This morning, I was listening to a podcast of Marketplace Money – which is the acceptable but somewhat inferior weekend edition of American Public Media’s Marketplace – which, among other things, featured a small segment discussing the role of ‘math anxiety’ in some people’s financial illiteracy. Something the guest (I forgot her name) said really made me sit up and take note:
You could have one instance – one teacher – who called on you when your hand was not raised and sent you to the blackboard to solve a problem that you did not understand. You get embarrassed, you get very shy of the math very quickly, and it only takes once but the ramifications can last for a lifetime.
This is so unbelievably, absolutely true. While I managed to do generally okay in math, my ability and enthusiasm for the subject was really stymied from a visceral dislike of the discipline, associating it with the unmerciful, hard-line methods of instruction by many of my teachers. There had been a time in my life (elementary school, actually) when I actually enjoyed mathematics, but as the public school philosophy of breadth over depth came to the fore, I lost interest and began to actively hate it.
I marveled when I learned that my youngest brother, a student in private school, told me that he didn’t actually hate math. It shocked me that he didn’t dread math classes any more than Social Studies or English. What was the difference? His school actually prioritized students learning the content comfortably over ensuring that students graduated high school with two years of calculus; depth over breadth.
Beyond financial literacy, although obviously important, this same phenomenon has an obviously deleterious effect on the quality and nature of human capital, obviously most relative to math & science professions. If the prevailing means of mathematics indoctrination in this country is confrontational and overly-stress inducing, how do we expect to produce an adequate number of math & science professionals to maintain economic growth in a technology-centric economic environment? It’s simple psychology: associating mathematics with confusion, stress, shame, and frustration will probably not compel a student to consider mathematics-intensive (or numbers intensive) professions. External motivators may chip at the margins, but the majority of students will continue to opt for such cash cows as gender studies or journalism (or anthropology!) over critical scientific disciplines.
This isn’t just a question of making students like math, but also enabling public schools in the US greater latitude in pioneering alternatives to the status quo in the provision of education, which may include controversial things like vocational learning (as opposed to wholesale college-prep), more school choice, homeschooling, and merit-based promotion systems in schools (!).
1 Comment
March 19, 2008 at 7:10 pm
I know you’re trying to be sarcastic, but the useful math disciplines/ useless humanities disciplines dichotomy doesn’t hold up in any way. People moan and groan about numerical illiteracy, and I agree that it’s a problem, but I’m much more alarmed by the actual illiteracy I keep encountering in students at my elite university. Yes, they can read words and identify them, i.e. read the words “FIG NEWTONS” and understand that that shiny foil packet contains Fig Newtons, but parsing syntax at higher levels (to wit: sentences, paragraphs) escapes the vast majority of them. If you’re going to sign a contract, you’re screwed if you don’t understand the numbers, but you’re equally screwed if you don’t understand the sentences.