My living babies are 10 and 6 now, upstairs having a shower which the 10 year old sorely needs. A decade since I wrote here about her birth, Elsie is well entrenched in the BO phase of life -- not a baby anymore. And I just bought the last packs of condoms off the picked-over stock at my local grocery store, so hallelujah, I'm not going to be making any more babies, either. I wasn't quick enough to get any green veggies or toilet paper. I made the mistake of being 5 minutes late to the 6am opening and, by the time I sauntered through the doors at 6:05, many shelves were bare.
My beautiful little school is officially on vacation, and when that is over, I will be returning as an online teacher for nobody knows exactly how long. In the meantime, I want to share some thoughts and tools about math learning especially for parents who find themselves in the sudden and strange position of supporting education from home.
I've been teaching since back when I was a student myself, at first unofficially, coaching friends through their algebra homework, and then as a job to keep me through college. (You're looking at the once-official tutor of Smith College's chemistry department and personal tutor to the family of the school physician.) I taught high school, prep and public. I taught middle school. I TA'd engineering grad school classes. I've been in this work for decades, for many ages and stages of life, and I've noticed something important:
Americans have a wack relationship with math.
Whenever I tell a someone I'm a math teacher, I get a strong reaction. "Good at math" people like to launch immediately into telling me how to do my job -- for example, after hearing that my job is stressful because lots of people who don't know education keep trying to tell me how to do it differently, a doctor of mine told me we could solve all our problems if we just taught calculus in 8th grade...
*Sigh.*
On the other end of the spectrum, you have the self-identified "bad at math" people, who give a much more visceral reaction. There's a blanching or flushing of the face, an upward lift in the tone of the voice, then a mad dash to change the subject. Some women go in another direction, digging into the feelings and burst into tears right there on the street. Out floods a long and tortured story of being raised in a sense of inadequacy and stupidity. I suspect more men would burst out crying, too, if America didn't have just as a whack relationship between masculinity and feelings as we do between intelligence and math. In any case, the issue is fraught.
But it does not have to be this way. I have taken SO MANY PEOPLE from sobbing in my office or at my kitchen table to calm and capable in their math learning.
To be clear, I am NOT talking "bad at math" to "good at math" because I think that entire lens is a broken way to look at learning.
I am talking transformation from panicked and inadequate to patient and loving. I am talking paralyzed to progressing. I am talking stuck to growth. That's the transformation we want.
So if you want to tune in over the coming days, at least for a couple of weeks, I'm going to be talking about math here. And I'm going to be talking about it ESPECIALLY for the following types of people:
People who feel "bad at math" and are afraid to face math again.
People who feel "good at math" and are having trouble supporting family in the process of learning
Parents who have to become teachers and tutors right now out of thin air.
Anyway, please tune in. I always start simple and build, and I'll answer questions in the comments.
Here for you all!!! Solidarity, my socially isolated friends!
Love the blog! Keep it up!
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