My children, despite their many strengths and talents, both struggled painfully with math. I confess I have never been a fan of math, but as the daughter of an engineer I was never given the opportunity to get in touch with my feelings about it. One simply learned the basics of math through whatever means necessary. It was a matter of survival; unlike English or History, my father took proprietary interest in my mathematical literacy. I learned to adapt through my own brand of memorization and pattern recognition, thinking of problems as games. I related to math in a competitive vein—deriving enjoyment from being right. Before I knew it I was a certified math geek, completing two years of calculus in high school. I drank the Kool-Aid, so to speak, buying into the propaganda that math was the foundation of all other learning.
Now that I’ve outed my kids I must be fair; they were each competent enough at math to fulfill all the state and standardized exam requirements. Whether or not they possess the math gene, through their dedicated work ethics they prevailed at meeting their academic goals so far. But the road was not an easy one. This wreaked havoc with my golden rule of parenting: never teach your children to drive, play the piano, or do math. It’s not that I haven’t instilled a sense of the importance of each of these things. I insist on the highest standards in each of these disciplines, but as each is a relative commodity, it seemed advisable to me to avoid these mine-filled battlegrounds. The relationship between parent and child is challenging enough without adding math to the equation.
My solution was simple: delegate math mentoring to a qualified surrogate. This worked well most of the time. One year, when my son was studying Algebra 2, we had a period of time when math tutors were particularly hard to procure. With midterms approaching, I had no choice but to step in and play the role I dread most. At the mid-year parent-teacher conference I mentioned to his teacher that I was currently working with him. Much to my surprise, the teacher’s temper flared up immediately. “What gives you the right to teach him math?” he said somewhat aggressively, leaning over the desk that, fortunately, separated us. “Uh,” I said, uncharacteristically sheepish, as his instant hostility caught me off guard, “it’s not rocket science—it’s algebra.” He shot back, “But this isn’t your ordinary Mom stuff!” “Well,” I countered, regaining my footing, “I’m not your ordinary Mom!”
Discretion being the better part of blog etiquette, suffice it to say that the teacher and I agreed to disagree on almost everything except that ‘i’ is the square root of -1. The math teacher and I never spoke again. Math remained a troubling presence in our household. Whether or not I was responsible for my kids’ tutelage, I still had a vested interested in my kid’s success. So for their sake I did my best to maintain high morale around anything math-related.
Inevitably, my kids would raise the classic why-do-we-need-math-anyway debates. In the early years, it was easy to dazzle young children with answers they could barely comprehend, like balancing a checkbook, managing investments, comparison shopping, or calculating the deductions on a paycheck. After all, if you do not take the time to count your change or review your credit card statements you become a certain type of victim of society. Last year, for example, I found no less than eleven inaccurate, duplicate or over-charges on my American Express bill totaling close to three thousand dollars.
Consumer awareness aside, I thought it was valid to consider just how much we really use the full force of the math spectrum we learned in school. For my career, math was an important stepping stone to other disciplines. Without certain basics it would have been difficult to grasp the economic concepts I learned in graduate school. One cannot comprehend shifting curves or traveling along a curve without first understanding how a graphed curve reflects the interplay of two variables. Nor could I have survived biostatistics class where we learned how to find the slope of that enigmatic line that flies inexplicably through the scatter plot of random points.
Early in my career, I set out to do more qualitative rather than quantitative work in the healthcare industry, yet I found myself continuously drawn to the financial side of organizations. Faced with opportunities in operations versus those in reimbursement and finance, I discovered that the numbers were more intuitive to me than the people. I felt more confident making decisions around hard data. Hospitals face the interplay of so many variables: labor, quality standards, patient acuity, regulations. There are always classic debates over whose patients are sicker, what will the government pay for, what brings better outcomes, how to improve productivity, and what factors increase risk. Each is difficult to examine and adjudicate at face value. Each can be solved with quantitative models.
Later, as I left hospitals for industry, I continued to borrow from my mathematical and financial toolkit to argue everything from product design to strategic direction. In my subsequent consulting practice, which focuses on marketing, messaging and strategic planning, I frequently find myself framing discussions in quantitative terms. That being said, the last time I calculated a derivative or integral was in my college calculus final exam. The last time I used the quadratic equation was to show my kids how to use it to solve problems on their homework. Today, I use tangents only to digress off topic at Starbucks, not to touch a point on a curve.
After considering my mathematical journey, I must admit that math is all it’s cracked up to be. My kids will have to persevere, making friends with their greatest demon. Perhaps I made a mistake as a parent not beating my kids over the head with mathematical principals while they were still in diapers. I hope my kids did not suffer because I chose to forego the nightly math competition that my own family had over dinner. When the rigors of learning math seem beyond relevant, I hope they will think of math class much like a medicine ball. You need to push beyond what you use every day to develop the mental muscles that allow you to think with facility and ease in your own problem space.
No comments:
Post a Comment