Changing Perspectives

memecenter.com

As a child, I was indifferent.
As a teenager, I hated it.
As an adult, I now see math's purpose, but still am utterly frustrated by it.

This is not the story that I want my students to be telling when they become adults.

So, a little bit about myself: I've always been a creative person. As a child I took an interest in stories, art, music, and history, and in high school, I developed interests in philosophy and psychology. I went to university for English literature. One of my life goals is to publish a fantasy novel, and my other hobbies include drawing, attempting to play guitar and flute, hiking, and writing poetry. I've always lived in the realm of the theoretical and the imaginative, where the focus was on creativity and beauty. Math never fit into this world of mine. Our relationship began as a tolerable dissonance that was easily forgotten while I learned basic concepts in elementary school, but developed into a seething hatred in high school when math homework required more time and effort, forcing its way into my evenings and interrupting my life. I deliberately went behind my guidance councilor's back to drop out of the grade 12 math course when I learned that I wasn't required by law to take it.

pinterest.com

Whenever the topic of math would come up in conversation, there were a couple of stories that I would always pull out to prove my point about how absolutely terrible math was. The first involved my grade 10 math teacher and parabolas. The setting was a beautiful autumn day, just after we had returned from spending our lunchtime freedom lazing on the grass outside, staring up at the changing leaves. Coming inside to the starkness of our white tiled classroom and staring at incomprehensible combinations of numbers was excruciating, and our teacher had difficulty in keeping our attention for longer than thirty seconds. "Guys, this is important!" she cried out in frustration. We stared at her blankly, then one of us asked her just when we were actually ever going to use parabolas in the future. "Well, if you ever need to drop a ball off of a roof..." she began, but I tuned out the rest of what she said immediately because I recognized those exact words from the word problems in our textbook. Despite how they tried, I couldn't relate to any of the situations the textbook writers wrote about, and my teacher never did anything but reiterate what they said.

The second story took place when I told one of my friend's mom about my teacher quoting our textbook word problem word for word, commenting that nobody I knew had ever used the math they had learned in high school when they became adults. "Well," she replied, "my husband actually used had to use some math that he learned in high school for his job the other week. I walked in on him Googling something about the quadratic formula." This was the moment that I realized just how pointless math class was, because even if I did understand a concept now, when I would actually run into a situation in my adult life where I would need to use it, I would be sure to have completely forgotten how to do it and would be resorting to relearning it through Google.

So, math class in school is completely pointless, right?

imgflip.com

Well, actually, adult me has come to understand that math is important, and is stealthily hidden in a lot of different places. I have a slight tinge of regret that I didn't take data management in grade 12 when I find myself in the middle of an argument with someone over the the skewed statistics involved in a political debate. Also, the strict dichotomy between fun creativity and boring analytical stuff broke down while I was in university writing English essays. I came to recognize the importance of logical thinking and problem solving skills, and I've become passionate about wanting the students graduating from my class to be proficient in these skills. And where are these skills commonly found? Math.

This TED talk discusses the issue of how math has been taught in our schools, and how this style of teaching has completely affected students. Dan Meyer is a high school math teacher who is focusing on teaching his students to learn the logic behind math rather than having them memorize formulas, and connecting everything that they learn about to real life situations. His students are more engaged, have a deeper understanding, and retain the information for much longer. This is the same kind of teacher that I want to be.

I've begun to change my perspective about math already, but I still have a long road ahead of me, and many layers of bias against math to rebuild.