The written word has always been a friend of mine. Like a warm blanket I can come back to and snuggle against it is always there to comfort me. Math on the other hand has been the opposite. One might be surprised that I excelled in science but had trouble with mathematics. They do go hand in hand. There is something about the way the material is presented in science though. I find science interesting and therefore any math associated with it was just part of it. Math by itself is just horribly stressful for me. I am terrible at the simplest math problems. I can figure out percentages in my head in seconds but give me simple arithmetic and I freeze up. I physically get stressed and I can feel my throat tense up as I try to add and subtract simple numbers.
I remember being in fourth grade. My teacher wasn’t very good. She was very standoffish and just handed out papers expecting the students to know how to do the work. It was our first experience with long multiplication. I didn’t understand so I guessed. I multiplied the numbers in each column and put them next to each other as the answer. So if the question was 22×44= my answer was 88. Not correct. The correct answer is 968. I did this for the entire sheet and finished before the rest of the class and reluctantly brought my answer sheet to my teachers desk. I will never forget the look she gave me. She took one look at the paper and threw it back on her desk saying, “This is all wrong, go back and fix it.” All of the kids in the class her heard her. I was mortified and embarrassed. Near tears I walked back to my desk with no idea how to do the work.
Perhaps my reluctance began there. Perhaps all that it took was one teacher to scowl at me and embarrass me that caused me to lose any confidence in the subject I may have had. The path continued into junior high and high school. I had a teacher that said, “Leanne got Larry Bird’s number, again!” For any of you that don’t know Larry Bird wore the number 33. Public humiliation was a common trait of most of my math teachers, none of them wanted to go the extra mile to make me feel comfortable and actually teach me what I was doing wrong until one teacher I had in high school. She taught Algebra and she was amazing.
Math is important and teachers should strive to make children comfortable with it rather than embarrassing them when they fail. I have a problem where I look at numbers once and then again and see if a different number than I first saw. I don’t know why it happens, it just does. Math can be fun with activities. I like visual displays when it comes to mathematics. Charts, graphs and pictures that help to explain the problem at hand. Word problems were also easy for me which is no surprise considering my comfort level when it comes to writing.
Now, with the internet, there are so many places that kids can practice math. I wish I had the internet when I was in school. This website has a bunch of cool math websites that turns learning into a game: Math Made Fun
If there was a story book in existence that somehow taught a math problem with every chapter children with stronger literacy skills would excel in math. I just know it.
Harcourt Math: Challenge Workbook
Scholastic Success with Math, Grade 5
Houghton Mifflin Math Steps: Student Edition Level 5
