I see it around me every day, and it kills me; the averted eyes and hesitant words create awkward silences, and it becomes obvious that almost every student in that math class wants to disappear. It kills me because I’m not like that . . . anymore. I can tell you when it all changed for me, too.
All my life, I always wanted to know why I needed math, and when no one answered it to my satisfaction year after year, I gave up wanting one. I gave up wanting to know at all. I gave up my sense of curiosity and settled for crunching numbers. This is a story that most students share.
We are taught the “Print and Puke” method of education, and we perform outstandingly. Teachers hand out the sheets and grade on the curve, assuring that most squeak by, and come time for the test, students puke up all the cut-and-paste puzzle pieces they were force-fed in previous weeks, and arrange it neatly for a passing grade. Most go on to do well enough, but some end up feeling cheated out of something, like I did.
As a student, you are expected to pass a test more important than the final, but most find out too late. Standardized Tests have been taught as how to pass the test itself rather than learning the material expected. It took me a long time to realize that “Print and Puke” wasn’t going to work with these. I had been rendered helpless. Communication skills and analytical thinking are the only skills that standardized tests look at, disguised as English and math. No one was really testing my grammar usage, or my ability to convert fractions, and this went against everything I had been taught. The only option was to be re-taught.
Soon after, a whole new world opened up. Math isn’t about the numbers at all, and that is the hardest idea I’ve ever had to accept. Once I began to ignore the numbers, I saw the concepts behind them. I have learned to appreciate the creativity required to perform certain processes. I feel the need to say this again; math isn’t about the numbers. It promotes the wonderful skill called analytical thinking: the process of drawing conclusions from information given. (Is that not the simplest way to summarize mathematics?) Don’t hate math because it makes you think about your world, that is the only way you’ll find something you really love. Finding that makes all the sweat you put into it worthwhile.
When teachers say that we will use this skill every day, most shrug it off, reading “skill” as “numbers”. They sleep through the lesson and miss the most important part. I hate to say it, but those teachers are right. We must think. Whether reading a book, following politics, doing research or running a company, you have to think for yourself. Don’t just look at the world. Instead, understand it and use that to your advantage. “Print and Puke” may get you the A, but it cannot compare to the experience of learning a new concept, and genuinely wanting to know more.
Students and Educators, the best you can do to get that WOW moment is to entertain your whims. Passion breeds passion! Find someone who loves something you want to learn to love. Go up to a stranger and ask “Why is this so cool to you?” Better yet, be that someone. The quest for knowledge never ends, it just changes direction. Be fearless with your education.
My biggest challenge is to get the point across to the kids...math is a mind expanding drug!! Those that have realized that fact are the ones who actually enjoy the thinking involved it Algebra.
I have read your blog and appreciate your love of literature.
In many respects, the author of a compelling work of fiction need to posess a “mathematical” mindset. Logic and structure, even if not immediately evident, exist in most successful pieces of writing.
I was a Math major in college for one semester, until I succumbed to the siren call of the English curriculum. Both disciplines have served me well.
Your Voice is a wonderful addition to the Ohsters roster. Tell us more!
diane
I loved your post! Math isn’t about the numbers is a theory that applies to all of school. As a language arts teacher, I can tell you that reading and grammar isn’t about words or writing either, They are about making meaning of the world around you. Keep up the great blogging!
You have discovered what many do not discover until graduate school: “Be fearless with your education.” Encouraging your peers to speak up, engage, and be involved personally in what they learn can only prompt the “print and puke” suppliers to rethink their ways, too. BTW, you might enjoy reading some philosophy of mathematics.
As a retired math teacher, “I wish I’d have thought of that.” What a wonderful post, it’s actually beautifully said.
> math isn’t about the numbers
No, it’s absolutely not.
Here’s the problem, though. You, and millions of other school kids, all ask the same question about what math is good for.
You see now that it’s about recognizing patterns, about how logic fits together, about how one thing can lead to another in an entirely unexpected direction.
How do you explain that to your past self, or to those millions of other kids who want to know what math is for?
Is it enough to say “math isn’t about the numbers”? I don’t think it is, but I’m not sure what the right thing to say is.
If you find out, please let me know.
Thankyou for choosing my image to go with your post. I’m not across this kind of topic, but i do find it interesting. Keep up the blogging!
Once I began to ignore the numbers, I saw the concepts behind them.
It’s great to get these flashes of inspiration - and you wrote about it so well. I’m wondering if you would have seen the concepts so clearly if you hadn’t messed around with the numbers first?
It promotes the wonderful skill called analytical thinking: the process of drawing conclusions from information given. (Is that not the simplest way to summarize mathematics?)
