The math literacy problem

I've been talking to a number of my classmates for the last couple weeks and a theme is emerging for me. The majority of people do not consider themselves "math people." What I've started to wonder is why.

From the get-go, I was a math person. Math makes sense to me. Its patterns and rules, its hidden intricacies, and its ability to describe the incredibly complicated process of, say, falling. But it seems that insight is not universal. Or is it?

Is it that people don't understand "math" or that they got stuck somewhere along the way and never felt success again? Is it so unusual to understand patterns? Or to follow that if I have pies each cut into 6 and I have 5 slices that I have somewhat less than one pie? Is it a challenge to see that when an object is thrown up into the air, its distance above the ground is predictable via an equation? Are those ideas the hard part, or is it that people got stuck somewhere and never moved on?

It's culturally acceptable to be bad at math. Why? Why is it okay to be illiterate in math, but not okay to be illiterate in reading?

I'm not suggesting that math makes sense to everyone. You actually don't have a math brain? Fine. But before you decide that, are you sure that it's not that somewhere along the way you stumbled over an idea?

My greatest challenge as a math teacher, I predict, will be finding those stumbles and getting students past them while moving through the curriculum. If I can do that for even half my students, will the generation coming through be less inclined to say "I'm not a math person"?

Math problems are a puzzle. There's a beginning and an end, but how you get between those two points is entirely up to you. You know if you solved the puzzle if you got the right answer. There's a great deal of satisfaction in solving the puzzle.


For explanations of math at any level
http://www.math.com/
To learn more about Mathletics, the online program engaging students in fun and challenging math learning
http://www.mathletics.ca/
For super fun, content specific math games (seriously addictive)
http://www.mathplayground.com/

A brilliant performance piece about the realities of love in terms of math.

Reconciling

So far, the whole experience of becoming a teacher is foreign to me. That's not true. I've been a teacher in many different capacities for years. But this format of school is not what I've experienced before. I hope to reconcile my training as a student and my training as a teacher to a more complete understanding of education.