It's a Math World

In a staff meeting the other day, we had a presenter who was there to encourage, shape and mold us but ended up spending a lot of time talking about math.  How students need to be encouraged to look at a problem and think, "I don't know how to do this" and then add "I don't know how to do this, yet."  That yet taking a kid who cries about math to one who does word problems for fun.  Y-E-T making it easy as 1-2-3.  I wondered then and I wonder now, do we really all need to like math?  Do we really all need to look at it and think yet and be math superstars?  

I look around my class, my class where I teach English, and I see Math worksheets out every day.  I tell them every day, my work first, then Math, but the Math is always there, in every class. And I think, because I am an equitable sort of thinker, that if they are doing Algebra worksheets in English that they should be reading books in Algebra.  They laugh when I say this but I am sort of serious and I wonder what is it that makes Math such a force in their lives and, subsequently, my life?  

Do we all need to be Math superstars?  Or Mathletes or whatever fun name they have now?  We all know that I have never been a math superstar and never will be.  We do not need to add yet to the end of my sentence, because I am a grown woman struggling to help my 8th grader with his Math homework; I know where I stand.  In my adult life, I have never had to solve for x in a job or at home and the only time I use fractions is when I bake. I am not saying we don't need Math, because of course we do, but do we need it to be so ramped up?  So super fast that kids are just meant to keep going, keep going, keep going to the next level?  Are we all going to be rocket scientists or doctors or engineers?  We are not.  Don't tsk tsk me; I am not saying that we can't be if we want to, I am saying we are not all going to be.  Because we are not.  And that is not lack of a growth mind-set; that is realism.  

So what is it with the Math?  Why are we pushing these kids to learn it all so fast and so furiously?  I know I am one thousand years old, but I swear they are learning things in 8th grade that I didn't touch until I was in college.  Are their brains even ready for that? I really don't think so.  I think that the boy's squishy frontal lobe is filled mainly with fart jokes, boobs and obscure facts about video games.  I have watched three kids in my house slump over with the weight of Math, work long hours at the kitchen table over Math, push other classwork aside to finish Math and labor in a Herculean fashion under all the Math.  Today, I watched the boy crumble under the weight of trying as hard as he could, but still failing at Math. And I am watching Math crush the things he was working so hard for and there is no yet to add in anywhere here for him to make it better.  No yet to swoop in and make it easy.  No yet to make the homework a snap and the classwork a breeze.  No yet to pass a quiz the first time. Maybe for the rest of the country math is this place to show tremendous growth, but in this house, math is just a four-letter word.

Preach Calvin, preach.