Math: to Hate, or not to Hate?

Math is a popular subject to hate. After all, who likes to be forced to sit in a stark classroom, attempting to answer an extremely long list of questions that all look like gibberish for an hour straight? Or who wants to tell their son or daughter that they have to endure this situation? Regardless of whether this is what the modern math classroom looks like, this is what many people associate with math. Their own personal experiences are combined with the attitudes presented in numerous Hollywood movies, and these together mix to create the negative atmosphere that surrounds math. Before they even begin school, many students are receiving messages that math is difficult, boring, tedious, and pointless. Within this atmosphere, students begin to internalize certain beliefs about math, and about themselves, such as that math is boring and useless, and that they are either good at math or bad at math. Personally, I believed that math followed a strict set of rules, and that there was essentially only one way to solve a mathematical problem. I also failed to see where I would use any of the abstract equations that I was attempting to solve.

I was taught to solve mathematical problems using formulas. These formulas were handed to me as pre-made tools from my teachers, and I had to plug in the correct numbers. This style of teaching did not foster my problem solving skills, not did it inspire any curiosity that would lead me to make new connections between the facts that I had already learned. It was very difficult for me to transfer my knowledge to a similar problem if it did not follow the exact formula that I had been taught, because I didn't have the background understanding of how the formula had been created. Between my lack of interest and struggle to truly understand the concepts being taught, I gave up investing anything more than the minimal effort required for a decent grade.

However, while math is born out of logical reasoning, it is nothing like the rigid structure that I viewed through the narrow lens of formulas, and there are multiple ways to come to the same answer. Many of my teachers taught from the perspective that students must be able to solve questions, but their approach overlooked the importance of us learning the very basic structure of math itself. While they taught us what to do, we didn't understand why we had to do it this way. Teaching through inquiry places the focus on understanding this structure instead, and students naturally find their own ways to the correct answers by exploring mathematical relationships using tools like manipulatives. To quote mathematician Georg Cantor: "In mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it." Finding specific answers isn't as important as figuring out a way to find the answers. Students who learn the structure of math through inquiry and exploration are developing problem solving skills that will enable them as they explore increasingly complex concepts.