“What do you like about working here?” I asked during my interview to work at KCP Tech. I was rather struck by Vishakha’s response that she liked being able to help people learn math. She thought that it was completely ridiculous that it was acceptable for a grown adult to say “I’m bad at math” in public when nobody would ever say “I’m bad at reading.”
It had not really occurred to me just how absurd that sounded. For me math was simply a tool that everyone had to learn. While in school I’d be given a formula, told to memorize and practice it repeatedly for a test, with barely a mention why it worked, or what I was learning it for. For me it wasn’t hard or scary, just boring and something I had to do.
My classmates would tell me that math would be clear later. “When you take physics and calculus together in your senior year, then all the math you have been learning will start to make sense.” But I never did take physics or calculus.
So to me math continued to look like a high-level science. A formula written on a whiteboard surrounded by steaming beakers and Tesla coils. But it shouldn’t be. Being taught math and never knowing why it works can lead to lifelong math anxiety, according to new research.
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