Math is Hard (and that’s ok)

Sixth grade math is hard. I say this as a person who took calculus in high school and started college with plans to be a math teacher. I say this as a person whose husband has a BS in Math. Sixth grade math is hard.

But before you tell me I should not say such a thing, that I am perpetuating stereotypes that girls cannot do math, that I need to think of my daughter, let me say that my daughter is exactly who I am thinking about when I say this. The math she is learning is hard. It is algebra without calling it algebra. Tonight, it was basic combinatorics (again, without calling it that). And she not only has to do the rote memorization (because honestly, times tables are nothing but memorization), the new Common Core* standards around math actually make her think about it. They are as much about problem solving as solving the problem. And we love that because it is much more important to teach a kid to work through the problem than for her to simply know the answer.

But we also need to recognize that these math problems are challenging so that when she struggles, when she gets frustrated, she does not think she is stupid. Think about it, if I am sitting there telling my daughter that math is easy when she is struggling with it, what am I telling her about her intelligence? Even when she does well at math, what am I imparting to her if I tell her math is easy?

There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that math is hard. What would be wrong would be to tell my daughter that because it is hard, she does not have to learn it; that I do not expect her to get it. No, I tell her math is hard, but that I believe she is smart enough to figure it out. I tell her I do not expect her to simply “know” the answer, I expect her to work through the problem and solve it.

Math may be hard. But she is smart. She can do math.

Last week when Pop Tart decided she was stupid. Or, more accurately, she decided that the other kids in her class now thought she was stupid, and in her mind, those two things are pretty much the same thing.

Pop Tart did not have the easiest start in life. No child who ends up in foster care does. She had to repeat a grade. She was put on an Individual Education Plan (IEP) to give her the extra supports she needed to catch up. She has caught up. She is working at grade level. But to end an IEP, the school has to do testing. They cannot take a parent’s word that it is no longer needed. Testing put Pop Tart on the IEP, only testing can take her off of one.

So, late last week, Pop Tart and one other child were pulled from their regular class room to go be tested. To Pop Tart, this broadcasted to the other kids that she must be stupid. And so that night at home, she started struggling with math she had been doing competently the night before. Because suddenly, she was stupid.

The problem is, of course, she did not tell us what had happened until 20 minutes into the frustration and the “this is impossible”s and “I am just stupid”s. So after a break, we sat down to talk to her. Telling her that the people who get the most tutoring are not the stupid kids but the rich kids who then get into the best colleges in the country did not work. But telling her that we did not think she needed the IEP anymore, but that in order to end it, the school needed to do the paperwork, and the paperwork included testing, very much helped. (It also helps that as a former foster child, she understands bureaucracy than most adults.)

We also talked about how her math homework is not easy. It is hard. And it is okay for her to struggle and ask for help. What is not okay is for her to give up. She has to try. She does not have to know the answer the second she reads the question. She does need to work through the problem.

But key to this conversation was not just telling her she was smart, and that she could do this. It was acknowledging that what she is being asked to do is not easy. It seems easy for us because we both have a lot more math knowledge than a sixth grader, but the questions she is answering are unquestionably harder than the math I was doing in sixth grade.

After that, she went back to her homework. She had three problems left to do. These were word problems, which most people I know hate to begin with. But these were word problems not where she was being asked to solve a problem, but to write out in sentences HOW she would solve the problem. Two of them went quickly. The third was much more difficult. It took her ten minutes of conversation back and forth with C to work her way through it. But she did work her way through it. And not once during those ten minutes did she say it was impossible or that she could not do it.

More and more we are learning about stereotype threat. (This blog post was inspired by this post on Stereotype Threat from the MIT Admissions blog.) Study after study has shown that when people feel like they are being judged by a demographic – gender, race, etc – that supposedly does not do well at something, they perform worse. In fact, girls will do better on tests if they put someone else’s name on the paper, or if they fill out demographic information AFTER completing the test instead of before.

This is a big deal. This is absolutely something as a society that we need to find a way to work through and move past. As the XKCD cartoon reminds us, if a man is bad at math, he is bad at math. If a woman is bad at math, girls cannot do math.

This is absolutely important. But it also is not something that will be solved by claiming that math is not hard. What we have to tell our children is that math IS hard, but that they are smart enough to figure it out. Pop Tart is not struggling with her math homework because she is a girl. She is struggling with it because it is hard.

And that is okay. It is okay to struggle. It is okay for things to be hard, but just because something is hard does not mean we do not try. Instead, it means we have to try harder. And when we do figure it out, we know we have accomplished something. We know we are smart not when we can do the easy things but when we complete the difficult things.

So please, if your daughter (or son) tells you math is hard, do not try and tell her it is not. Let math be hard. Just also let her know that she is smart enough to figure it out, too.

*As a note, I LOVE Common Core standards for math. As I say in the post, a lot of these questions are NOT about solving the problem. They are about THINKING about the problem; they are about problem solving. And teaching my kid to think, to solve problems? That is so much more important that teaching her to line up numbers

I also LOVE the “new” math (also called Singapore math). I do not care that these are not the ways I did things. Singapore math give my daughter multiple ways to solve a problem so that she can choose the one that works best for her and for the situation. Because really, we already know we do not all learn the same way, so how is it a bad thing to teach kids multiple tools so they can use the one that works best for them?