My daughter is unintimidated by math. Why should she be intimidated by it anyway? Math is just numbers, and numbers are everywhere. (Ok, yes, I know that there is a little more than that to math, but not in the primary years).
The other day she was watching a video from the library and I was sitting there with her. The video turned out to be about a math contest, and the prevailing message of the entire 30-minute long segment was that math was something for brainy people, not for the general population. I don’t get it.
We assume that our children will read and write. When they do not read and write on a school-scheduled time frame, we may take them for educational assessment and intervention. Parents and teachers tend to take reading and writing seriously. We know that they are important cultural skills, so we value them, create names for various problems we have with those skills, and cultivate those skills through early literacy programs.
We don’t do this with math. According to our prevailing cultural norms, math is hard. Perhaps this is because we learn math in the abstract and we learn reading as an applied skill. But math does exist in everyday life. We use geometry to build things. We use addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and percentages to budget and do our taxes. Math does exist in the real world and we do need to know how to use it. So why the bad attitude about math?
When we expect our children to have a hard time with math, what do they do? Sometimes they have no problem. What do we do with those children? We label them as nerds, geeks, brains, what have you – pick a word that suits your era. While this might be considered a compliment to some, it really isn’t, since we’re labeling kids as uncool and different. Sometimes they have a hard time. Then we get them extra help, secretly assuring them that they are normal and that math is indeed hard.
I’m tired of the mathitude. My kid likes math, and that’s perfectly fine. It’s not amazing and brainy. She just enjoys playing with numbers. If at some point she has difficulties with math, we’ll talk about how important it is to understand the applications of math in the real world, and we’ll practice those skills. Because math is important, it’s for everyone, and we don’t need to revere those who can do it or be afraid of it.
Image courtesy of catwoman at Stock Exchange.