The Perception of Mathematics

Attitude, outlook, and support are just as vital to successful mathematics teaching as the content of the instruction and the expertise of the teacher.

It is much more difficult to teach mathematics to a student who has a negative perception of the subject or the instructor, or who has a fear of mathematics or a bad experience learning it in the past.

Students, and even some parents, believe that an excellent teacher will, figuratively speaking, inject the students with mathematics knowledge and fluency with a hypodermic needle.

Wouldn’t that be awesome, if we could all learn mathematics (or anything else in life) without any effort?

But the real world doesn’t work that way. At least, not yet. (Perhaps a future generation of students will simply connect jump drives to their brains for access to instant knowledge. That may be exceedingly convenient, but perhaps considerably dangerous if they don’t also learn the wisdom to accompany instant knowledge.)

Some of the most important life skills that mathematics can teach, in general (i.e. not just to those students who will make direct use of the subject), are those skills that most students like to avoid and feel won’t ever be useful.

Mathematics can help anyone learn to think more abstractly, apply logical deduction, visualize three-dimensionally, and develop useful problem-solving skills. These are skills and techniques that can benefit people in a variety of non-mathematical disciplines, not just in mathematics. For example, visualization can be highly useful in art.

Yet many students are just focused on getting the answer and getting the course over with so that they can promptly forget everything they’ve learned.

Many students don’t like to sit through an abstract lecture in mathematics. If they would try their best to follow along, it would help them develop abstract and symbolic reasoning skills that could greatly benefit them later in life when critically thinking about totally different subjects.

Many students don’t embrace the challenge of solving new types of problems, especially word problems and proofs. They want to study a small number of examples and encounter only problems that closely resemble those.

But life doesn’t just throw a small number of simple problems at people. Life throws curveballs. The ability to apply concepts in different situations is a vital skill in any field. A strong repertoire of problem-solving skills is highly practical. The logical thinking involved in proofs helps to develop sound reasoning.

Another problem teachers encounter is when the struggling students refuse to rise to a challenge. For example, everyone becomes a better problem-solver when the teacher at first skips a couple of steps, asking students to try to fill in the steps on their own, and then fills in the steps a few moments later. This helps students learn to look a couple of steps ahead to see where the solution is going, instead of just being lost in the algebra.

But when the struggling students think to themselves that the teacher will simply go over the steps in a little while, so it’s not worth paying attention, they lose out on this opportunity to improve a valuable skill.

Most students who don’t go into a highly mathematical career will forget the quadratic equation, forget how to factor, forget how to integrate, forget properties of logarithms, etc. But if they can be motivated to learn how to think more abstractly than they would like, apply logic more often than they would like, learn to solve a variety of problems, and learn to apply concepts in different situations, they may very well benefit from these skills years down the road without ever realizing what a wonderful advantage they have indirectly derived from studying mathematics.

So much of this boils down to perception. Students do better in mathematics when they can be led to believe that the material is worth studying, when they feel that mathematics is fun, when they approach the subject with confidence, when they overcome their fears, when they have a positive outlook, and when other teachers and parents support the learning process.

This perception can be fostered through marketing. You can’t just tell people what to think. That’s not what marketing is. But marketing is a more indirect means of spreading a positive perception and outlook.

You can explain ways that mathematics can be useful to all students and hope that some of the students pay attention and believe this to some extent.

You can try to foster a positive outlook. You can try to motivate students and engage them in learning. You can make mathematics seem more fun and less daunting.

You can support other teachers and hope that they return the favor.

You can foster a positive image as a teacher.

You can show your passion for the subject and hope that students, parents, other teachers, and administrators sense this. Students often respond positively when they come to believe that a teacher truly cares about their success and really enjoys the subject.

Marketing a positive perception and learning ambiance is just as important as the content of the instruction and the expertise of the teacher.

Chris McMullen, author of the Improve Your Math Fluency series of workbooks