![\"Find](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.ams.org\/blogonmathblogs\/files\/2014\/02\/there-it-is.png\")
<\/a>Find x. Image: Aaron Rotenberg, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n
Journalist\u00a0A.K. Whitney<\/a>\u00a0is a “math phobe turned math phile,” according to her Twitter<\/a>\u00a0bio. Growing up, she enjoyed science, but bad experiences in middle and high school math classes kept her from pursuing a\u00a0STEM major. A few years ago, she enrolled in a pre-algebra class at a local community college and started her math education basically\u00a0from scratch. When a friend asked her why, she said, “I got sick of believing I suck at math.” In a series called Mathochism, she writes about her experiences working her way up through calculus. I first encountered the series on Medium<\/a>, where she is posting an installment every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but it is also available on her blog<\/a>. She also wrote an article for Cosmo<\/a> about why and how she overcame her fear of math.<\/p>\n Another perspective\u00a0on learning math as an adult comes from Jennifer Ouellette’s series<\/a> that eventually spawned The Calculus Diaries<\/a>. Ouellette is a well-known science writer who focuses on physics, but she had never taken calculus. While she finds conceptual explanations helpful, she writes,<\/p>\n I must confess that on the rare occasions when I’ve bothered to put in the effort to understand a basic euqation or two–and they must be basic, given my functional innumeracy–it has deepened my grasp of the essential concepts in ways I don’t entirely undrstand, yet can’t deny. It’s like some final piece clicked into place that I never even knew was missing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It’s really interesting to see the\u00a0points of view of students who start without a strong math background or confidence but genuinely want to learn\u2014and learn to like\u2014the subject. We sometimes assume\u00a0that students in introductory math courses\u00a0just want to fulfill a university requirement and\u00a0don’t really care about learning the material. Those students do exist, and we probably won’t really be able to reach them, but it’s valuable\u00a0for us to see what makes it easier or harder for a motivated student to make progress. For Whitney,\u00a0teachers and textbooks are important, but she also writes about broader issues: male dominance in classrooms, our society’s attitude towards women STEM majors, and the myth that you have to be a genius to be good at math.<\/p>\n Her comments about her teachers, from the “dapper professor” of pre-algebra to the “calculus dementor,” are interesting because we get only one side of the story. Sometimes I try to fill in the gaps and figure out what might have been going on from the instructor’s perspective. In a post called Show Your Work<\/a>, Whitney expresses her frustration at worked examples that\u00a0skip steps. She writes,<\/p>\n It\u2019s particularly galling when an instructor skips steps on examples in lectures (and so does the book in its ridiculously expensive solutions manual that promises to solve all the odd problems yet leaves out a third of them), then expects me to “show my work,” all my work, and even takes points off for paraphrasing a little on a definition or for not writing f(x) on every step.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I wish I knew specific examples of what steps were omitted and what definitions were paraphrased. I’m sure\u00a0the instructor thought he or she was doing the examples fully and that\u00a0his or her rules about how work had to be shown\u00a0were clear. And what seemed like “paraphrasing a little on a definition” to Whitney\u00a0may have changed the meaning of the definition. It’s probably impossible to avoid those problems in any class, but it’s good to remember that students who make mistakes like that aren’t being sloppy or lazy. It’s just hard for students\u00a0to evaluate their\u00a0own work and understanding.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, Whitney’s calculus class ended on a sour note. But this time, she left with a different attitude than she had in middle school. She writes,<\/p>\n But unlike previous bad experiences, this didn\u2019t sour me on math. Nor did it take away from my interest in learning more calculus, which was actually one of the most satisfying chapters in my short math career.<\/p>\n Yep, I really love calculus.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n