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/
This is a great post and Not something that I had ever really considered. Why is it that math is the acceptable poison pill of the academic world? I can't even begin to imagine the amounts of times I've said that I'm not a math person.
ReplyDeleteI think in someways math is really being challenged by technology, and that the generation or so of students have really become more and more reliant on that technology. Math at its most basic levels is seemingly unnecessary for someone who just needs to divide or multiply. To make an odd comparison it's like teaching someone how to farm and handing them a plow, while other people are on giant machines doing the same work at a fraction of the effort. The person holding the plow is going to want to know, why can't I just do that instead?
I think other disciplines are just starting to really see this same thing happening as well. I think we all know a lot of people who have trouble with spelling or even legible writing because they are so reliant on word processors. I honestly feel that one of the great challenges of the future for teachers, is keeping these skills relevant and demonstrating their importance.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, Teacher C, in terms of basics in any discipline. I personally feel that these skills are valuable.
ReplyDeleteFor math in particular the issue surrounding technology isn't so much knowing how to multiply or divide, but rather how would you know when to use multiplication or division. To follow your wonderful analogy, how would you know that you're meant to dig and not that you're meant to cover the earth? The tool in this case is not necessarily in competition with the process.
As for our future students, in math at least, I always tell them if no one knew how to do this, who would tell the calculator how to add? And would you know if it had been programmed wrong? For Language Arts, it's an important question, the question of relevance.
I'm one of those people who doesn't have necessarily a math brain. I can follow logic perfectly well when I have to, but logical thinking isn't really my default. Why I went into science remains somewhat of a mystery... I find that I like math not so much because I'm passably good at it given enough effort, but because it fascinates me that there is an underlying logic to reality that wasn't invented by humans, but rather was discovered. Calculus, the bane of many high school students'
ReplyDeleteexistence, is incredibly elegant! Mindblowing, really. Actually, the debate over whether something like calculus was invented or discovered might help to get students interested in the material.
I had a high school calculus teacher who illustrated one of Zeno's paradoxes (the one about halving a distance to an object, then halving it again etc... ad infinitum) when we worked on limits. It stuck with me as a really neat idea and really piqued my interest into the topic.
I appreciate you opening a discussion on this topic Camille. While my degree is in history, I've tutored all levels of grade school math for seven years, and constantly find myself helping students who insist that they "just can't do math". I've found that some people certainly have more of a natural aptitude for math, but that every single student can get much better at math with non-judgmental one-on-one help. Some students missed some critical building block back in elementary school and nothing has really made sense since, some students have difficulty focusing in class, etc. The cultural preconception of math being "something that only those really smart kids have a chance of being able to do" makes things even harder. How many people would ever have persisted at learning to read as kids if this attitude accompanied reading?
ReplyDeleteApart from one-on-one time to take struggling kids back to the essential basics that they may have forgotten or never learned, I think something most math teachers don't emphasize enough is that students can look for outside sources to help them learn. Google any math subject and you'll get countless examples, pictures, and videos explaining the topic in ways that may fill in the gaps of teachers' explanations. I like www.khanacademy.org because it has very easy to follow video introductions to every math topic under the sun.
Thank you everyone for your insightful comments! It's a subject I've been talking about for ten years; this borderline celebration of "not being a math person." Thank you for your suggestions and insights! Keep them coming!
ReplyDeleteYes, why do we tolerate statements about Math illiteracy? Could this be because of the way Math has been traditionally taught? Math is one of my favourite subjects to teach but it has been the most challenging for me to learn.
ReplyDelete