Category: Math

posted by Beret

I love math.

It’s possible I love it because I had a very handsome math teacher.

More likely, it’s because I had a very handsome, very effective math teacher at an impressionable age. Junior High was such a wasteland of raging hormones, brutal social cliques, and boring grammatical exercises;  Mr. W. was like a shining star in the midst of it all. Unfortunately for him, we loved him eighth-grade style; we were constantly doing ridiculous things to get his attention. One day we spoke without making a sound–just mouthed words–for the entire class period. Once we stacked the desks in a pile and sat on the floor in a circle, like kindergartners. But Mr. W. was well acquainted with thirteen-year-olds, and remained completely unfazed. Not only did he maintain his sense of humor, he doggedly plowed through the equations, vividly illustrating the meaning of X with his wacky stories and chalk drawings of widget factories. Thanks to Mr. W., algebra still makes happy sense to me and everyone else who drove him crazy.

Someone killed math for a lot of people, which is a crying shame. If your child hates math, though, it might not be their teacher’s fault. It might not even be because of you and your own math badditude. It might just be the way our culture seems to throw up their hands in the face of it. People make jokes about their inability to do math in a way that they would never, ever do about reading. They dismiss the ability to calculate by pointing to the computer and asking, “why bother?”    Continue reading “Learning to Love Math”