The Challenges in Generating a Safe Space

I've been struggling a lot lately with cultivating an environment in which mistakes are acceptable. As a teacher, I feel like I wear two masks in this regard. On the one hand, I directly tell my students that mistakes are acceptable, and even expected, phenomena in the process of learning. Sometimes I specifically ask students to share wrong answers so we can all learn from them. Sometimes I specifically thank students for having (intentionally or unintentionally) made a public mistake, because we can all learn from them. I intentionally discuss (sometimes ad nauseam) the many ways that we all think about different problems, so that students see that there is no One Way to complete a process. And yet...



And Yet...
Sometimes, when I ask a question, I am clearly looking for One Particular Answer.
Some days I ask a question and stand there with an incredulous look on my face, and even raise my voice as I ask the question again, confounded that my students can't answer a simple question. (I mean, didn't we go over this Just Yesterday? And the day before that, too????)
Some days I don't have the time for discussions of all of the nuances of this problem, and all of the possible awesome mistakes that can be made, and all of the different ways that we can approach this problem, which leads to
Sometimes I interrupt my students, mid-sentence, to tell them why they are wrong.

I feel like I can probably justify, individually, about 80% of my interactions with students, and I think that's a fairly good number, as mid-experience human endeavor successes go. Which is to say, I think I'm about where I should be, considering the level of my training and practice at this particular skill of mine. However, that's an allowance for ME to feel okay about MYSELF. I partly think that this would be an acceptable ratio if my students had not come in with some preconceived notion that math classes are not safe places for creativity, wondering and mistakes. But most of my students do come in with such preconceived notions, and I view one of my primary goals to be changing those notions. And every slip I make, I'm just throwing them back into, "yep, I remember, math class is about doing what the teacher says and being right."

This is one reason why I think I have such a hard time practicing what I preach. I tell my students that mistakes are okay, but every real mistake I make as a teacher, I flog myself for. Because every mistake I make, I backtrack seven steps on helping my students to reach a more wholesome relationship with math.

I have another thing on my mind, which feels related, at least in my own head. My 3.5-year-old son has started lying regularly. He's really terrible at lying. In fact, sometimes he will just say the negation of a statement, without context. Like, a few weeks ago, "Can I please sit on your lap? I didn't just pee in my pants." (I hadn't questioned whether he'd peed in his pants, because I had seen no indication of such, but this comment inspired me to ask.) Or last night, "I didn't put the corkscrew in my pocket." (I was cooking, so I wasn't keeping track of what he was doing with the corkscrew moment-by-moment, but I knew by that comment exactly where to look for the corkscrew.) Here's how it's related to the teaching thing. I feel like he's telling lies because he is attempting to match his actions to his understanding of my expectations. This is exactly the sort of game that I'm attempting to free my students from. One of the stories I've told myself as a teacher of adult students, is that they come to me with previous traumas from math education, and I am going to create a safe space where they can release their traumas. But my experiences with my very young child lead me to believe that either (a) my "safe space" mode is not yet safe enough, or (b) our human needs to be right transcend the safety of the environment. Either way, I'd say that this ups my challenge in creating safe spaces, both for my students and for my son.