The Ghost of Mathsmas Past

I have an exam tomorrow morning. It will be the first exam I’ve sat since 2008 or 2009, probably. And it’s for maths. Ok, no, it’s not a “maths exam” as such; it’s for a course about how to teach maths to primary school students. In case you missed the memo, I am in fact studying primary education, so suddenly I have to know about easy things like addition and subtraction, and less easy things like algebra and how to teach children to count. Can you even conceive of a time when you didn’t know how to count? That was a thing. That’s a thing lots of people are good at teaching to small children. That’s a thing I’m being examined on tomorrow morning. So given that my brain is completely consumed with studying, I’m not really in a place to write a blog about anything else. NO DON’T LEAVE. This isn’t a post about maths, honest, it’s a post about changing your opinons, and how weird that shit is.

To give you some context, I’d like to take you on a little journey back in time. The year is 2005, and yours truly is standing in a jewellery shop in Indooroopilly Shopping Centre, Brisbane. Teen Lizzy is wearing a school uniform and is excitedly looking at a pink love heart pendant. The shop assistant asks if it’s a gift or for Teen Lizzy. “It’s for me,” she says, “it’s a present to myself for finishing maths forever”. That’s right, I had just come from my Grade 12 Maths A exam, and I had walked up to the shops and bought myself a necklace because I deserved it, apparently, for having survived 12 years of mathematical torture. And because I genuinely thought that 1. pink love heart pendants were cool and 2. I’d never have to do maths again. Bless.

I mean... to look at me... it's actually quite surprising I wasn't any good at maths. #nerd4lyf

Skip forward a couple of years, we’re in a university exam hall, and I’m feverishly writing answers that look remarkably like maths onto an exam paper. Having chosen a minor in Psychology, I had accepted that yes, unfortunately I would have to endure one semester of first year statistics. I regurgitated as much as I could onto the exam paper before walking out and promptly forgetting everything. As I continued through my psych minor, I fudged and guessed my way through any statistics part of my essays and hoped no one would notice.

I was one of those people who bitched and moaned about mathematics, who claimed it had no use beyond the basics, who behaved like I had some kind of number-based dyslexia (which is actually a thing by the way, but I don’t have it). But the reality, of course, is that I have used maths every day of my life. The day I bought that pink love heart necklace I would have mentally calculated if I had enough money to cover it, would have thought about how long I had until my bus left, or how many marks I had hopefully gotten on the exam to get the overall grade I wanted.

But now, I am enamoured with it. One semester studying this course has completely changed my mind about maths. I see now that it is a universal language, that is important, even that it can be beautiful. And I also am coming to understand why I have struggled with it for so long. The main focus of this course is on teaching maths for understanding. Not just teaching the multiplication table, but actually teaching strategies for multiplying, for making sure kids actually understand what they are doing when they multiply, or divide, or find common denominators or translate equivalent fractions. Some of my teachers taught like this, but most didn’t. So once maths got beyond the realm of basic concepts and memorising, I had zero skills in my arsenal to cope with the bigger stuff.

I think *because* I have struggled for so long with the subject, I feel really empowered to do better by my future, hypothetical students. Because I know how embarrassing it is to stand at the checkout and have no idea how much your third of the share house groceries should be, I want to make sure that no student of mine has to experience that. And because I have so drastically changed my mind on this topic, I want to empower young’uns to feel good about maths, to feel like it is just as fun as science, just as interesting as English or history. I want them to feel like that always, so that instead of struggling through maths education, they’ll flourish. I want to give students the most positive maths foundation possible, so that they can be much, much better at it than I ever will be.

Ms. King out. 

Epipha-map

Self Portrait - Lizzy King, 2013

Sometimes we change our minds slowly; we learn gently, and subconsciously, we may never even realise that our opinions have grown. Other times, realisation comes like a clap of thunder. We might be reading something, or sleeping, or talking with someone, and then suddenly, BAM – the light bulb cliché, the explosion of knowledge. I like to think that those moments are a good way to map our development as humans. So here’s my epipha-map.

Epiphany Number 1: not all families are the same.

In grade 1 or 2 I went to my first sleep over at a friend’s house. I remember my mum telling me I had to wear knickers to bed. I never wore knickers with my pyjamas (secretly, I probably didn’t start doing so till I was a teenager) and I remember being quite weirded out by this change in my sleeping attire. But that wasn’t the epiphany. Sitting at the dinner table with this nuclear family of four, it occurred to my small brain that it was actually probably a bit weird that I called my dad Tony and that he did most of the cooking. And I remember not liking my friend’s dad because he had a moustache and liked his lawn more than he seemed to like his family. My mum did all the garden work, and I actually sort of had it in my head that mums were outside people in my world and dads were really good at making cheesy cauliflower. And in that moment I realised that not everyone was like us (awesome).

