Overcoming Math Humiliation
".....students being shamed, embarrassed, harassed, brutalized, drugged, inflicted with boredom, or just plain ignored — and they remembered these experiences far more vividly than anything they were ever ostensibly taught."- from David Albert's introduction to Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto.
Perhaps you remember specific lessons from your school days. I know I do. For many decades, one memory that has stayed with me is one of my high school algebra teacher throwing the book at me. I mean, he quite literally threw the textbook at me. Why? Because I frustrated him, I suspect. He always asked me to "show my work," and I always jumped ahead to the answer, skipping the "work." The responses were correct, but that didn't seem to matter to him. I wasn't following his specific directions, and he expressed his frustration by throwing the textbook across the room at me! Then he flunked me in algebra. Or maybe he gave me a "D." Luckily I had good grades in all my other subjects. And lucky too that he didn't hit anyone with that book. It was a big, heavy book. I remember being so humiliated by that experience that I refused to take any more math courses for the rest of high school.
Meanwhile, I was sent off to Ann Arbor once a week to the University of Michigan's testing laboratory for reasons I have never clearly understood. There, they ran a whole series of tests on a group of about twenty high school teens from an assortment of schools. I loved it because it kept me out of class for a whole day, usually, and I enjoyed taking their tests. They were puzzles that I rather enjoyed solving. And since our high school debate team researched its debate topics at the University of Michigan Law Library, I stayed and worked on debate topics. Whatever way I looked at it, this was much more fun than sitting in school.
When I left for college, I recall that I didn't take any college entrance exams, no SAT or ACT, no college-specific tests. But my freshman academic advisor asked me why I wasn't taking any math or science. He said that my math and science scores on the tests I had taken at the University of Michigan indicated that I would do well in these fields. That was news to me! No high school teacher or advisor had ever bothered to pass that information along to me. Instead, since I was outstanding in English, good at French, was president of the French Club, and had studied Spanish and German in elementary school, I went into English with a French minor. I could not escape how I felt when that algebra teacher threw the book at me. I figured I must be really stupid in math because he'd never done that to anyone else as far as I knew. So when I heard that I had excellent math aptitude scores from a college academic advisor, I was genuinely surprised. Quite frankly, I didn't believe him. Later I ended up in a master's degree program in philosophy, a realm of study that closely parallels math in its abstract thinking.
Eventually I realized that I took after my father, a math whiz, who always did the math in his head so fast that he too couldn't put it down on paper. He dabbled in engineering, was skilled at electrical and mechanical trades, built our first black and white TV, then built the first color TV in our neighborhood when the tubes became available, and he was also good in sales. He applied math quickly and efficiently to everything he did in his job and his life. At home he was a gentleman farmer who grew at least 40 acres of vegetables every year on our farm. He could tell you how much he paid for seed, what his yield was per pound of seed, and how he could never earn enough money from selling those vegetables, detailing out all the dollars-and-cents reasons why he couldn't make up for all the costs of growing vegetables on his farm. As a result, he often gave away far more produce than he ever sold. Farming was one of his hobbies, and he gained much more than produce from working his fields, planting the seeds, doing everything necessary to help them grow, and enjoying the fruits of his labors. When he returned home from work at his office he would immediately get out of his suit and tie, slip into his farm overalls and work boots, put on his hybrid seed brand baseball cap, and set off on his tractor to plow his fields, mow his hay, cultivate his crops. He loved working the earth and found it highly therapeutic.
In my freshman and sophomore years of college, I worked several part-time jobs to help pay for my education. One job required me to get up early to check students into the dining hall as a "meal ticket checker." I had to quickly learn how to recognize students by face, room number, and name so that I could check them off on the dorm's flat Rolodex-type flip files. It took me years to realize that I had been selected for that job because I was particularly good at it, had an excellent memory that involved names, faces and numbers, as observed by the dormitory manager. I also worked as a secretary in a science research laboratory filled with scientists from all over the world who researched how radioactivity affected plants. For that job my fluency in English and my ability to apply my knowledge of other languages helped me. Both were interesting jobs, jobs that I would never forget, and neither one related directly to anything I studied in high school. Except, perhaps, typing, which I had taken so that I could type my college papers, rather than write them in longhand.
Many years later, when my daughter was deciding whether she wanted to attend college, she faced taking the SAT and ACT exams. These two exams required math skills, and my daughter, though very good at basic math-related everyday life skills, had never worked her way through those basic high school math courses. How was I supposed to help her, the person at whom the algebra teacher had thrown the book? I asked a friend for recommendations, and he suggested that I read something by Daniel Greenberg, from the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, titled "And 'Rithmetic." I read this article in which Daniel Greenberg relates how he taught math to 9-12 year olds at Sudbury Valley School. He suggested that students could cover all basic math in 20 contact hours if they were truly ready to take on math. When Greenberg reported this miracle to his friend, a math teacher, his friend said:
"Because everyone knows," he answered, "that the subject matter itself isn't that hard. What's hard, virtually impossible, is beating it into the heads of youngsters who hate every step. The only way we have a ghost of a chance is to hammer away at the stuff bit by bit every day for years. Even then, it does not work. Most of the sixth graders are mathematical illiterates. Give me a kid who wants to learn the stuff -- well, twenty hours or so makes sense."
I took this information to heart and set my daughter up with practice test books from the library on math for both the SAT and ACT exams. I also found some books that we both liked that covered algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus. And I left her to her own learning, more often than not sitting on the living room sofa with her laptop and these books.
By the time she had finished the equivalent of twenty contact hours of high school level math concentration, totally on her own, she was able to pass her SAT and ACT with acceptable scores in math. And furthermore, she learned that about 42% of first-year college students required remedial math and remedial English during their freshman year of college. She did not need either of these remedial courses. So the homeschooled student, who had never formally taken a high school math course, never had more than 20 contact hours of intense math study, who relied on her own self-directed math and math practice tests for the ACT and SAT, did better than 42% of the average public or private school graduates. Remember, she was motivated.
Of course, if your student loves math and enjoys spending time studying it and working on problems, go for it! But don't hesitate to offer a 20-contact-hours opportunity to your students who have shied away from math. Read Daniel Greenberg's article linked below and figure out what you can set up as a self-directed, self-motivated learning course with your student to cover all the math required for college entrance today. I allowed about 20 weeks to give my daughter plenty of time to do this on her own. Turned out, it was more than enough. As an adult, she has even supervised projects that involved testing students on their high school math. Who knows? If I had faced an option like this, and if my algebra teacher had not thrown the book at me, humiliating me and making me feel inept in math, I might have ended up in math, or science, instead of English and foreign language studies.
Resources:
"And 'Rithmetic" by Daniel Greenberg:
Other interesting Daniel Greenberg articles:
https://sudburyvalley.org/author/daniel-greenberg
"Just Do The Math" by David Albert, from David's book, Have Fun. Learn Stuff. Grow: Homeschooling and the Curriculum of Love:
http://www.besthomeschooling.org/articles/math_david_albert.html
The two books below are available as PDF files, or as paperback publications by Learning Express Editors. They are usually available in your local library, too.
501 Algebra Questions (PDF):
https://epdf.pub/501-algebra-questions.html
501 Geometry Questions and Answers (PDF):
https://epdf.pub/501-geometry-questions-amp-answers.html
Norma Curry
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