For much of my school life, I have hated math. It was the one subject I didn’t always do very well in. The studies of literature, social studies, and science came easily to me, as did the studies of foreign language, music, and drama; they were like favorite cats, purring in my lap and winding lazily around my ankles. Math was a different beast entirely–learning math was like trying to catch an eel with Vaseline-slicked hands.
And yet, strangely, I remember a time when I didn’t hate math. I would ask my father to come up with adding and subtracting problems with big numbers when I was first going to school, just to show how I could do it. But that was within the safety of my home, where I knew I wasn’t going to be teased within an inch of my life for being wrong.
First Problem with Math: I’m Either Right or I’m Wrong (and Usually, I’m Wrong)
At school, I didn’t feel I could afford to be wrong in front of everyone else. If I called out a wrong answer to a math problem, I heard about it for the rest of the week in vicious taunts and insults (more than normal ribbing)–the other kids couldn’t get enough of me failing, because usually I did so well in classes.
And, unluckily for me, wrong answers just became more and more common on my math tests and homework as I grew up. Soon, math wasn’t just adding and subtracting anymore, but “multiplying” (something I barely wrapped my brain around before the end of third grade), not to speak of the devilish art of “dividing”. (I believe long division is practiced most often in one of the circles of Hell described in Dante’s Inferno.)
Multiplying and dividing were longer, more involved processes, which were harder for me to concentrate on anyway because they were a pain to learn and a pain to remember. And because they took longer to do and I didn’t like focusing on them, they were harder to get right. Moreover, I didn’t understand WHY I had to do them. Adding and subtracting were easy because they were quick to do and I could easily see where they were used in the “real world.” Pardon the Southernism, but I thought, “When in tarnation am I going to have to know how to divide 256 by 8, or know the result of 12 x 17?”
As I got into these somewhat higher realms of math in upper elementary school, I was at the same time studying more advanced literature, social studies, and science, since I was in the Academically Gifted program. No one, not my teachers or the other students, could understand why I was so good at everything but math, and I could not tell them why either, but I could tell them exactly how frustrated it made me.
Second Problem with Math: It Makes Me Look Stupid
Much later, I was able to understand what it was about math that drove me nuts. Math proved to me how imperfect I was. The subject of math showed me that no matter how hard I tried, I was always going to be stupid and wrong at SOMETHING, and that other people would likely focus on the one thing I did WRONG rather than the 99 things I did RIGHT. We, as a society, focus on errors in someone else’s performance much more than we focus on their successes. (Can I get an AMEN?)
As a perfectionist, math and its nearly-inherent difficulty infuriated me beyond reason; I, too, focused on the one thing I did poorly on versus the many things I could do well. How could I spend literally HOURS working and working at a problem and get it WRONG? Was there not credit for effort, for the number of times I had to erase and start over? (I hate erasing almost as much as math–you never quite get the paper clean again!)
Not to mention that there was no way to “skip a step” to make the process of each problem faster; if I tried to make it go faster, I ended up getting horribly wrong results. To do it right, I had to do it slow, and I hated going slow. I wanted the answers yesterday, and I wanted them to be right, too, but my brain just wouldn’t do them. The processes I was asked to use were always so long and drawn-out and boring to my mind, and you had to do them JUST SO or everything would tumble down like a house of cards you breathed on too hard.
Third Problem with Math: It Became the Largest Source of Anxiety in My Academic Life
By fourth and fifth grade, math became a seat of anxiety in my mind, and anxiety, as I now know, “locks up” my thought process. All I could think about while trying to work on math problems was how much of a pain the problem was, not how to do it, and I ruminated around and around in circles till I couldn’t focus anymore. Even multiple-choice tests were no help; I often came up with answers that weren’t even LISTED. I could work myself into a nice big crying fit just trying to do five math problems, because each of them made me look stupid and helpless with every fruitless minute I spent on them. The other students’ teasing voices and laughter only served to heighten my anxieties even further–not only was I having trouble with math, but my troubles were public knowledge. The shame of it!
The Math Hatred Flowchart
The only thing this flowchart doesn’t show is that my math hatred was cyclical–once I got to the “math hatred of epic proportions,” problem-solving got longer, and longer, and longer. This, as you might imagine, led to more anxiety, more teasing, even more anxiety, and even more of a sense of futility. Why even keep TRYING to do well at this subject, when it was obviously in God’s will that I keep failing?
