Math Myths — Myth 1

Math­e­mat­ics is beau­ti­ful, mys­te­ri­ous, and vex­ing. We study and learn how to com­mu­ni­cate through the writ­ten word because God spoke to us through His writ­ten word, but why do we study and learn how to see the pat­terns in nature? Because the pat­terns in nature are a puz­zle show­ing us the nature of God, they are wor­thy of study. So, what’s the prob­lem? Why do we strug­gle so much with com­mu­ni­cat­ing to our chil­dren the impor­tance and beau­ty of the study of math­e­mat­ics? We have believed the world’s lies about math. Over the next few weeks, let’s debunk some myths about mathematics. 

Our first myth is so preva­lent that I even had a 12 year old girl argue with me this week about how she’s just not a math per­son. What does that even mean?  Could you imag­ine if our stu­dents at the wise age of 12 told us they weren’t “lis­ten­ing” “read­ing” or “speak­ing” per­sons?  Assum­ing they did­n’t have a phys­i­cal ail­ment pre­vent­ing them from engag­ing in these skills, we’d just claim they were being child­ish. Yet, adults will say of their child or themselves:

Some peo­ple just aren’t math people. 

The fact is that no one is born with the innate abil­i­ty to per­form math­e­mat­i­cal feats. Even Ein­stein did­n’t have great math skills ear­ly on in life. Could you imag­ine if he wrote him­self off as a non-math per­son? This myth aris­es from the real­i­ty of the dif­fi­cul­ty of the mas­tery of math­e­mat­ics. It also comes from the belief that math is a pro­ce­dure based sub­ject. This com­mon belief is drilled into our stu­dents’ heads with pages of work­sheets on car­ry­ing, bor­row­ing, long divi­sion, solv­ing for x, and sub­sti­tut­ing val­ues into a for­mu­la. While it is impor­tant to know how to use a for­mu­la for our advan­tage, math­e­mat­ics is actu­al­ly the dis­cov­ery of the truth and the cre­ation of the for­mu­la rather than the com­put­er­ized appli­ca­tion of said for­mu­la. To write math­e­mat­ics as a for­mu­la­ic pro­ce­dure based sub­ject that “some peo­ple just get” sells it short. Where is the sub­ject that rivaled phi­los­o­phy for the top of the lib­er­al arts? 

While we are debunk­ing myths, I think it’s impor­tant to note that some peo­ple do in fact strug­gle with pro­ce­dures. Pro­ce­dures can be dif­fi­cult to fol­low, but learn­ing to fol­low the pro­ce­dure in math­e­mat­ics isn’t the study of math­e­mat­ics. It’s a human skill that we use in many areas of life, and can be more dif­fi­cult for some stu­dents than oth­ers. Most math­e­mat­i­cal pro­ce­dures are writ­ten to be pro­grammed into com­put­ers and left to the world of automa­tion. Let’s learn them, and move onto the real math! Push­ing our pro­ce­dur­al strug­gles onto math­e­mat­ics guar­an­tees that we miss out on the beau­ty and mys­tery of the creation. 

As Paul Lock­hart says, “Stu­dents are not aliens. They respond to beau­ty and pat­tern, and are nat­u­ral­ly curi­ous like any­one else.” Remov­ing the beau­ty and pat­tern from math­e­mat­ics has hin­dered the advance­ment of math­e­mat­ics and con­tributed to this myth. Rather we should agree with Descartes and remember.

For it is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to apply it well.