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| Peanuts characters Peppermint Patty and Franklin work on a word problem. |
Me, some time around fifth grade through ninth, which would be from 1970 to 1974.
A main part of math class is word problems and I'm awful at them. I'm bad at math generally and have to go to summer school after ninth grade, having needed an eighty on the final exam to get a passing grade and getting a score of about half that.
When confronted with anything beyond simple arithmetic, it's as if a fire door closes in my head, blocking a neuron pathway. I don't panic but I do get anxious. To cope, I get surly and rebellious. "I'm never gonna use this stuff," I tell anyone who will listen. I don't understand that like most learning, math is a discipline, an exercise in abstract thinking. My teachers are well meaning but unable to spark me into wanting to learn, and they lack the ability to spot what I now think is a mild learning disability. They are men—it's an all boys school—who served in the military, World War II, Korea. Gentle coaxing is not in their teaching repertoire.
Being bad at math pulled down my grade average and made me feel dumber than I probably was.
Word problems were the worst. Little narratives about people filling pools that leaked at one rate with hoses that ran at another; traveled from one city to another on roads with varying speed limits; invested different sums of money into banks with different interest rates; divided pieces of fruit among a number of friends; were a part of families with complicated age differences; scheduled a number of people for activities with number and time restrictions.
How I hated word problems.
When I was thirty-two I wanted to go to graduate school. To do that, there's a test you take and a part of it was word problems. I don't think they have that part anymore, the analytical section. I got a big book and studied it nightly for weeks and, for the first time, I got a handle on word problems and I did well enough on the Graduate Record Exam to get into graduate school. It was about the only issue of my youth I've ever resolved.
The Peanuts cartoon above presents a word problem that I don't believe can be solved. If I'm wrong, I'd love to hear about it.
There’s something about word problems that shuts off a switch in my brain required for understanding them...it’s a deer in the headlights kind of thing. I applaud your initiative in successfully preparing for the GRE, and grieve your loss of valuable summer enjoyment stuck in a math class when a tutor earlier in the year might have turned the situation around in time, saving you from needless anxiety, likely inaccurate assessment of your intelligence, and helped your gpa. Have you blogged about your graduate school experience? I don’t remember seeing that when previously scanning your earlier posts to get up to speed. I will have to get back to you on the solve-ability of this problem.
ReplyDeleteActually, I had tutors but I was just that dense that they didn't help. Also, that summer of math classes wasn't that bad an experience for me. The teacher zipped through things in a clear, brisk way and it all made sense to me for the first time ever. And the only time.
DeleteI loved grad school, which I went to in my early thirties. It was the only time I ever did well academically.