Latrenda Knighten has always liked math.
As a child, she remembers breezing through timed tests ‒ high speed, low stakes assignments that challenge students to complete a number of simple problems in a short amount of time. Knighten couldn't understand why the drills, sometimes called mad minutes, sparked "extreme anxiety" in some of her siblings and fellow students.
So when she became a teacher herself, Knighten gave her students timed tests multiple times per week. The response shocked her.
"My students had a breakdown. They were crying because they couldn't do it that quickly. ... This was part of the curriculum, but because of how it affected my students, I stopped using them because we weren't getting any productive results," said Knighten.
The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, of which Knighten is now president, would eventually issue a statement saying that “timed tests do not assess fluency and can negatively affect students, and thus should be avoided.”
