...was in ninth grade. About five minutes before class was supposed to start. The teacher - she was one of the "cool" ones - apparently wanted to tell us the hard truth. She raised her hands and said, in a tone that brooked no argument: "Math is hard. Honestly, most people reach a point where they just hit a wall."
I actually did hit a wall years later, in twelfth grade multivariable calculus. I had to go to a different school to take this class, where a Romanian woman assigned us a problem set that asked us to calculate the force (or something!) required to launch several rocket ships into space. The second problem asked us to prove Kepler's laws of planetary motion.
I still remember how I did this problem set. Basically, I performed every single mathematical operation I knew. Then I converted everything into polar (!) and did it all again. By the end, I had ten pages of very impressive-looking equations and absolutely no damn clue why planets moved in elliptical orbits.
I spent hours tearing my hair out over these problem sets. I was literally convinced that I would never be able to do them. I would never even understand how to start being able to do them. That old statement about the wall came back to me many times. I kept slogging. But I felt like I never got anywhere. This is it, it's the wall, I thought.
But then - and this is the crazy part that I still can't quite explain - after about six months, something very strange ocurred. One day, I actually did a problem. And then I did the next one. This is not to suggest that I started getting them all, but it was as if something in the vague and murky fog of my brain finally began to assemble into a coherent pattern. There is absolutely nothing I have done academically, before or since, that so clearly gave me the impression that my brain was actually expanding. One day the wall was there, the next day it was not. (Two years later at a work holiday party I met a guy who was a theoretical mathematician and he told me he'd experienced something similar.)
However. If I had hung onto that belief in the wall, I might easily have given up. And that's why I think that my old math teacher's advice, while well-intentioned, was actually probably the worst advice I've ever gotten from any teacher ever.
A few weeks ago, one of my roommates suggested that we head over to a low-income government school to spend a morning teaching young girls English. We were there for about three hours. The girls - between seven and ten years old - read books with us, sang songs and danced. At the end, their teacher handed out several pages of coloring and asked them to organize into groups. For roughly the next hour, they managed themselves.
Here's the interesting thing: afterwards, the teacher was talking with us, and he mentioned that the boys were much more rowdy than the girls. Which reminded me of the concept of the "achievement gap" (part of that whole "decline of men" argument that I find so distasteful). I'm sure many, many people have said this over the years, but I wonder how much of the "achievement gap" between boys and girls exists because boys are harder to teach, and so people just assume that they've hit their "wall" earlier. Like I said, if I'd been anyone else - had any other set of parents, any other set of genes, any other set of anything - I probably would have dropped out of that math class. And if my teacher had been anyone else - even the teacher I'd had a few years before - she probably would have accepted that decision.
I actually did hit a wall years later, in twelfth grade multivariable calculus. I had to go to a different school to take this class, where a Romanian woman assigned us a problem set that asked us to calculate the force (or something!) required to launch several rocket ships into space. The second problem asked us to prove Kepler's laws of planetary motion.
I still remember how I did this problem set. Basically, I performed every single mathematical operation I knew. Then I converted everything into polar (!) and did it all again. By the end, I had ten pages of very impressive-looking equations and absolutely no damn clue why planets moved in elliptical orbits.
I spent hours tearing my hair out over these problem sets. I was literally convinced that I would never be able to do them. I would never even understand how to start being able to do them. That old statement about the wall came back to me many times. I kept slogging. But I felt like I never got anywhere. This is it, it's the wall, I thought.
But then - and this is the crazy part that I still can't quite explain - after about six months, something very strange ocurred. One day, I actually did a problem. And then I did the next one. This is not to suggest that I started getting them all, but it was as if something in the vague and murky fog of my brain finally began to assemble into a coherent pattern. There is absolutely nothing I have done academically, before or since, that so clearly gave me the impression that my brain was actually expanding. One day the wall was there, the next day it was not. (Two years later at a work holiday party I met a guy who was a theoretical mathematician and he told me he'd experienced something similar.)
However. If I had hung onto that belief in the wall, I might easily have given up. And that's why I think that my old math teacher's advice, while well-intentioned, was actually probably the worst advice I've ever gotten from any teacher ever.
A few weeks ago, one of my roommates suggested that we head over to a low-income government school to spend a morning teaching young girls English. We were there for about three hours. The girls - between seven and ten years old - read books with us, sang songs and danced. At the end, their teacher handed out several pages of coloring and asked them to organize into groups. For roughly the next hour, they managed themselves.
Here's the interesting thing: afterwards, the teacher was talking with us, and he mentioned that the boys were much more rowdy than the girls. Which reminded me of the concept of the "achievement gap" (part of that whole "decline of men" argument that I find so distasteful). I'm sure many, many people have said this over the years, but I wonder how much of the "achievement gap" between boys and girls exists because boys are harder to teach, and so people just assume that they've hit their "wall" earlier. Like I said, if I'd been anyone else - had any other set of parents, any other set of genes, any other set of anything - I probably would have dropped out of that math class. And if my teacher had been anyone else - even the teacher I'd had a few years before - she probably would have accepted that decision.
No comments:
Post a Comment