Miles Kimball, Quartz
If the “love it and learn it” hypothesis is true, it gives a simple recommendation for someone who wants to get better at math: spend more time thinking about and working on math. Best of all: spend time doing math in the kinds of ways people who love math spend time doing math. Think of math like reading. Not everyone loves reading. But all kids are encouraged to spend time reading, not just for school assignments, but on their own. Just so, not everyone loves math, but everyone should be encouraged to spend time doing math on their own, not just for school assignments. If a kid has a bad experience with trying to learn to read in school, or is bored with the particular books the teacher assigned, few parents would say “Well, maybe you just aren’t a reader.” Instead, they would try hard to find some other way to help their kid with reading and to find books that would be exciting for their particular kid. Similarly, if a kid has a bad experience trying to learn math in school, or is bored with some bits of math, the answer isn’t to say “Well maybe you just aren’t a math person.” Instead, it is to find some other way to help that kid with math and to find other bits of math that would be exciting for their particular kid to help build her or his interest and confidence.
The way a teacher presents a mathematical principle or method in class may not work for you—or, as Elizabeth Green suggested in the New York Times, the whole American pattern of K-12 math instruction may be fatally flawed. If you loved math, you would think about that principle or method from many different angles and look up and search out different mathematical resources, until you found the angle that made most sense to you. Even if you don’t love math, that would be a good way to approach things.
Many people think that because they can’t understand what their math teacher is telling them, it means they can’t understand math. What about the possibility that your teacher doesn’t understand math? Some people are inspired to a life-long love of math by a great math teacher; others are inspired to a life-long hatred of math by an awful math teacher. If you are unlucky enough to have an awful math teacher, don’t blame math for your teacher’s failings.
Cathy O’Neil—who blogs at mathbabe.org—describes well what I like to call “slow-cooked math”:
There’s always someone faster than you. And it feels bad, especially when you feel slow, and especially when that person cares about being fast, because all of a sudden, in your confusion about all sort of things, speed seems important. But it’s not a race. Mathematics is patient and doesn’t mind.Being good at math is really about how much you want to spend your time doing math. And I guess it’s true that if you’re slower you have to want to spend more time doing math, but if you love doing math then that’s totally fine.
I was lucky to have a dad and older brother who showed me a bit of math early on, in a way that was unconnected to school. Then in school, I spent at least as much time on math when I wasn’t supposed to be doing math as when I was. It was a lot more fun doing math when I wasn’t supposed to be doing math than when I was.
For one thing, when I did it on my own, I could do it my own way. But also, there were no time limits. It didn’t matter if it took me a long time. And nothing seemed like a failure.
I spent a lot of time doing math. And very little of that math was done under the gun of a deadline. I spent some time on literal tangents in geometry and trigonometry. But I spent a lot more time on figurative tangents, running into mathematical dead ends. When Euclid told King Ptolemy “there is no Royal Road to geometry,” it had at least two meanings:
- Everyone—even a king or queen—has to work hard if he or she wants to learn geometry or any other bit of higher math.
- The path to learning geometry, or math in general, is not always a straight line. You may have to circle around a problem for a long time before you finally figure out the answer.
