The Learning Umbrella

I’ve been thinking a lot about math recently.  It’s always been my “weakness”, although I am actually competent with it.  My brother is one of those people who were born just “seeing” numbers and he is intuitively brilliant with mathematics.  I felt stupid working with him, and we were at the same math level even though he was two year younger than I was.  This led to a desire to avoid math, and an eventual case of “learned helplessness” as I just shut down when I came to a math problem I needed to solve.

As my brother cruised through math work and read esoteric books about theoretical math, I started to do something that handicapped me for years.  I started to cheat.  We were using the Saxon math books, and it started off innocently enough.  I would get stuck on a problem, and I’d start to panic about how I just couldn’t make my mind work.  I’d peek at the answer, and then work my way backwards from it.  Then, I started to just look at the answers and write them down, without the “working backwards” justification.  My mom didn’t realize I was doing this, and I went through the rest of that level (algebra 1/2 if I’m remembering correctly) that way.  Needless to say, I was now in the stew pot, because I didn’t know any of that material.

When we went on to Algebra 1, I tried to not cheat anymore.  But I still couldn’t do the work, and I still felt that paralysis.  I hated it, and I’m sure it wasn’t fun to work with me.  My mom started to sit and do the work with me (which was good because I couldn’t cheat), but I found that if I stared at the problem long enough, she would just do most of the work.  I still felt helpless, and I’m sure I genuinely thought I needed her to help me that much.  I’d sort of understand the concept, at least well enough to verbally BS about it, but I’d freeze up when it came to actually manipulating any numbers.  But, because I could BS about the math concepts, Mom let me move ahead.

I decided to stop doing any math after I’d finished Algebra 2.  That was the same as the minimum requirement for high school, and I presented a case to my parents about how I wasn’t going to need anymore math in my life.  After all, I was planning on being a dancer and dance teacher!  I think I was 14, maybe 15 years old, and I had my whole life completely mapped out with the blind certainty of the adolescent.  My parents thought my arguments were “well reasoned” and that was the end of my math study at home.

That fear and paralysis were hard to overcome.  They were almost enough to keep me stuck with college, as they do to a lot of people.  My mother has tutored several adult women who come to her because they can’t pass the one required math class at the community college.  Math phobia is holding up their lives.  Luckily for me, this story wasn’t over, and I found the motivation to go back to math again …

The rest coming soon.