Math Matters

One evening, when we were in high school, Sam Reisner and I went to pick up Bruce MacArthur.  I'm sure we had some wholesome activities planned.  We ran down the stairs in his basement and beheld him working on some crazy math problem; y'know the kind that takes like three sheets of paper.  Sam was mad, "Dude, you're not done with your homework?!?!"

"Oh, I'm done.  I was just messing around with a different way to solve this.  Let's go."

Unlike Bruce, I'm not one of those "math people".  But I work at it.  I passed college algebra and calculus; actually I got really good grades in those classes.  I did it by teaching it to the other students in the study group that I formed.  Through that experience I realized that most math teachers shouldn't be.  And the truth is many of them don't really want to be; they want to be mathematicians and teaching the schmucks like me pays the bills (or they want to coach full-time ;-) ).

Now I teach math to my kids and a few of the neighbor kids.  One of the consistent bits of feedback goes something like this:  "Wow Mr. Facer, you're really good at this.  The way you explain it totally makes sense.  You should be a math teacher."  I chuckle and think silently to myself, "I already am."

But seriously, why is it so common for children to have this experience where math is such a difficult discipline?  Certainly my experience growing up was that once we made the jump to algebra, to variables, to complex formulas, I was lost.  There was a small group of my peers, maybe ten or twenty percent that kept up, and the rest of us were left drowning.  I think it's because for non-math people, it needs to be explained in better detail, with more of the "why" and illustrated in multiple different ways; until you reach the example or illustration that clicks with that particular student.

When I teach math, here's what I do:

• We do NO math without scratch paper.
• We show all the steps, every time.
• I explain the concept different ways, and we work it different ways until I can tell it has registered.
• We don't move on at the right answer, we move on when we have the right answer plus comprehension.
• I check comprehension by having the student explain it back to me.

This year, one of the neighbor kids has trigonometry.  I never took trig, but I like it.  Between the text and the internet we're figuring it out.  I really like math.  It's a darn shame that it took more than thirty years for that to happen.