Start Where you Are

Learn­ing alge­bra is hard. This is a truth from which many shy away. Many par­ents don’t like see­ing their chil­dren strug­gle. Many peo­ple don’t under­stand the ben­e­fits of strug­gling. While com­mon idioms like “from fail­ing you learn” are tossed around, the real­i­ty of fail­ure is no fun. It is no sur­prise to learn that par­ents and stu­dents shift their focus as soon as the strug­gle begins. It’s com­mon­ly in Jan­u­ary that many math stu­dents real­ize that they don’t remem­ber every­thing from the fall semes­ter and there­fore will strug­gle with the next semes­ter of learn­ing. The answer to this dilem­ma is not quit­ting, find­ing a dif­fer­ent cur­ricu­lum, or label­ing your­self as a ‘non-math’ per­son. This dilem­ma reveals one thing: you are a lim­it­ed human learn­ing some­thing infinite.

Con­grat­u­la­tions, reach­ing this lev­el is an accom­plish­ment. You have suc­cess­ful­ly joined the real world of learn­ers. The brave ones. The ones who don’t shy from a chal­lenge, but face the world head-on and dis­cov­er the beau­ty and truth and good­ness in God’s cre­ation. As math­e­mati­cian Paul Lock­hart says, “This is real­ly what keeps me in the math game– the chance that I might glimpse some kind of secret under­ly­ing truth, some sort of mes­sage from the gods.”

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, reach­ing this strug­gling point still leaves you with a ques­tion to answer: What are you going to do about it? What do you do when you real­ize that you don’t know the expo­nent laws or remem­ber the pow­er of the identity? 

Start Where you Are

Remind your­self of what you do know. You may not remem­ber how to solve simul­ta­ne­ous equa­tions, but do you know what a lin­ear equa­tion is? Do you know what the solu­tion to a sys­tem of equa­tions rep­re­sents? Do you remem­ber how to read and where to go to find infor­ma­tion on sys­tems? Do you have a math mas­ters mem­ber­ship so you can access Lori’s lessons on systems? 

It’s true. Hav­ing to go back to the begin­ning and start­ing where you are will take more time than you may want to spend. If alge­bra is worth learn­ing, it’s worth the time. Believe me, there are few things that will shape your brain to think like God than the study of his lan­guage of cre­ation. While it’s true that the truths in math­e­mat­ics can help us build a bridge, that’s too sim­plis­tic. We don’t study hard things and bang our head against walls in order to build a bridge, we do it to glimpse the beau­ty of God. Stick with it! Doing the hard thing is worth the time!