Epiphany Number 2: Fractions and decimals are the same thing.

I was quite a clever kid. I was good at most subjects at school without even really trying. I was a very good reader, I liked writing and science things the best, but I also was pretty good at maths too. Until I was about 10. And then suddenly, maths got hard. I struggled intensely with anything that combined letters and numbers: 3 + x = 7?! How can an x be in there?! Xs are for words, not maths. The whole thing baffled and upset me. In particular, I could not cope with fractions. I got my head around decimals ok, but spent hours freaking out about fractions. And then my mum spent a day baking with me. We measured things out with measuring cups, and she patiently explained how 1/4 + 1/4 could equal 1/2. And I got it. I was happy. The next day at school we were working on some maths problems and I had a little “oh!” moment as I realised that 0.25 + 0.25 = 0.5 as well. They were the same thing. All this time, they were the same bloody thing. I felt like a genius idiot.

Epiphany Number 3: Belief isn’t fact.

On school camp, some of the girls were reading out horoscopes from a magazine and asked me what mine was. I went on a small rant about the ridiculousness of the belief that somehow rocks in space could tell us anything about our little mundane lives. Basically, I killed the fun. My atheist friend looked up from the magazine and said, “you know Lizzy, the way you feel about horoscopes, that’s the way I feel about Christianity”. I was pretty pissed and stomped off, I guess not because she’d said it, but because she’d called me out. I was religious at the time, but that moment was one of the first times I deigned to consider other people’s beliefs as in any way legitimate. Not that I suddenly thought horoscopes made any sense (they make none, to be clear), but in that one sentence, my friend had made me realise that all belief is kind of ridiculous, and it doesn’t hurt to be a little bit respectful. (If you’re reading this, Hilde, I give you permission to gloat).

Epiphany Number 4: I’m not a Catholic.

On the subject of religion, I started doubting and questioning my faith around the age of 16. At the end of the school year I went overseas with my choir, and we sang in amazing places across Europe. We sang a church service in a Catholic cathedral and it was one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen. We were told that only those who were Catholic were allowed to leave the singing to take Communion. So I dramatically stepped out from my 75 fellow singers, along with 3 or so other students and walked the length of the cathedral to get my bread and wine in the fanciest setting possible. And swallowing it was like swallowing chalk and acid. As I walked back to place I realised I’d done it to be different, to be interesting, for fun and I vowed never to take Communion again unless I was sure it was what I wanted. I’ve not touched it to this day.

Epiphany Number 5: Pride and Prejudice.

The themes are in the fucking title. Right there, on the goddamn cover.

Epiphany Number 6: It’s not them it’s me.

In 2009 I got quite sad. And anxious. And stressed. I was depressed at the end of high school too, but this was a whole new ball game. I sort of felt like I wasn’t allowed to call myself depressed because I knew people who’d battled depression for years, and mine came on quite suddenly. In the space of a few weeks I went from being pretty happy and ok to locking myself in my room, not eating, hurting myself, being in a constant state of panic. I probably would not have sort help had it not been for the paranoia. I had an overwhelming sensation that people, all people, everywhere, were looking at me. I knew, logically, that they couldn’t be, but empirically, evidence that I was seeing with my own eyes was that they were. So I went to a psychologist. It was three or so weeks before I got the courage to tell her people were looking at me and she said, “have you considered, Lizzy, it’s that you are looking at them?” No I had not considered this, I admitted. She told me to practise not making eye contact for a whole day, and see if this fixed the problem. I walked out of her office and up the street and instantly realised I was making eye contact with people. So I stopped. It was excessively difficult, I had been the one freaking other people out all along. I genuinely skipped home with happiness. While the battle for my happiness took a lot more than a quick fix realisation, this epiphany helped me so much, that I honestly don’t know how I would have survived without it.

Epiphany Number 7: I can’t run out of inspiration.

Almost every time I sit down to write a blog, I don’t know what I’m going to write about. And it’s becoming a problematic fear. I won’t go near my computer for hours, I’ll dawdle and procrastinate and ask people what I should say and read a book and hope it’ll go away. And then every time, without fail, I’ll open a word document with a blank mind and suddenly find something to write about. Like just now, when I had an epiphany about epiphanies, and started telling you about it. There’s always going to be stuff in my brain and as long as people keep reading (and even if they don’t), I’m going to keep writing it down.

Ever had an epiphany? Tell me about it via comment, facebook, twitter, carrier pigeon.