Aren't We All Math People?

Working in higher education for the last 36 years (how did that happen?) has given me a lot of opportunity to hear lots of opinions about developmental education (formerly remedial education, etc.). Nothing causes a life-long educator more pain than to see a student come to you underprepared. How can this happen when they have been duly approved to graduate from an accredited high school? But I am not here to argue that point, I would rather talk about this nonsense of math versus non-math people. We often say things like "Everyone should be able to read; how are you going to function in life without learning how to read." Shouldn't we be saying the same thing about math? How would you function without understanding math? That is why I was excited to read Sarah D. Sparks' piece on the matter. She writes, "My 2nd grader finishes his math enrichment, then gleefully creates blank versions for his dad and me to try: a subtraction-based, number-placement logic puzzle, intended to be challenging. My husband withdraws for 10 minutes or so, returns and hands over the completed puzzle. I stare at my blank triangle. Mom, aren’t you done yet? my son asks. Are you struggling? A dull pressure starts to thud behind my eyes. I’m thinking, I say, a little too sharply." Did reading that make you feel a little uncomfortable? It certainly made me remember when I sat in Ms. Sparks place with my children. I encourage you to read the brief, concise article and join us who say we are all math people.

IS FAILURE REALLY VALUABLE
Many people learn from a young age that making mistakes feels terrible and can be embarrassing. That lesson often gets learned in school. But in her TED Talk, Kathryn Schulz says those terrible feelings come from realizing wrongness, not the feeling of actually being wrong. Because often, people are wrong for a while before they realize it, and in that intervening time, being wrong feels eerily like being right. In education there’s a lot of talk about valuable failure, the necessity of mistakes for learning and celebrating the learning that comes out of being wrong. And while teachers, parents and students may understand that concept in the abstract, in the moment, they still don’t want to be wrong. To protect ourselves from ever being wrong, we try to be perfect, but inevitably fail, making things worse. Schulz points out that nothing ever turns out as we expect, and that’s a core part of being human. Continue reading

4 EASY STEPS TO LEARN MATH
Math proficiency is a subject of a lot of anxiety for college leaders, students and even national leaders. Employers and educators alike know that math skills are crucial to many of the science, technology and engineering jobs expected to be ever more important in the future, but students’ math comprehension continues to stagnate. In his TED Talk, mathematician Conrad Wolfram argues much of this angst is about how well students can compute by hand, not how well they understand math. He breaks math down into four steps: 1. Pose the right question about an issue; 2. Change that real world scenario into a math formulation; 3. Compute; and, 4. Take the math formulation and turn it back into a real world scenario to verify it. Continue reading

MORE STUDENT SUCCESS RESOURCES
I recently sent you an update noting that I had added a student resource about avoiding procrastination on the Teaching and Learning Faculty Development Canvas site under Modules. Here is another short article you can share with your students about studying. The author, Dr. Christine Harrington, writes, "The strategy that most students use- and is unfortunately the least beneficial- is reviewing notes.  Think about it- reviewing your notes doesn’t take much effort or energy.  It’s a pretty low level cognitive task." Continue reading