Common Core Math, or Yeah! Let's Make Math HARDER!

I stink at math. Always have.

In elementary school, I did fine until division. Addition, subtraction, multiplication - that was all good, but division and I were like oil and water. My Mom worked with me for hours after school trying to help me with it.

What got me over the hump with division was when I was finally able to visualize the actual operation of division in my head: seeing the top value divided into parts by the lower value.

What I didn't understand at the time was that I am a 'Visual Thinker', one of the myriad fun possibilities of falling on the Autism Spectrum. I don't think in words, symbols, or sounds, I think in pictures.

I learned at an early age to form words to describe the moving pictures in my mind, which has served me well over the years. When it came to math, division became a visualization of a machine. Put the bottom number in slot A, top number in slot B, and keep turning the crank for the proper number of decimal places. Simple.

Of course, this all fell apart for me when it came to Algebra. It was all symbolic, and I couldn't visualize it. Luckily, there were steps to solving these problems I could memorize which got me through high school with a 4.0.

Geometry and Trigonometry were child's play - I could visualize it all.

So, I graduated high school looking like a math whiz, when in reality I understood nothing about Algebra.

Little did I know on the first day of engineering school at the University of Virginia I was going to come face to face with the demonic overlord father of Algebra: Calculus.

We didn't get along well.

What followed was five years of wailing, whining, skipped classes, dropped classes, and embarrassment. Looking back on it now, many of my professors had the patience of saints. Honestly, if I hadn't been a gifted programmer, I think they would have happily sent me home, and I wouldn't have blamed them.

I can still remember the day sometime in 1988 when everything suddenly clicked. I was staring at my Calc II book literally not understanding anything on the page when I looked at a derivative and suddenly saw graph lines converging and three dimensional solids casting shadows on two dimensional planes below them. The visualization engine had finally made sense of what the symbolic math was trying to say.

I laughed out loud. After five years, I had finally seen what my first year professor was trying to explain to me. 

The Common Core Math debate brought all this back to me. I've looked at the methods being used to teach simple addition and subtraction - they're arcane. I don't think it will work for kids on the autism spectrum at all.

This appears to be yet another attempt by 'education experts' to 'level the field'.

It means 'enforcing mediocrity'.

Kids excel at different things. Some kids are math whizzes, some are great at history, some are great at art.

But just because some of us were really bad at math, doesn't mean you have to attempt to force everyone to be merely adequate at it. Make sure that all kids get to an acceptable level, but don't hold back the kids who are really good by forcing them to follow ridiculous rules that won't help them should they meet the Calculus demon.

I don't understand why this is such a difficult concept to grasp.

I've had a successful career as an engineer. Given my questionable math skills, I probably should have chosen a different field. However, I was a stubborn techno-geek who wouldn't quit even when I probably should have.

I succeeded in the end not because my teachers dumbed things down, but because they actually taught me something. Maybe we should get back to that.

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