February 7, 2006

The Calculus of Struggle

A good friend of mine teaches Calculus at the University of Chicago. Over brunch this week-end I told him, “I sometimes wonder if I should take more advantage of the fact that you teach math, considering how much help I need with it. I really should be exploiting that part of our friendship you know.” I was half joking, but only half. We’ve talked before about Math… and often about the insecurity of his students and about my own Math insecurities. I was actually what I call, “math-abused” as an eighth-grader. Mrs. Mohan, who taught algebra at the Hamlin-School-for-Girls, (where I was educated for one year, prior to my entering an east coast prep school, and following seven years of public school education) told me one day in frustration at my inability to understand from where the quadratic formula derived, “Ruby, you just can’t do math.” Children will believe what they are told about themselves by their elders. After that, I failed to succeed at Math… again and again. I had to retake every level of Math in high school for the first three years, until my Upper Year (that’s East Coast for Junior Year) when my math teacher told my Aunt, “Ruby can do math, she just doesn’t believe it.” When this message was relayed to me, I didn’t suddenly burst into a fit of Calculus… but did I manage to pass the rest of my math classes.

I was thinking about this seminal period of my life as Mr. Calculus was describing to me how his students struggle with Math. They come to his office hours, trembling with fear over their inability to solve the problems he assigns, and then as he sits, “breathing down their neck” as he describes it, they solve the problems, without him saying a word. “What they don’t know is that I do the same thing with the math that I’m working on- it’s just on a higher level.”
      “Wow, that’s amazing,” I say. And I am amazed. I’m amazed that anyone could devote several years of their life to Math, an endeavor that I don’t completely revel in.
      He continues, “The thing about doing Math is that most of the time it’s about spending time doing something that you can’t do. You sit there and look at the problem and you have no idea how to figure it out. That’s how it is most of the time. Then occasionally you solve a problem and you move onto the next one.”
      “Yeah, that’s true.”
      “But figuring that out made a difference in the rest of my life. Because there are a lot of things that are really hard to do. But you just do them until you get it right.”

I know I’m not getting it right… what he said. But the way it made sense to me was that he had practiced doing something that he wasn’t convinced he could figure out. He’d pushed through that barrier of insolvency until he solved… again and again. I realized that the reason I had never excelled at Math was because most of the time, I never got past that first barrier. Convinced I “just couldn’t do math” I would read the cryptic word problem and feel incapable of converting the words into symbols that made a formula I could solve. Once I hit that first bit of resistance I’d just stop and give up. As long as the task is easy, factoring, or converting decimals to percentages, solving for x, proving a geometric theorm… something I already sorta know how to do, I can do it again and again without too many bumps. But every time I hit a new concept, I freeze up for a while, uncomprehending, my brain mixing up all the symbols and then I give up- and do something else I already know how to do.

And that’s my whole life. Doing what comes easy. And what comes easy is starting things. Opening books. Shaking hands and smiling. Drafting a first version. Getting past those first steps requires a weight-lifter’s approach. You have to keep flexing against the resistance, lifting even when it hurts. Exhaling on effort. Taking a breather and then going for another set, seeing if you can add one more rep before you give out and nearly drop the stack. And then while you rest, the fibers rebuild themselves, bigger and stronger for the next time. Yeah. That’s it.

Technique isn’t just physical. It’s neural.

post script
My God… I just found the website for that snotty girl’s school I attended for a year. And Mrs. Mohan STILL teaches there. I think exorcising a little demon is in order.

Related Links
Arousal and Stereotype Threat Sex differences in math performance, by Talia Ben-Zeev and Michael Inzlicht.
The Hamlin School for Girls