Mathematics

Math scares me!

Growing up, I was not a strong student in math. In Elementary school, I remember getting so nervous before “mad minutes” and it was not necessarily because of the addition or subtraction, but we had to put the “time” down when we finished. My parents only had one clock in our house and it was in roman numerals and the rest of the clocks were digital. I still get anxiety as an adult to have to tell someone the time from an analog clock and ill admit it does take me longer than most to figure it out (face palm), but we do not need to tell time that way with all the technology around us. Another fear is dealing with money. Counting back change used to give me extreme anxiety. If I was ever asked to work the door or concession at a hockey game/high school event that was my biggest fear that I would not give back the correct amount of money.

I can say that I do not remember my math learning experiences from elementary school, but I do remember in grade 7-9 we did A LOT of math questions up at the chalkboard where other students could see our mistakes while working through problems. I felt like in math you should be able to just “know it.” It should be easy… Did you not memorize your times tables? Well if 5X6=30, how come it takes you so long to figure out how many groups of 6 go into 30? I also felt that if you did understand it you could fly through the assignments and were praised, but if it took you longer or if you did not finish your homework (my parents couldn’t help me with math problems at home) you were a student that got left behind. How Math was taught to me was usually a written lesson on what definitions meant, example questions (not many maybe 1 or 2 of each type of questions), than we would be given numbers from the Math Makes Sense textbook and told to get to work. In math, you worked alone for most of it. I also felt like the subject was taught quickly. That might have been because I would finally start to understand a concept and we would be moving on to the next concept.

In my grade 10 and 11 math class, I had THE BEST math teacher. He cared and made an effort to get us engaged and wanting to learn. I remember our whole class marching down the hallways chanting a math song we created in class to learn a new formula with him leading the way. He also volunteered a lot of his time to do math with students that needed extra help (like me) in the mornings, during lunch hour, or after school. He has actually helped me in my university math classes too, I reached out for help and he would send me a video of how he got to his answer and explained each step. I am thankful for teachers like him.

Reading the article “Teaching Mathematics and the Inuit Community” by Louise Poirier we learn how using other cultures view points can be beneficial to learning math in other ways than Eurocentric ways of learning. The article talks about students that were not doing well at Eurocentric math, but when they were taught a new strategy game those students that were spending more time learning from their traditional cultural or from their grandparents were able to learn spatial relations quicker and easier than the western taught children. We also learned that the Inuit children used a base 20 system for their first 3 years of learning math. Base 20 works for their culture and society because they do a lot of their teaching orally. It works well because in their number system can be the same meaning for the same number unless it is spoken differently. We also learned in our lecture on Tuesday that they use the base 20 system because they use their hands and feet for counting and grouping numbers. I also like how the Inuit teach the months of the years. They go by what naturally occurs over the months and not by a set of 30 or 31 days. I actually like this way of using a calendar because not all years are the same with weather changes, hunting availability and so on. The Inuit use the land to survive so if they went by a strict 30/31 day monthly calendar it would not fit their life style. It just goes to show that not all MATH is the same which I have always considered it to be a universal subject. I thought this because of how I was taught, I am happy to see other forms of math and hoping I can incorporate different varieties of teaching math in my classroom so my students do not fear math like I did.