Fourth Problem with Math: It Was the Only Way to Be Respected Academically
By “failing”, I mean getting less than 90% on tests and homework. I was supposed to be one of the “smart kids,” but math threw me into emotional tailspins and locked me on a straight downward course with the ground. I was supposed to be a “smart kid,” but I was hamstrung when it came to math. It dragged down my GPA and made others doubt my gifts in other areas.
And of course, in the mid-to-late ’90s, being hyper-good at math meant you were considered a genius, while being hyper-good at everything else BUT math meant there was something wrong with you. All the “math and technology” special schools and the math competitions that sprung up everywhere told me that. Math was how you “got ahead” academically, how you got respect from other kids (and teachers!), and I just COULDN’T DO IT.
The frustration I experienced! I coveted that respect more than anything–I sure as heck wasn’t getting any friendship at school, after all. If I was disrespected and generally repudiated by most of the kids I went to school with, where did I belong in the academic society? Nowhere, and I wanted to belong, very badly.
Fifth Problem with Math: It Threatened to Ruin My Fragile Social Status
Other than my academics, I really didn’t have much going for me during much of my public schooling. I had no friends, no social life; for much of it, I had nothing else I did that was just mine, like a special gift of any sort. I was just “smart”, but I didn’t feel I deserved the label of “smart” because I stunk at math. My social status in school, for much of my public school life, rode on my grades, and those darned low B’s in math made me feel worse than average–again, like there was something wrong with me because I wasn’t good in a subject full of absolutes and just numbers.
Up until 7th grade and the discovery of my musical and written gifts, math kicked me in the shins over and over again, making me feel that no matter how old I got, I’d never get any respect for my intellect. I’d always be judged as lacking, by both my peers and my authority figures. To the boys, I was just another “stupid girl” who wasn’t good at math. To the girls, I was some unpopular whining thing who cried over her math books all the time. And the teachers just couldn’t get a handle on WHY math made me so angry. At the time, I could not tell them all of this, because I couldn’t self-analyze. All I knew was that the sight of numbers on a page with the instructions “Do 30 of these problems” locked my brain into obsession with my imminent failure.
The Math Feud, From Middle School to Present-Day
All of the above problems and fears popped up at irregular intervals throughout middle school, high school, and even up into college. I began to see myself as a complete failure when it came to math, so I didn’t expect hardly anything of myself when working with the subject matter. Though I hated seeing those B’s in math appear next to my perfect record of A’s in all the other subjects, I knew it was no better than I could do. I was stupid in math, and the sooner I realized it, I reasoned, the sooner I could perhaps get over this crippling anxiety and fear of failure.
But it rankled in my gut that I couldn’t do any better, and occasionally anxiety still gripped my mind again when faced with problems I just didn’t know how to do. (Example: my College Algebra midterm, in which I stared at the paper for about 10 minutes before bursting into tears. I think I hate solving for x, y, and z just a wee bit more than scrubbing tile grout with a baby-sized toothbrush.) I struggled with math as long as I had to, and as soon as my college credits for math were satisfied, I avoided it as much as possible.
These days, math and I are not on speaking terms. I imagine if I saw math coming down the street on the same sidewalk as me, I’d switch over to the other side of the road, much as I avoid the real-life bullies I went to school with. I do as little with it as I possibly can, to keep from the feelings of futility and fear that ruled me in public school and college.
(I’ve also found that other highly-technical, absolute right-or-wrong subject matters, such as dynamic website coding, sentence diagramming/explicit grammar rules, and music theory are also difficult for me. An overly-long, involved process with lots of itty-bitty, easily-mistaken steps, leading to a result that might or might not be right, seems to be the perfect recipe for a Robin meltdown. PHP, MySQL, I’m lookin’ at you. :P)
Will There Ever Be a Solution to the Math Problem?
Math still means failure, anxiety, and tears to me, and I think it always will, just as literature and music will always mean success, comfort, and smiles. Even now, I kid that my brain is just “not wired” for math, and I willingly leave mathematical operations to those who wish to do them.
However, I do not believe that there is absolutely no hope for me when it comes to math. Perhaps, if I had a very understanding teacher who could help me gain more positive psychological associations with math, I could potentially break down the centrifugal anxiety ride long enough to actually do stuff with it. The curiosity about math that I once had as a child is still there, because it’s a mental frontier I have yet to conquer; it’s, however, a frontier whose native animals have bitten and stung me more times than I care to admit. 😛