Sunday Dec 4, 2022
In school, I was always terrible at maths. I quite enjoyed the classes – but just seemed not to have any talent whatsoever for the subject. When I graduated from secondary school, the idea of studying a scientific discipline never even occurred to me as I was so convinced that I would be badly suited to it. Nowadays, I spend my time applying and teaching concepts of biostatistics – a type of applied maths. Of all the weird and wonderful areas that I have worked in since finishing school, this is the one that I feel comes most naturally to me. So how do you square this with my memories of maths class from school?
Taking a step back, I realise that I was never bad at maths – I always understood the concepts well. But I am naturally awful at applying arithmetic and algebra. If you ask me to solve for a variable, I will do it wrong. My brain just never seemed to get this particular way of representing concepts. As an adult, however, I found other ways of thinking about maths. Programming taught me that mathematical expressions can be decomposed into algorithms. Learning statistics showed me how to think about quantitative problems visually. As a side-effect, the algebraic expressions also started to feel more intuitive because now I knew how to translate them into other languages that were better suited to my cognitive style.
Thinking back on school maths, although visuals were often used when concepts were first introduced, when it came to evaluation, it pretty much always ended up being about how well we could perform algebraic manipulations. As a result, kids like me end up believing that they are bad at maths, and get excluded from scientific careers that they could actually be well suited for. If the purpose of school maths is to develop mathematical thinking skills, then it seems unwise to teach it in a way that is only geared towards one particular cognitive type. Encouragingly, since I left school, programming has been introduced to many primary school curricula. This seems like a very positive first step.
Now that I teach similar topics myself, I often fear that I am making the same mistake, by teaching only to my own cognitive style. It is hard to put oneself in other people’s brains. But there is a lot to be gained in doing so.