Math is many things to many people. For most people (post-school), mathematics is no more than a tool for problem-solving.
What is your view of the role of technology in math learning? Would you use a tool that allowed you to “mess with” mathematics? You may be interested in the post 21st Century computer algebra literacies.
I love (LOVE!) teaching math. I had a great class last year where the students were convinced that Fibonacci was haunting them. Some students even confessed to dreaming about the Fibonacci series, it seemed to them to be eerily everywhere, whether the vegetables they ate, in their own body measurements, popping back up in Pascal’s triangle when studying probability... When numbers haunt 13 year-olds, life is good
What a poetic response to a lovely posting!
diane
Something about the photographer’s comment randomly led me back in memory to my first conceptual physics class (I never learned the WOW of math in high school, so never studied it in college, and regret that deeply, now that I realize there’s beauty in numbers and equations and their relation to physics and our world).
In your coinage, I “got behind the physics” to the wow. So much so that I walked the Los Angeles campus, watching birds dodge and weave in the sky, and had aesthetic rush after rush with the sheer pleasure of understanding the physics principles of that flight. My friends ribbed me for my “Physics! It’s all physics!” mantra during that period. But it all was.
I love your closing. I find new music that way - I ask people whose minds I respect, “Tell me your top five music-makers.” It should be similar with learning from teachers with passion.
But it’s not. Most students are like the ones that depress you in your opening scenario. That leaves me, at least, weary of “casting pearls (of literature) before swine.” I’ll save them for the three out of a thousand that come up and ask, “Why do you love literature?”
Those students, I’ll help learn on my own time. If only they had time themselves, which they don’t because of the homework (or is it busywork?) burdens.
The sad part? These indifferent students are not, of course, “swine.” Instead, they’re victims of an education system that has conditioned them to fear learning due to grading, and dread schooling due to drudgery.
Again, loved your writing. Glad you’re here.
In the last few years though, I have been finding a desire in becoming a doctor or something in the medical field. I excel in health, science, math, language arts, social studies, Spanish, and computer classes so I find that I would do well in the medical field as long as I keep an interest in these subjects. I decided to re-fall in love with math and other subjects that I didn’t have much interest in so that I could follow my dream.
Your writing is very insightful to the minds of other students that feel (or felt) the same way the I do. I think that teachers should help describe the specific topics a little bit more so that this “Print and Puke” method doesn’t come into play in the lives of future kids.
Being a part of an advanced discovery program my experience is still better then most, but even in advanced programs people aren’t allowed to love to think and to love school. Peers discourage it by example and by teasing those who rise above. We are not allowed to love school. That is nerdy. Even if we do we hide it because it will be looked down upon. This is probably true because those who struggle to learn are jealous of those to whom it comes easily. They take out their jealousy by teasing and making those who are blessed to be smart feel bad about their gifts. Teachers and those who care for our learning desperately try to make it not so, but they have no effect humans are to prone to jealousy and to eager to be accepted. If one wants to be extraordinary they must shirk what their peers say and rise above to love learning and math and the concepts of thinking because that, not fitting in is what will carry them through their life.
In sixth grade I changed schools, and at my new school, my questions finally got answered and I became interested in math. I used to hate it, but now that I understand math it isn’t so bad. I decided I wanted to be an engineer in alternative energy, and I knew that this ment I was going to need to use math. I hope that plenty of people learn about the ‘print and puke’ method because then people can actively try to start stopping it so that kids can enjoy school and get every bit out of it as they can.
Nice writing and thoughts!
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good luck
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good luck
i’m a math and philosophy undergrad at the university of washington, finishing up my final year in college. i was decent at math in high school (even took calculus in my senior year of high school.) however, that aha moment happened when i had to take calculus again in college. i was taking differential calculus in my first quarter of college, got my ass kicked and got a C+, but after that i never looked back and decided to major in math. why? because i started to see the beauty and rigor in math beyond any sort of “real world applications.”
an example of this was when i used to think that there was no such thing as a derivative beyond the 2nd derivative (this was back in high school in my calc class, when one of my fellow classmates was laughed at for suggesting such a thing.) and then, when i find out in my first quarter calc course in college that there were n-th derivatives, this opened my eyes. when i further saw that these are actually used in taylor series, i was laughing about how supposedly “useless” 3rd derivatives were.
but yeah, i would agree that math isn’t really about numbers at all (except number theory, except that number theory is concerned about the _properties_ of numbers and the _structures_ between them.)
whenever i encounter a person who said that they suck at math and never bothered with it beyond algebra, i try to tell them that there is still hope, for they haven’t been doing “real math” at all. “real math” lies in creativity, never regurgitation.