The Math-y Me

"They" told my parents I wasn't a "math person." After the tests I was given as I entered a new school for the second grade I was tracked in the "slower" math class and the "faster" English/reading classes. I guess that's why I am sitting here next to a paper doll of my "future self" as a journalist and writer that I made in the second grade - there's no way I could have imagined then what the future had in store for me. Math, after all, was biologically not in my make up - it should not have even been possible...

As a child I always liked to be creative - drawing, coloring, and crafts were all things I loved to do with my spare time. I loved to play school, thinking maybe someday I would like to be a teacher like my dad. I also, no surprise to my educators, loved to read and write. What I never did was count for fun or start playing adding games with my friends. However, there were some activities I was involved in that, I can now see, had some hidden mathematical roots:

• I adored baseball. I collected baseball cards with my father and studied the stats of my favorite players. I extended this into a personal hobby by joining a little league softball team.
• We played board games a lot. Particularly Monopoly and not in its new mutated form with an electronic bank and plastic cards, but, instead with me or my cousin as banker counting and distributing the appropriate monies to each player turn upon turn.
• I loved to save change and, since my mother spent many years as a banker in Citibank before going on disability, I was taught exactly how to roll my change in the appropriate wrappers with my account number written on the side so I could save up for something really cool some day. (I think all I was really ever saving up for was larger dollar amounts printed in my bank book!)
• I don't know when it started exactly, but I became obsessed with jigsaw puzzles. That was the easy go-to gift for me for years. I remember birthdays and Christmases where I would see rectangular boxes wrapped up and I would think, "I wonder what that's a picture of! I can't wait to open it."

So, if the right person was paying attention, maybe they could have foretold where I would end up on this journey, but it took me a really long time to wipe the cobwebs from my eyes, to erase the stigma I had grown to accept and understand that maybe people should watch what they are saying when they think they can determine a child's lifelong educational aptitude based on a test given at age seven.

Some cobwebs got swept away when I was twelve years old not because I had a beautiful mathematical moment or that I experienced an epiphany about my own abilities, instead, I saw things a little bit clearer about one's inability to keep faith in the certainty of what we think we know about how life will proceed. Unexpectedly, on Thanksgiving morning, my father passed away. At that point all preconceived notions of my life's path went down the tubes, because all of them involved my father for much longer than fate had allowed.

I was in the seventh grade then and math class was atrocious for me. Eighth grade got a little bit better, but by the time I got to high school I had had enough of it. I decided there was no time to waste in this life and if I didn't understand something I damn well better ask someone about it, so that's exactly what I did. My teacher's name was Miss Curtis and the second she said something that didn't sit right with me, I raised my hand and asked - I was in a new school, only about four people knew who I was so what did I care. I figured I would be doing this all class long, all year long because I was so bad at math, but I was so so wrong. Because I asked questions right away I stopped the deluge of confusion to follow - I was being proactive instead of reactive and it worked. By the middle of the semester my teacher and classmates, who obviously had not heard of my biological tendencies against mathematics, started calling me a "math person" and pointing to me for help. I was thoroughly confused.

I didn't buy in. I wasn't sold on this "math person" title, but I did realize that math homework was the easiest and often what I would do to give myself a break from Global Studies, Spanish or Religion homework. I would help my friends out with their math and then ask them why the heck they didn't just ask the teacher in class, admitting that was the only way I knew what I was doing, but they never followed this advice. This continued, as I readied for college with my sights set on Elementary education as a major. The one thing I learned from helping out all these people was that I wanted to teach, for sure.

In one of my introductory education courses the TIMMS study was going to be discussed. I had heard of TIMMS before and was intrigued by it, so I was happy we were addressing it in class. In short, TIMMS is:

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study(TIMSS) provides reliable and timely data on the mathematics and science achievement of U.S. 4th- and 8th-grade students compared to that of students in other countries. TIMSS data have been collected in 1995, 1999, 2003, and 2007. (http://nces.ed.gov/timss/)

What I learned through our discussion of the results of the 1995 study was that in the United States we were simply not stacking up globally when we looked at mathematics education. I had already decided that I was going to be the best teacher I could possibly be, so hearing that my own weakness was my country's weakness scared me - who would I ask for help when I was teaching? I decided after the discussion in that class that I needed to really work on my math for the sake of the students I would someday serve - I changed my Elementary education major to a double major and added on Mathematics. Over the next four years I transformed from a Education major trying to strengthen her mathematical mind to a full-blown Math-chick that couldn't wait to get into a classroom to show kids how COOL math really was.

It was a strange transformation and I distinctly remember one day being brought to tears thinking about what "they" told my parents so many years ago... I am not a math person. Whatever did that mean? Did they tell the parents of the kids who scored lower on the reading portion that their child wasn't a "reading person"?! The idea is idiotic, I know, but how different is it from what is said day after day about mathematics? Think about it. I do. Often.

I think about this so often because, as I carved my path in this life, I have found myself not a journalist or a writer as I once dreamed, not an elementary school teacher like my father, and not even a middle school teacher as I planned as I exited my undergraduate education - nope, after it was all said and done I have become the one thing a non-math person could never ever become: I am a high school mathematics teacher and have been so for twelve years. In the end, "they" had no idea what they were talking about.