The Skill Math Students Need Most May Be the One We Are Training Out of Them

Insights on math literacy, instruction, and leadership for educators and school leaders.

Attention isn't something students either have or don't. It's something we help them build — and math class may be the best place left to do it.

Slack notifications. Emails. Inbound calls. Texts from family. Calendar reminders. A task list that grows even as you work through it. For most adults, that’s what a normal workday feels like. We move from tab to tab and message to message, answering one thing while thinking about another, and we tell ourselves we’re multitasking — when often we’re just switching fast enough to feel productive without staying with anything long enough to think deeply.

If that’s hard for adults, we should be honest about what we’re asking of students. A student settles in to work in math class. Someone coughs. Two classmates whisper. A hand goes up across the room. The teacher stops nearby to help someone else. An announcement breaks over the loudspeaker. A paraprofessional walks in and starts a conversation at the next table. Then we wonder why the student lost focus.

But focus isn’t something students simply have or don’t have. It’s something we help them build. And nowhere does that matter more than in math.

Rigorous math asks students to hold information in mind, filter out what’s irrelevant, test a strategy, sit with uncertainty, and keep going when the answer doesn’t come quickly. In a world of screens, shortcuts, and AI tools that can manufacture the feeling of progress in seconds, those skills may matter more than ever. Before we ask whether AI helps or hurts student thinking, it’s worth asking a more basic question: are we helping students build the attention they need to think deeply in the first place?

That question took me back to a 2009 Stanford study by Clifford Nass and his colleagues. They expected that the students who multitasked the most — juggling email, texts, browser tabs, music, and TV — would turn out to be the best at it. They tested working memory, the ability to filter out distractions, and the speed of switching between tasks. On all three, the heavy multitaskers did worse. Multitasking, it turns out, isn’t a skill that sharpens with practice. It’s a habit that erodes the very focus we need to think. Later research points the same direction: when our attention is fragmented into a few minutes at a time, there’s a real cost to climbing back to depth after every interruption.

Why This Matters for Leaders

Consider that opening classroom scene. The announcement. The student leaving and coming back. The side conversation. Most of those aren’t student failings — they’re features of the environment, and the environment is something leaders shape. It’s something you can control and improve. This is all too often overlooked, or taken as “it’s just the way it is” with a sigh.

But if we coach students to improve their focus while leaving in place the systems that fragment their attention, then they’ll never experience the sense of calm we want for them — and they’ll see adults choosing not to act. Neither of those is okay.

Attention is built through design — through the tasks we assign, the routines we protect, and the interruptions we’re willing to remove. The leadership question isn’t only “are students focused?” It’s “what in this building makes focus harder than it needs to be — and which of those do I actually control?”

Monday Ready Ideas

Distractions fall into a few buckets: what’s built into how the school runs, what’s baked into the culture, and what’s specific to a class or task. You, as a leader, have influence over all three.

• Audit the distractions you control, and start with the loudspeaker. Some of the biggest attention-killers are leadership choices hiding in plain sight. When I led Uncommon Charter High School, we simply didn’t use the overhead announcement system; those interruptions pull a whole building off task, and most of them could wait. That may not be possible everywhere, but maybe you can set a policy that it isn’t used during instructional time. Walk your building and name what you could turn off or tighten: announcements, passing-period churn, the steady stream of students leaving and re-entering rooms. A single student getting up for a tissue can erode the focus of thirty.

• Protect deep work, your teachers’ and your own. Where do teachers actually do their planning and instructional thinking? If it’s at a desk while students come and go, we’re asking them to prepare rigorous lessons in the exact conditions we say erode thinking. Give them protected time and space for that work before they have to do it in front of a room. Then model it: notice whether you’ve defaulted to always-available, and whether you’ve built systems so someone else can handle the urgent while you focus on the important.

• Run a focus walkthrough, and bring students into it. Form a small team to walk the building, flag where and when focus breaks down, and bring back concrete fixes. Consider a student version of the committee; they notice what adults miss and feel ownership when asked. It’s also where you borrow what already works: many of our best routines came from our special education team, whose strategies for minimizing distraction we adapted across every classroom. A norm like silent, ready-to-work entry comes from the same instinct: protect the start, and the focus follows.

There will always be more pulling at our attention, not less. So we owe students both halves of the work: coaching them on the strategies to fight for their own focus, and using the systems we lead to show them what a genuinely focused space feels like, so they know it’s possible.

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My new book, Empowering All Leaders to be Math Leaders (Routledge, August 2026), goes deep on exactly how to make this happen — with tools you can put to work immediately in order to be “Monday Ready.” Subscribe here for more or find me at thomasobrien.xyz.