I Blame The Math Teachers

It’s that time of year again, the time when the new homeschooling parents, and those who are still thinking about it, begin to wring their hands and ask the eternal question:

It never fails. It is the one concern voiced over and over by almost every novice.

They will furrow their brows with concern over socialization, and not wanting their kid to be “that homeschooled kid.”  (You know the one.) They will have apprehension over extra-curriculars and sports.  But the thing that keeps them up at night and robs them of their peace is, quite simply, math. I would venture a guess that fear of teaching math is among the top five reasons why parents ultimately opt for traditional schools rather than educating at home.

I blame the math teachers.  I blame the institutional school setting.

These adults have attended at least 12 years of traditional school, most of them even more when we include Kindergarten and College.  12 years of math education and they are so afraid and unsure of their own abilities that they doubt they can adequately teach first grade mathematics.  Their schools and teachers failed them.

The problem lies in the institutional approach which we have developed towards math instruction.  The focus is not on understanding the process by which 1 and 1 actually become 2, but on the memorization of the statement that 1 and 1 simply are 2.  There is a world of difference between those two statements, and an ever larger gulf between understanding and rote memorization.  It is the difference between mathematical confidence and arithmetical hand-wringing.

To put it even more simply, math is being taught as a skill when it is, in truth, a language which pupils must be taught to speak.  Math is the language of logic and reason. It is poetry of absolute right and wrong.  It is the ultimate song in praise of order.

Instinctively we know this.  We sense, even from a young age, that math is the key to understanding the way it all works.  If only we could learn to understand the meaning of the symbols on the page, we could begin to penetrate the mysteries which surround us!

….and then no one shows us how……..

There are so few fluent speakers, and even fewer for whom this is their native tongue.  The very people who should be teaching us to decipher these mysteries very often don’t truly understand them themselves.  We are, quite simply, a classroom full of people trying to learn a language from the guidebook.  The only thing which sets the teacher apart is that she/he has been poorly speaking it longer.

I blame the teachers.  They are attempting to teach something they don’t know know with the very same methods which failed them!  It is a vicious cycle of madness.  It’s no wonder American children can’t do math, and why their mothers wring their hands in fear at the idea of teaching 1+1.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  What if we threw out the flash cards and the rote recitations and began again?  What if we taught math as a love language?  What if we taught the game of right and wrong?  What if we instructed children in the idea that ideas could be proven with a formula by which everyone else would get to the same conclusion?  What if we made it fun?  What if we made it sing?

There would be no fear of it at all.  There would again be native speakers like Pythagoras, Euclid, or Poincare!  If we removed the dread and the trepidation, if we did away with the social narrative that math is too difficult, we might just discover that it really wasn’t so difficult after all.

"Science is the great poem about material creation dancing to the music of perfect mathematics according to God's sovereign and lovely plan." ~ Mary
Daly