How to Never Teach Math

I’ve never actually hated math.  In fact, I’ve made a hobby of going back and reviewing the math I learned and school to see if I still have it.  There are branches of math that are easier for me than others.  Geometry is a breeze.  Perhaps this is because my dad’s a carpenter and I’ve absorbed a lot of it just by observation, but put lines, angles, and shapes in front of me, I will get it done.

Algebra was a different story.  I passed my classes but it always took more time than I wanted; I’d do the steps three or four times and still end up with the wrong answer.  The frustrating thing about it wasn’t just that I didn’t know how I would ever apply it; I was never taught what it was for.  Arithmetic is about counting and counting accurately.  Geometry was all about measurements and seeing how math worked in nature.  Algebra?  No clue what the equations were about or why they were important.

Khan Academy has been great.  I finally understand the basic premise behind algebra.  It’s about balance and making sure that everything on one side is equal to the others, kind of like making sure the scales are equal.

So, it’s cool that I have resources, time, and no pressure except from me to understand this field of knowledge.  But that’s not the reason I decided to talk about this.  I’ve kvetched about my public school education before and I’m going to do it again because this baffled me when I was in class.

When I took Algebra, our teacher did not care whether we got the right answers on our homework.  I’m not kidding.  If a student came to class the next day with only the answers written on his or her paper, even if they were all the right answers, our teacher wouldn’t give them credit.  If, on the other hand, they came to class showing the work, i.e. the steps they took to get to the answer, even if every answer was wrong, they’d get credit on the homework.  The principle was that if they could show they knew how the process went, they understood how the math worked.

It should not take a genius to know how stupid that sounds.  You might get away with crap like this in English class.  Ask students to write on a specific topic, every one of them could come up with a different opinion and they would all legitimately be right.  That kind of diversity doesn’t work with math.  There’s only one answer, and showing the work doesn’t mean jack.  If you show your work and the answer is still wrong, it means they didn’t get it.  I sure didn’t.  And yet I got an A in that class.  It’s the least deserved A I ever received.

I passed it off as sheer laziness from one teacher.  After some discussion with family, I’ve discovered that that has become the standard practice in my sister’s high school curriculum.  And suddenly I’m very concerned about the rising generation’s education.  If our students are not being held to achieve mastery of this disciplined subject but are essentially being given a free ride, what’s the point of making them go through all those years of math?  This is insanity.