Math.is.Not.Cool.

At long last, I finally have reliable wireless internet at home. It feels like a tiny miracle. I’m going to celebrate by writing a cranky post.

This kind of alarmist “american kids stink at math” article is beginning to bother me. Not that it’s an unworthy topic – american kids, at least the ones that I see every day, *do* stink at math. It’s a serious problem, but as a society we approach it in deeply flawed and deeply unserious way.

Consider this quote from a parent:

““Kids in high school, where social interactions are really important, think, ‘If I’m not an Asian or a nerd, I’d better not be on the math team.’ Kids are self selecting. For social reasons they’re not even trying.”

Here’s another from a former Math Olympias silver medalist (and current Princeton doctoral student):

“There’s just a stigma in this country about math being really hard and feared, and people who do it being strange,” she said in a telephone interview. “It’s particularly hard for girls, especially at the ages when people start doing competitions. If you look at schools, there is often a social group of nerdy boys. There’s that image of what it is to be a nerdy boy in mathematics. It’s still in some way socially unacceptable for boys, but at least it’s a position and it’s clearly defined.”

These quotes, and the study that prompted the article seem to identify the problem as this:

Only nerdy kids like math, and kids don’t like to be thought of as nerds, so kids don’t like math.

Or, expressed in another way:

“Math is uncool”

…with the implication being that if we could just make math cool enough, mean girls and guys would be making room on their varsity letter jackets to proudly flaunt their Math Olympiad patches.

This kind of asinine reasoning would be merely funny if it wasn’t so prevalent and so insidious. I hear different versions of this “if we only made it zany and cool enough, kids would love it” at teacher trainings pretty consistently from on high and from down below. The most ridiculous example was a colorful book I was offered from my former school’s math and science library by a wonderful teacher. I’ve probably described it before, since it gave me such an epiphany. The brightly illustrated pages were filled with paintings of adorable anthropormorphised geometric shapes frolicking down hills and across meadows. “Geometry is fun!” these pages seemed to shout.

But how much geometry would an elementary aged child pick up from reading that book or similarly themed materials? Almost nothing.

This kind of reasoning and these kinds of solutions completely ignore the more pressing question: what’s wrong with our pedagogy?

What is it about the way that we teach math that is different (and worse) than other countries that produce better grade school mathmeticians? My daily observation of middle schoolers is that they don’t hate math because it’s uncool, they hate it because they’re not good at it. It’s the same observation I made at my last school, but in conversation with others it was obscured by the fact that all the children I was teaching math to were poor and non-native English speakers. At my current school, there’s an unusually even ethnic and socio-economic mix, especially for an urban school. Still, I observe the same thing: the kids – even (maybe even especially) the academic high achievers- are completely frustrated by the curriculum because they don’t have basic computation skills.

In the admirable rush towards introducing critical thinking skills and abandoning “drill and kill” methods, teaching anything that involves memorization (like multiplication tables) has become almost anathema.  The local math curriculum is much more structured than say, the English or History curriculum, with frustrating results.  Even though it’s obvious to the Math teacher at our school that the reason the children are doing poorly with multiplying and diving fractions is that they don’t know how to multiply or divide easily, the powers that be think consider a program “behind schedule” when the teacher pauses to fill in knowledge gaps.  But what’s the point of moving on to dividing decimals when students don’t know how to do long division and aren’t sure what 16 divided by four is without using their fingers?  And why are children in a reasonably well funded school district not mastering these skills in elementary school?

These are some of the observations I’ve made in a very short stint as a math teacher and in my current foray into thank-the-SBJ-I’m-teaching-English-and-not-Math. I’m no expert, and I don’t have the time or the resources to compare our local pedagogical methods with those across the state, much less across the country in the world.

Still,  when the NYTImes mentions that

“relatively small Bulgaria has sent 21 girls to the competition since 1959 (six since 1988)”

I’m going to make an educated guess that they probably make children memorize multiplication tables in elementary school in Bulgaria, and and their success has less to do with math being cooler among Bulgarian teens.