Admittedly, math is not my favorite subject. It isn’t especially difficult for me, or unpleasant, it just sort of resides in the same earthly realm as I, and we tolerate each other. I always did well in school, I thrived in English Literature, survived the sciences, and contentedly dog paddled through mathematics, never sinking, and occasionally getting water up my nose.
When confronted with the task of teaching my children math, I blissfully closed my eyes and imagined myself leading them in harmonious, early 19th century canticles of multiplication. Then I opened my eyes and saw the four, very real, very different, students in front of me and discovered that a couple of them, at least, would not even be in tune, let alone in harmony with math. Not being that confident in it myself, I started to dread each lesson.
The relief came when, after years of my eldest child struggling with math (and bad attitudes about math), I was coached and encouraged by my super-mathematical friend (whom you all know as the Scio Academy tutor), and she has finally shown great progress and success. And then, apparently, she developed multiplication-amnesia. Necessity has made us put her curriculum aside for the moment and reinforce the 7s, 8s, and 9s. Then, while correcting her work, and seeing the same mistakes over and over, I looked her in the eye and said “math is nothing, if not logical”. And then it occurred to me that math and I could be better friends, simply for that reason.
So we continue, not in the confidence that I am a great math teacher, but in the simple truth that math is logical, and we can learn it.