When my friends kid was taking high school algebra, he was doing quite badly several times and asked me to help him. I would always see what the current subject was, formulate a plan in my head then I would ask him to explain to me how his “teacher” “taught” him how to approach and “solve” whatever the class of problem du jour was. It was always overly complicated to nearly unintelligibke. W He would always give me the most backassards unintelligible explanation that struggled to be classified as English language. Then, slowly, calmly, patiently, I would explain in simple elegant terms how to define, then solve any similar problem. At first, there would always be the “can’t understand mental shield”, but with some patience that look would melt into a healthy skepticism that it can’t possibly be that simple. Then the flash of epiphany as he realized maybe it was that easy followed by rapid succession of completing successfully more difficult problems. I would then task him with teaching 3 of his friends what I taught him. Amazing how a non teacher can undo 3 weeks of bad instruction in less than an hour.
Math played a huge role in my life.
But until I was an adult, it wasn’t a good role.
Math was a terrible thing for me growing up. I couldn’t get it. When I graduated from High School, I couldn’t add or subtract fractions. I had to go to summer school for several years, no help at all.
In grade school, while the rest of my large family was playing outside during the summer, my mom would drill me with the times tables using flash cards. It did help. God bless her. As much as it took out of me to sit there inside during the summer, I know it probably took more out of her.
In the Seventh Grade, my dad hired a sailor to tutor me in math. Poor guy. He would try to explain things, and I would just put my head down on my arms which were on the table. It was awful, and probably worse for him.
When I joined the Navy as a jet mechanic, I got involved in a project back in the mid-Seventies called IECMS. (Inflight Engine Condition Monitoring System) It is de rigueur in modern jet aircraft now, but back then, single engine military planes had nothing in place to monitor them other than a pilot’s eye and experience, and if that one engine failed in flight, that was pretty much it. So they were trying to predict it.
Detroit Diesel Allison sent a Tech Rep with us on our deployment to the Mediterranean, Jerry Wouters, and I worked closely with him. We had long talks about many things, including what I wanted to do when I got out of the Navy. I wanted to go to college, but I thought my weakness with math would sink me in any STEM field. He was teaching a college level algebra course for sailors during the deployment, and encouraged me to sign up for it. He said he would personally tutor me, and he was positive he could teach me.
He was a young guy, maybe 30-35, and he taught me. I got a “B” which was a real accomplishment.
I ended up going to college on the old GI Bill, and entered as a Chemistry major. I will say, I did well, but taking Physical Chemistry nearly gave me a nervous breakdown. I was never that smart, but I was stubborn, and hard work didn’t scare me away, and that was how I had to learn.
I was so jealous of people who just “got” it. For me, I felt that, to extract even a small nugget of knowledge, I had to do the equivalent of putting my foot on the guy’s chest as I pulled with all my might to extract that knowledge from his virtual mouth with a pair of pliers.
Point is, I look back on how I eventually did get good with math, and I had to conclude most of my impediments to learning were somewhat self-inflicted. My dad was career military, so we moved around a lot. I counted it up and I went to 12 different schools, so consistency and continuity could have contributed as well. I have all my report cards all the way back to Kindergarten, and they are interesting to read. I did well in some things such as History and English, but Math...
It wasn’t the grades that caught my eye recently when I was looking at them. I got plenty of “F”s and “D”s, but I did get a B once or twice, but now I can guess they were just passing me on. But still, it was the comments the teachers wrote that stuck out at me.
“Needs to improve self-control”. “Disrupts class.” “Tries to entertain class.” “Spends time daydreaming.” “Doesn’t use time wisely.” “Does not pay attention in class.” “Reads personal material in class.”
I read that now, and I suspect my teachers must have hated me. And, in retrospect, I feel bad I made their life a chore.
But, in the end...I learned math, when I was compelled to, and motivated to. I feel a great deal of accomplishment in that. I just wish I could have harnessed my motivation earlier when I was in grade school and high school. But then I realize...
It was my time in the US Navy that laid the foundation for my success in life.
I always felt like a complete incompetent at many things as I grew up, but when I got in the Navy, I realized I actually could learn things and do quality work. I made E5 in under four years and got a lot of responsibility with it (like the program described above) and that seemed pretty good to me, since few others seemed to. (Maybe in today’s military that is no big deal, but it always felt to me during a peacetime Navy like it was an accomplishment. It sure felt like one for me.)
So I can’t accomplish a re-do of my math life. In retrospect, it seems like my inability to learn math was simply a part of the plan in some way, and the right one, too. That jibes with my observations at this point in my life. All the decisions I made were the right ones, and if I did make a wrong one, it somehow turned into a right one. Every fork in the road takes you the right way...:)
But I wish I hadn’t been tortured all those years by math. It was awful I would obsess all summer about going back to school, and back to math class again. I wonder what it would have been like had that not hung directly over my head for 12 years, 24x7 and made me hate school with a white-hot burning passion.
If I may, a non-educational establishment creature. You are obviously a teacher.