Math Memories

My own memories of elementary school math are painful. In third grade, I knew I wasn’t learning math, and I just couldn’t believe it. It simply couldn’t be possible that I wasn’t smart! 
Today, we believe everyone can learn to read. However, we think only the gifted can learn math. We are comfortable making jokes about our own math lacks. Looking back, I see my not unusual experience as typical for the 60’s, when I was a child. At the time, my math struggles plunged me into a state of hesitancy and self-doubt that came to permeate my psyche. I still felt competent reading and writing, and I’ve always enjoyed occasional bursts of belief in my own genius. But the failure of my education to succeed in making me math literate felt horrible. Standing at the chalkboard, feeling scornful eyes on my back, the division problem too high and too close, it felt like the marrow in my bones was being slowly frozen.

Eight years old, I kept trying to figure out when and how I’d fallen behind. I also tried to catch up, doing flashcards at the wood-and-formica dining room table. Could I have missed six weeks of school when everyone else learned the multiplication tables? It didn’t occur to me to ask my teachers for help. If they knew my grades, and weren’t helping, it was because it was too late to put a life vest on a person who’d already fallen in the water. Math class was like a river in the Grand Canyon. Everyone else was together on a raft, being steered by the competent hands of Mrs. Gioux at the front, and the California Board of Education at the back. I had fallen off about a mile back, and was now holding onto a log mentally composed of only the 2’s , 3’s, and 5’s times tables.

When we moved to Rochester, New York, in the alternative high school, I by choice took algebra three times, got D’s three times, and finally gave up.
As a preschool Montessori teacher, the logical thinking, logical quantification, and association of numeral to quantity was math I loved and could handle. Then at an American Montessori Society conference, I encountered Mortensen math, a technique that finally, to my amazement, let me understand algebra. Alas, it disappeared from the market instead of spreading fruitfully across public and private education as I had deeply hoped.

Math is a language for understanding and expressing relationships. Like me, many adults had trouble learning math because they were taught only techniques of calculation, and that only with chalk and a chalkboard, paper and pencil. Too abstract, and too meaningless: a recipe for a dish we never get to taste.
Using objects that can be held in the hand, and learning to understand fundamental relationships, is the key to math literacy. A brain-friendly environment is also essential.  This is why I'm passionate about the Froebel Gifts - they let students use their own constructions to gradually build math skills.

Do you have memories of your childhood experiences with math? I'd love to hear them, whether positive or negative.