by Wendy Ward Hoffer. Author of the forthcoming title All Minds on Mathematics.
While in a meeting with a collection of college-educated professionals, one dropped that familiar line, “I am not a math person.” I jumped. No one would sit in a work meeting and announce to colleagues that they are “not a brush my teeth person” or “not the taxpaying type” or “not a believer in gravity.” As humans in this country, there are just certain things that we do. Including math.
Think about it: we have been doing math ever since we were small children. In elementary school, we learned to write numbers and memorized times tables. We sorted and counted our Halloween candy, bargained two Almond Joys for one Reese’s. We stacked and added up our pennies and quarters, nickels and dimes to calculate our net worth, then added our paper money to see if we had saved enough for those coveted sneakers. We learned about taxes when the clerk shocked us by charging more than the stated price for the shoes. In high school, we took algebra and geometry and physics, got our first jobs and scrutinized our paychecks to understand our wages and deductions. We learned what time we had to leave a party to get ourselves home before our curfew. We budgeted for college and blew our savings on prom, mathing all the way.
Today, you use math to solve an abundance of problems: to make sure you have enough battery in your phone to make it through the day or enough money in your account to cover your rent; to calculate the price of a sweater on sale or to figure the cost of three concert tickets; to discern whether an annual gym membership is a better deal than the monthly fee, and by how much; to double a cookie recipe. to ensure there are enough forks for a holiday gathering; to measure a wall to see if the couch will fit…think of it: childbirth, parenting, retirement planning. It’s all math. You understand that if it’s 7:23am, and you are still in your slippers reading this blog post, and school starts at 8:00, an eleven minute drive across town, you’d better finish quickly and get a move on.
See? You are a math person.
Across your life, you have probably spent far more time in a math class than most of us spent learning to drive a car. You wouldn’t say, “I’m not really a driving person,” to your passengers as you slip in behind the wheel. You are the driver. You are about to drive. You have every confidence. You don’t deny your skill. You do it everyday. Just like you do math every day.
Still, I totally understand why those words - “not a math person” - spill from some folks’ lips when the topic of mathematics comes up. Despite all our years of effort and toil with numbers and formulas, problem solving this circle’s diameter and that truckload of bananas’ weight, and the math decathlon that life outside of school expects, some of us got the wrong idea about ourselves: we were persuaded that math is a foreign language, a hidden kingdom accessible to only a few because perhaps our teachers were unsupportive or we got average grades or never loved statistics. But claiming therefore not to be a math person is like me saying I am not really a car-driving person just because I failed my first try at the driving test in 1985 and have never entered the Indianapolis 500. I drive a car just about every day; in fact, I am a good driver. You may not spend your weekend cozying up with conic sections or evaluating exponents, but still, to live in this world requires quite a bit of math. You are doing it. You solve problems at least as often as you brush your teeth.
So, I kindly request that you quit running yourself down. We do not need to pass these insecurities on to the next generation. They are watching, listening, emulating us. What we say and believe makes an impression. Why not teach students that they, like you, are indeed mathematicians already? It is true. You have mathed your way through life. You are a math person. And we need all the problem solvers we can muster, now and into the future.
