“Why Some Kids Keep Asking for the Answers in Maths: A Teacher’s Story About One Boy in My Class”
‘Is number 7 forty-two?’ Marcus asked, holding up his worksheet.
I looked at the blank space where his working out should have been. The rest of the page had faint, messy eraser marks — evidence of five or six earlier attempts that had been deleted before I could see them.
‘I’m not going to tell you that yet,’ I said. ‘What have you done so far?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t get it.’
This was the fourth time that morning Marcus had asked me for an answer. It happened during almost every maths lesson. Sometimes he asked before he’d even written his name. Sometimes he asked in the middle of a question, before he’d had time to think. Occasionally he’d ask the same question twice in five minutes.
It would have been easy to just tell him. The teaching assistant was busy helping another group, three other kids were waiting for me to check their work, and the lesson was running out of time. Giving Marcus the answer would have kept everything moving. He would have written it down, looked satisfied, and the page would look complete.
But I knew he’d ask again tomorrow. He always did.
I used to think Marcus was being lazy. He wasn’t. He was doing what a lot of children do when they’re overwhelmed by maths: he was trying to get out of the uncomfortable part. The uncomfortable part is not knowing how to start. The answer is the reward at the end of a process, and if you don’t believe you can complete the process, you narrow your focus to getting the reward by any route. Asking someone who knows the answer is faster than trying and failing.
Over time, I realised that when Marcus said ‘What’s the answer?’, he was really saying, ‘I don’t have a way in here. Can you lower the ladder far enough that I can grab it?’ If I just fed him the numbers, the next question would look just as impossible, and the next one after that.
So I changed what I did. Not dramatically. Not with a new intervention programme or a reward chart. I just started responding differently to his repeated question.
First, I taught him a phrase to say instead. ‘When you’re stuck,’ I told him, ‘instead of asking me what the answer is, ask me what to do first. Say: “Can you help me start?”’ That sounds simple, but it made a difference. Because ‘What’s the answer?’ is a passive question. It assumes someone else will do the thinking. ‘Can you help me start?’ is an active question. It means he’s still the one doing the work.
I also stopped asking ‘What don’t you understand?’ That was the question I’d always used, but it was too broad. Marcus couldn’t tell me what he didn’t understand. He just knew that he didn’t get it. Instead, I started asking him to show me what he’d done so far.
‘Show me the first step you tried,’ I said. Sometimes there was nothing there. ‘Okay, let’s look at the question. What is it asking you to find out?’ We’d read it out loud together. Often he could see the answer once he was talking. Once he knew that ‘I’m stuck’ was going to lead to a conversation, not a number, he started giving me more.
There were practical adjustments too. I moved Marcus so he was sitting next to a calm, steady child who didn’t mind being asked for help. It’s not that I wanted Marcus to copy off his neighbour — that was already happening sometimes. But I noticed he felt less anxious when he could whisper a question to a peer instead of raising his hand and announcing to the whole room that he needed help. There’s a big difference between saying ‘I don’t know’ out loud in front of twenty-five kids and asking another child, quietly, to show you the first line of their working.
We also made a small card for his desk. On one side it said ‘I’m working on this one.’ On the other side it said ‘I need help, but I’ve tried.’ When his card was on the second side, I could come over and start from where he was. The card didn’t fix the maths, but it gave him a way of getting support without having to interrupt the lesson. It also meant he had to attempt something first. He couldn’t flip the card before putting pencil to paper. That was a small rule, but it changed his first reaction from helplessness to effort.
If I’m being honest, there were days when I still gave in. Once, near the end of term, I looked at the clock, saw that I had a pile of marking to do, and just said, ‘It’s nine, write that down.’ Marcus copied it and smiled. For the rest of that lesson he kept checking if I was watching. I don’t think the answer helped him at all. I think what he learned was that if he kept pushing, sometimes he could get the answer without doing the work. That was a tiny hidden lesson in the middle of a rushed day, and I didn’t like it.
The better moments happened when I broke things down into smaller pieces. ‘Do you want to try the first one together? Then you do the second on your own.’ We’d sit at the side table with one worksheet between us. I’d ask him to read the question. Then I’d ask, ‘What bit is it asking about? How many objects did there be became after she bought more? Add or subtract? Why do you think that?’ He didn’t always have an answer, and sometimes his instincts were wrong. But eventually he was doing more of the thinking than I was.
For parents reading this at home, the same approach works. When your child asks you, ‘Is the answer 36?’ try not to say yes or no straight away. Instead, ask, ‘Tell me why you think it’s 36. What did you do to get that?’ If your child can explain their reasoning, you don’t need to give the answer at all — you’re just checking. If they can’t explain it, that’s useful information. You’ve found the point where they’re guessing, and that’s the point to untangle.
Another thing that helped Marcus a lot was taking away the pressure of the blank page. Instead of praising him for getting the right answer, I started praising the things he normally did before the answer: ‘You wrote down the numbers from the question — that’s a good start.’ ‘I noticed you tried two different ways before you asked for help.’ ‘You read the whole question before you put your hand up.’ These are not big heroic moments, but they’re the ground floor of learning maths. If a child believes the first attempt is part of the process, they’re less likely to freeze.
Marcus still struggles. He still asks more questions than most of his classmates. But over the months, the question has changed. He still asks for answers sometimes, and I expect he always will now and then. But he also says things like, ‘Is this the right way to start?’ or ‘Can I tell you what I did first?’ He still often gets the wrong answer, but he’s less afraid to get it wrong. That might not sound like a huge achievement. But for him, it is.
At the moment, I’m not sure what will happen to Marcus in maths next year. He might fall into another class where a busy teacher doesn’t have time to wait for him to try. He might go back to asking for answers because the feeling of confusion is too scary. I can’t control that. What I can do is keep responding the same way: not giving him the answer, but helping him take the next small step. He might not ever enjoy maths, and I no longer worry about that. I just want him to know that being stuck is not the same as giving up.
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