Caelin Bragg
Lantern Staff
Math is considered the big, scary boogeyman of school. Just saying its name sparks fear into students around the country. But math gets an unfair rap from a fundamental misunderstanding of what it actually is.
I should make it clear before I move on, none of what I’m about to say is meant to deride any student; they are simply doing the best they can in a fundamentally broken system. This is meant to criticize the broken system that’s been built to introduce math to them.
Math is simply about logic, reasoning and problem-solving, and that’s what the teaching of math should be focused on, not that math is just about numbers and equations. Saying math is only about numbers is like saying English classes are just about writing papers. While English classes do largely involve writing papers, the important parts are the skills the students develop along the way: critical thinking /reading and distilling information. In the same way, math classes should focus on those skills mentioned earlier, not just simply how to solve equations.
I, a math and English tutor at the El Dorado campus, alongside many of my tutees, dread, specifically, the math application problems; they are tedious, hard to understand and, overall, simply there to make students’ lives miserable, but if those previous skills had been taught to us properly in the first place, these should be some of the easiest problems to solve. If anything, the application problems are the English papers of math classes, where we, as students, fully apply what we’ve learned over the semester. And, based on the number of tutees looking for help in English versus those looking for help with math, English would be standing at a solid B+ /A- grade in its effectiveness, while math would’ve been dropped from the class week one.
The amount of times I’ve had students, intermediate and college-level algebra students at that, come in and not know how to solve the most basic of problems (something like, “7x-14=0, solve for x” or factoring simple quadratic equations, as examples) is a serious concern. And, again, I need to make very clear, this is not meant to be taken as bashing these students. These same students aren’t coming in asking for help in English Comp 2 with questions like “What’s a word?” or “What’s a paragraph?,” which are both at the same level of absurdity as my math examples, so it’s not the students who are lacking, the problem lies in the system that is math taught through.
It should take two seconds of reasoning (if, you know, math classes actually taught that) to realize there is a big problem with how math is communicated to students when the Math Lab at the El Dorado campus is always incredibly understaffed to deal with the large influx of students seeking help for math. And I’m not asking for the hiring of more tutors, I’m saying that the goal should be for us to get rid of the need for tutors altogether.
So when people claim to say they hate math, their anger and frustration isn’t unfounded, just misplaced. They should be directing that anger towards the system that is failing them in the first place, not placing that anger on the medium that the system is using, being math.
