I Went to a Good School, So Why Am I Terrible at Math?

We're Not Up to Snuff

• If I went to such a good school, why do I suck so bad at math?
• Would I hate math so much today if I’d had a teacher who didn’t make me feel so bad about not understanding it easily?
• Would I have improved at math if I had better study supports or confidence to believe I could learn it?

By focusing only on procedures—“Draw a division house, put ‘242’ on the inside and ‘16’ on the outside, etc.”—and not on what the procedures mean, turns school math into a sort of arbitrary process wholly divorced from the real world of numbers. Students learn not math but, in the words of one math educator, answer-getting... ...The answer-getting strategies may serve them well for a class period of practice problems, but after a week, they forget. And students often can’t figure out how to apply the strategy for a particular problem to new problems.

Making Math Skills ‘Common’

By realizing it plays a role in day-to-day life with things like personal finance, problem-solving and more, I might have even seen math’s value as a skill sooner. During high school, it was enough to get by with C’s in algebra and geometry. But it turns out I didn’t actually learn anything the years I progressed up the math ladder. In the end, I was just another student from my high school who got a diploma and went to college. But my foundation was shaky—and as I try to build on it now, I’m paying the price. All I can do now is cram from my GRE test-prep book, and hope that the higher standards most states have adopted are encouraging schools to actually teach kids these essential skills for life and career, instead of passing them along for a diploma. Then those kids can hit me up, because I need a tutor.