Editor’s note: This op-ed is by award-winning journalist Telly Halkias. It first appeared in the Portland Daily Sun.
The longtime national debate on improving mathematics performance in our schools has drifted away from some of the truths of teaching and learning this subject.
Students, for their part, have eternally decried math. Why should I study it so much? What good is this stuff if I’m never gonna use it past just balancing my checkbook and making sure my paycheck is straight? Who thought up this torture anyway?
Just as any boss should be able to articulate an organization’s vision to the rank and file – preferably with passion and clarity – so also must teachers find a way to communicate math’s purpose to schoolchildren. While demonstrating this pathos might seem difficult, students of all ages continue to be impressed by educators who pull it off.
Even though I’m a writer, I’ll admit that math is as good a discipline as any other to get the heart pumping.
Our entire pursuit of knowledge looks to it as a unifying force. Mathematics is a poetry of the universe that transcends race, creed, gender, and faith — and from which physics, chemistry, biology, writing, speech, music and art all take cues.
Math teachers do what they do for a singular reason. They may not even be conscious of it, but it’s something rooted deep in their childhoods — a phenomenon that exists to this day.
Back then, at a time when math is considered the hardest subject in school, those boys and girls who whip through the workbook and raise their hand with the right answer are seen differently by peers.
The best math teachers I had, whether in elementary school or graduate school, were not only lucid, but also inspiring. They knew how to keep coming back to the purpose of math – its raison d’etre – with conviction.
Often they are viewed as magicians, wizards of sorts who decipher codes that take the rest of the class all period to unravel. Somehow, the upstarts are done in minutes and doodling in their notebooks while wondering what is taking everyone else so long.
This feeling of invincibility scratches an itch in young students that no writer can ever reach. As someone with degrees in engineering and English, my sonnets never amazed friends as much as solving a quadratic equation in my head.
Mathematicians carry this aura throughout their schooling, and it’s something that eventually brings them in front of a classroom to share the secret. But before the teaching and learning can begin, the passion – and purpose for math — must be expressed.
This begins with the notion that our human sensibilities, as subjective as they can be, nevertheless are bonded to the natural world by the power of math.
The challenge inherent in mathematics, first recorded in 300 B.C. by Euclid in his landmark treatise, “Elements,” is the basis on which all human logic – particularly our capacity to reason — is founded.
Deductive reasoning, and its cousin induction, both make up the foundation on which the columns of evidence and analysis hold up the roof of problem solving. This is just as important, for example, to a journalist or an attorney, than it is to any statistician.
And solving problems, whether figuring out if we have enough money in our pockets to get a quart of milk, or pondering if we should terminate an incompatible romance, is what the human condition is all about. We do this in our daily lives as we navigate from one moment to the next.
That journey eventually brings us full circle to the grand scheme of mathematics. Laying the foundation in our youth – when minds are malleable to new ideas – is the key to success in just about any life skill.
Which doesn’t mean someone can’t run aground; there are countless ways our human frailties interfere. Nor does it imply that the cultivation of feelings is unimportant. Quite the contrary.
But the unsure world of emotions, and our need to understand and temper them, also goes back to solving problems. In the process, we learn to measure between passion and reason.
I haven’t taught math formally for decades, but continue to tutor the occasional student. The best math teachers I had, whether in elementary school or graduate school, were not only lucid, but also inspiring. They knew how to keep coming back to the purpose of math – its raison d’etre – with conviction.
That accomplished, they proceeded to teach with rigor – something many critics claim is lacking from today’s math classrooms. And that is the subject of next week’s column: how exactly should we proceed to reshape math education in the Digital Age?
You may e-mail Telly Halkias at tchalkias@aol.com or follow on Twitter: @TellyHalkias.
