I Am Not a Math Person: What The Teaching Profession Taught Me
I have a confession to make. I am not a math person. Yes, math is a large part of my life, but it washes through me like other things I am curious/passionate about — music, art, film, literature, sports, etc. I understand the statement, especially since its aim is to provide comfort/solace to those who have been unsuccessful with math — especially those who have suffered trauma with the subject.
But, I am just a person who relishes and dabbles in many things, and enjoys all the bounty of knowledge that the universe has to offer. Mathematics is no greater than music, and music is no greater than mathematics. But, I don’t see the urgency to let kids know they are a music person. I wasn’t very good at music, but nobody is telling me I could have been.
But, truthfully — and ironically — it was the institution of education itself that let me know in no uncertain detail that barriers would be erected to ensure that only education itself would let me know how capable I was of being a math teacher.
My degree is in science. For my entire career I was stuck at Level 3 for salary because I did not have an “Honors Specialist”. I wanted to get it in math, but that would have meant for me to go back to university and take 5 more courses to just enrol in that program.
Fuck. That.
I had already taught gifted grade 12 physics my first year of teaching. I had taught college level calculus before I started teaching high school. I taught calculus ten times in my career. And somehow, I was incapable of proceeding to Level 4 without going through the gates and hoops of education institutionalism.
When I gave workshops, teachers would often ask “Where did you do your Honors Specialist?”. I would say it with the most pronounced indifference — “I don’t have one”.
I taught my entire career watching teachers with that overvalued certification get promoted to leadership positions over and over again, and often get first choice of the most academic courses to teach. I spent 20 years, during my own time, teaching myself mathematics and the history of mathematics. Where is the accreditation path for that? There isn’t.
Do you know how painful it was to be with other math teachers, who were making more money and getting department headship positions, but had a fraction of the math knowledge that I possessed? While their certificate of static knowledge lay collecting dust in a desk drawer, I kept wanting to learn something new about mathematics everyday. I did it for the pure simple reason of being in love with mathematics.
Eventually, it all became too much — the bureaucracy, the politics, the hoop-jumping, the compliance culture, the testing culture, the grading culture, the comparison culture, etc.
Education told me I wasn’t a math person. And, as I mentioned above, I am not. But the way they told it to me is symbolic of how we sift/sort/label students with math. How we elevate math above other subjects.
The lyrics of this song by The Waterboys best sums up where I am today. I used the following image several years ago in a different blog.
