Math

As a child, I remember being terrified as I waited for my turn to be called to the blackboard...(yes, we still used chalk), to race to do math problems the quickest. I can do math perfectly fine when I have my own paper at my own desk. But when I have an audience full of peers watching my every move? That is traumatizing.

In Tamar Lewin's article, "Report Urges Changes in Teaching Math," the thing that stood out for me was:

"The report also cited findings that students who depended on their native intelligence learned less than those who believed that success depended on how hard they worked."

I believe that this statement is 100% true. I spent the majority of my life thinking that I was horrible at math and claiming that I hated it, all because I couldn't do problems in front of a crowd or do calculations in my head. In high school, math was the only subject in which I did not take honors courses. I thought that because I was a self-proclaimed "not a math person," that I couldn't do it.

In my family, my Dad and my younger brother are both very math-oriented, whereas my Mom also claims not to be a math person. She tells me her horror stories about taking upper level math classes in college by mistake and suffering through them. But then we go shopping and she figures percentages in her head.

It amazes me whenever people can do that. It is simply something that I'm not capable of, and it took me a long time to realize it. I am a visual learner, and just like I have to write a word down to spell it, I have to write out a problem to solve it. It took me even longer to realize that this does not automatically make me bad at math.

Getting over the hump of growing up thinking I wasn't capable of being good at math has been a lot of hard work, but I think I made it.

Unfortunately, I think there are a lot of people with issues similar to mine who never get over it. This probably contributes to the statistic from the article stating:

"...15-year-olds in the United States ranked 25th among their peers in 30 developed nations in math literacy and problem solving."

That is shameful and sad, but not surprising...just take a look at the image at the top of this blog. People (Americans) will take the easy way out whenever they can, and math is something that many people avoid simply because they are intimidated by it.