First of all, most of you who know me know that I have been pretty opposed to teaching as a profession for myself for quite a long time for quite a lot of reasons. I absolutely would never teach at the grade school level (I HATE being around children, plus I feel like I’d be wasting my brain and my talent in mathematics relegating myself to multiplication tables) or at the high school level (they’re still children, but now they’re children who are smartasses who think they know everything and they still don’t do that much mathematics). Now that I’m getting experience teaching at the college level, I’m learning that although I like it much more than I expected, a lot of the students still act like spoiled brats, and they don’t realize what mathematics is, what it’s used for, why it’s important, etc. They often just find it to be a nuisance.
However, when I think about it, I want to figure out the cause. The cause is the math education they receive from the beginning. There is a terrible culture in America in general that “math is hard,” “some people just can’t do math, and there’s nothing wrong with that, so I can just give up on it,” etc. I mean, seriously, when I told people I wanted to get a PhD in math (or now, when I tell them that IS what I am doing), so many look at me with a disgusted look that mostly comes from the thought “why would anyone ever DO that to themselves? Math is the worst thing ever.” And this is fed from the beginning by elementary education, and especially fostered in high school.
What high schools (and below, but especially high schools) really need are passionate, talented math teachers, much like my colleagues and me, to give students the right attitude about mathematics from the beginning. Not that everyone teaching grade school or high school math needs a graduate degree, but they should have the same positive attitude and passion that I see in math grad students and PhDs. There needs to be a culture change, in the attitudes of the general public toward mathematics as well as in the general public’s idea of what mathematics is. This isn’t going to come out of the sky; it needs to be taught.
The problem is that most people that actually have this talent and passion for mathematics DO go to grad school or into industry jobs, and don’t go into the “lower” levels of education. So those positions are left to bachelor’s-degree-holding teachers (often those degrees are not even in mathematics, but in education or English or history), some of which don’t even like mathematics themselves so they are propagating that attitude in America’s youth.
Now, I want to be clear. I do not think that this is true of all grade school and high school math teachers. Nor do I think there’s anything wrong with bachelor’s degrees in general or with teaching with a bachelor’s degree. (In fact, my comments on college education are aplenty, and have no place in this entry about math education. Perhaps another day…). In fact, from 1st-12th grade, I had six math teachers, and two of them were stellar, three were great, and the other was okay. I had great mathematics preparation for college. But I also went to private school and the largest class I’d ever been in had like 21 students in it. But there were plenty of people that had the exact same math teachers that I did that still got the anti-math attitude elsewhere that even good math education could not undo. I saw it with my own eyes.
Anyway, trying to get back to my point, I see in general a negative attitude toward mathematics and I blame it on generations and generations of propaganda. I want to fix this, but the most logical place to me to try this is in the education system by hiring good, talented, happy, passionate math teachers in the elementary schools on up the whole chain. But how can we staff all our schools in such a way? I welcome any ideas. I see several major problems in this endeavor: (1) the people that really feel this passionately about math that are already in existence tend toward other jobs (grad school, industry, teaching at the college level), (2) because of the cultural issue we’re facing, the people with positive attitudes about math are in the minority so there aren’t enough of them to staff every school in the country, even if we pulled them out of other math jobs to teach in our schools, (3) school administrators often have this negative attitude toward math themselves, so they don’t see a need for REAL math education, just the bare minimum to get by – hire a football coach that can “teach” basic algebra skills that cannot possibly impart any real mathematical wisdom on students, then the students will at least scrape by at a barely passing rate on standardized testing and the school will keep its funding. Those are just a few issues, but there are many more.
As just one person, just one voice, I don’t feel I can make much of an impact even though it’s something I really care about. Plus, you’re not going to catch me teaching below college level. So even if I chose an academic job to try and counteract the effects, the students get to me so late that they’re completely turned off to math and it’s nearly impossible for me to reverse their attitudes or show them real math. They just want their 70% passing grade so they can get through all their math prereqs as quickly and painlessly (with as little actual work and effort) as possible.
I don’t know if I’m being clear about my point. I don’t even know if I know what my point is. It’s just a topic I’ve thought about a lot lately, and a topic I’ve had lots of discussions about, and something I care deeply about, and something that frustrates me to no end. I get infuriated every time I hear a student whine about losing points for not showing work (“I got the right answer! Why does it matter how I got it? Yes, I did just guess…”), or complain about having an exam with open-ended questions instead of multiple choice questions (“I’ve never had to do an open-ended exam. This is so much harder! I don’t even have a chance of guessing right!”), or how they can’t use a calculator on a quiz or exam (“But how am I supposed to know how to do that without my calculator? I can just push keys and not think at all!”), or any other numerous common complaints that really stem from college-level professors expecting students to do actual mathematics (involving logical statements leading from given information to a solution to a problem, and the thought process behind it) rather than computation (which I find is too often the precedent set in early math education). How can we make students better prepared for this transition from stupidity to higher education? I don’t even think it’s entirely the high school math teachers’ fault, even though that’s really the only concern/cause I addressed above. I don’t know. What do you guys think?

PS. I forgot 2 major points I wanted to make.
(1) I don’t think math is the only subject facing a problem like this in the education system. One of my mother’s friends is a middle/high school art teacher, and I’ve heard plenty of stories from her about students resisting required art classes because they don’t think they’re artistic or they don’t see the point. You’ll also hear plenty of jokes about the “uselessness” of English or art or history or theater degrees. Plus, students in general often have a whiny “why do I need to know this for real life?” attitude that is difficult for teachers of all disciplines to combat. I just think math has a very difficult time because it gets a bad reputation AND people outside of mathematicians don’t really seem to even know what math really is.
(2) I don’t want to make it seem like I think that getting better math teachers earlier will make everyone in America a math genius. Everyone has different skill sets, and each individual has a unique aptitude for mathematics. However, I still think whether you genuinely are terrible at math or you’re a math genius, you should understand what mathematics really is and why it is useful, and have somewhat of an appreciation for it rather than a disgust for what you think it is.
Okay that’s it.

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