Triggered By Math

My chest tightened, I started to sweat, and unknowingly, I started to hold my breath. I wasn’t confronted with a dangerous animal or faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem. I was reading high school Common Core Math standards.

Let me backtrack. I was in the zone, working on a very cool project that connected songwriting to math and social justice. I felt like I cracked a code seeing how the pieces of the lesson could fit together, and I realized that I do well when I push myself into curricular areas where I’m uncomfortable. But this feeling of success soon came to a screeching halt when I got to the alignment portion of my work.

I began sifting through standards as I often do, making sure what I’m writing is connected back to the standards that schools are following. I got up to 8th grade with no trouble, but then I hit high school, and on came the flashbacks. Stifling classrooms in rows with monotone teachers standing at a chalkboard (yes chalkboards were still a thing when I was in school) writing out endless lines of equations with letters that didn’t mean a thing to me. Math was making me panic. I remember sitting in those classes not understanding any of it but being able to plug in the numbers and struggle my way through it. I struggled through algebra so well that I got put into honors geometry. I almost failed. I literally had no idea how to approach the subject. I couldn’t “see” it. I felt like everyone else knew something I didn’t. They knew the secret code. I was completely lost.

Moving forward a couple of decades, my second flashback was when I was studying for my GRE in the Auburn University library. Tim was teaching there at the time, and I was applying to Ph.D. programs. Again, I plugged in numbers, but without any sort of basic understanding of why I was doing what I was doing, I realized that I couldn’t reteach myself all of high school and college math in the space of just a couple of months. I didn’t get into any of the programs I applied for.

Math was a barrier guarded by gatekeepers to all sorts of wonderful things like advanced science and high-level Ph.D. programs.

So flash forward to right now, sitting at my desk, holding my breath as I see linear equations and graphing models. My body is clearly telling me something. Built-up over the years my psyche has determined that math is not for me. I don’t understand it, and I never will. But this is in contrast to moments before when I was excitedly solving equations for how to find the tempo of a song. I figured it out because I was interested. I was solving equations and writing equations. I was actually understanding what I was doing and why I was doing it. While it wasn’t calculus, it was problem-solving, and it was fun.

I know there are so many math teachers out there (two of my college roommates included) who do amazing things with math and make the subject accessible for everyone. But what about our system? What about all of those teachers who are still standing at the board droning on about how to do math without context? What does it do to kids to prevent them from engaging in real and challenging problems?

I have to deal with my triggering math issues, but kids in school should never develop them. Math is a gateway to so many things: financial security, employment, problem-solving, and making sense of how the world works.

Now that my breathing is back to normal and my writing for the day is complete, I hope this gives you something to chew on and think about your own experiences in math in particular and school in general.