Yes, math was torture and language was a warm breeze for me also. I do hope the time will come when we will let kids be kids again, play in the afternoons without a coach or pro watching everything they do, explore their own ideas with day dreaming, or putter around in their dad's workshop building god-knows-what. We have created generations of children doomed to frustration and disappointment because of the ideas described in your piece.
I'm worried that with the overwhelming focus on STEM and the rapid evisceration of the liberal arts that it will be harder and scarier for kids to follow their passions.
You might like Edward O. Wilson's The Meaning of Human Existence, in which he argues that now is the time for science and humanities to come together because we need humanities now more than ever.
And then you can be good at something and not like it (math comes to mind). I recall an interview at IBM. After a half day of grueling tests, the recruiter told me: you're too literary for us. I thanked the man, warmly!
I had the same thing, hitting a wall with math, as my friends flew towards the rarefied air of Calculus. Talent is even more vivid in sports. At some point, you realize you can’t compete. Writing and editing, yes, but I’m only still doing it because I kept doing it, one way or another, keep doing it, even if it’s just shopping lists.
You hit the wall, I don't even think I saw the wall. :-) But my talent for reading and writing was matched by a good ear which helped me learn French very early on, Germanmuch later, and more recently some Dutch and Swedish. My favorite Swedish phrase from Duolingo: jag kan inte hitta min byxor. I cannot find my pants. :-)
"it may not be all that difficult to produce a child prodigy.” Who'd want to? All the prodigies I know ended up painting houses or handing out pamphlets in front of the Sears Tower : )
This sounds awfully familiar. I did great in math until the dreaded algebra year in high school. Could not get it, had a tutor, and barely passed an algebra test. My teacher knew how much I studied, pitied me and passed me. My work career, however, led me to finance positions as corporate payroll manager, finance director, and even treasurer of a local nonprofit. How much of a difference was learning algebra for me? Not much. Go figure.
Not so ironically, when I suffered a concussion after a car accident in 2015, I had even more trouble with numbers than usual. I couldn't figure out the tip on a restaurant bill because the numbers danced on the paper. I've heard other people describe something similar. Luckily, the concussion didn't affect anything else and the problem only lasted a few months.
I'm glad you were spared worse from the concussion.
As you may know, the same portion of the brain (the left third frontal convolution) handles language, music, and math. Before I was old enough to go to school, I was working out little math exercises in my head. Once in school, I found "arithmetic" so boring that I tuned right out, and by third grade I was far behind and never really caught up. This is by way of saying that if you have aptitude in one of the the three areas (language, music, math), you may have aptitude in the others as well.
Only when I grew up and, as a first job in book publishing, became an editor of French and Spanish textbooks for the college market did I realize how badly most textbooks are written and edited. I don't know why that wouldn't also be true of math textbooks. I do remember that the math textbooks of my primary and secondary school years seemed to skip necessary explanations, and to make assumptions that were never discussed or clarified, and that my teachers could never answer the questions to which I needed answers if I hoped to make any progress. Probably many of my teachers, especially at the primary level, didn't have much understanding of math themselves and had learned what they "knew" simply by rote.
I remember a parent/teacher conference for one of our sons who was having some trouble in English class and I explained to his teacher that I had taught, I was an autuhor and so on, and how did she think I could best help him. She thought a minute and then grinned: "You could brainstorm!" as if that solved everything. I told both boys that it was clear their English teachers didn't write because how they taught writing was awful.
Yes, math was torture and language was a warm breeze for me also. I do hope the time will come when we will let kids be kids again, play in the afternoons without a coach or pro watching everything they do, explore their own ideas with day dreaming, or putter around in their dad's workshop building god-knows-what. We have created generations of children doomed to frustration and disappointment because of the ideas described in your piece.
I'm worried that with the overwhelming focus on STEM and the rapid evisceration of the liberal arts that it will be harder and scarier for kids to follow their passions.
You might like Edward O. Wilson's The Meaning of Human Existence, in which he argues that now is the time for science and humanities to come together because we need humanities now more than ever.
And then you can be good at something and not like it (math comes to mind). I recall an interview at IBM. After a half day of grueling tests, the recruiter told me: you're too literary for us. I thanked the man, warmly!
I was lucky: I got to follow my two passions, teaching and writing, and both have brought me gifts beyond measure.
I had the same thing, hitting a wall with math, as my friends flew towards the rarefied air of Calculus. Talent is even more vivid in sports. At some point, you realize you can’t compete. Writing and editing, yes, but I’m only still doing it because I kept doing it, one way or another, keep doing it, even if it’s just shopping lists.
You hit the wall, I don't even think I saw the wall. :-) But my talent for reading and writing was matched by a good ear which helped me learn French very early on, Germanmuch later, and more recently some Dutch and Swedish. My favorite Swedish phrase from Duolingo: jag kan inte hitta min byxor. I cannot find my pants. :-)
"it may not be all that difficult to produce a child prodigy.” Who'd want to? All the prodigies I know ended up painting houses or handing out pamphlets in front of the Sears Tower : )
There's a short story in that: "Prodigies I have known."
This sounds awfully familiar. I did great in math until the dreaded algebra year in high school. Could not get it, had a tutor, and barely passed an algebra test. My teacher knew how much I studied, pitied me and passed me. My work career, however, led me to finance positions as corporate payroll manager, finance director, and even treasurer of a local nonprofit. How much of a difference was learning algebra for me? Not much. Go figure.
Nobody can predict our career paths.
Ooof--math. #MeToo.
Not so ironically, when I suffered a concussion after a car accident in 2015, I had even more trouble with numbers than usual. I couldn't figure out the tip on a restaurant bill because the numbers danced on the paper. I've heard other people describe something similar. Luckily, the concussion didn't affect anything else and the problem only lasted a few months.
I'm glad you were spared worse from the concussion.
As you may know, the same portion of the brain (the left third frontal convolution) handles language, music, and math. Before I was old enough to go to school, I was working out little math exercises in my head. Once in school, I found "arithmetic" so boring that I tuned right out, and by third grade I was far behind and never really caught up. This is by way of saying that if you have aptitude in one of the the three areas (language, music, math), you may have aptitude in the others as well.
Only when I grew up and, as a first job in book publishing, became an editor of French and Spanish textbooks for the college market did I realize how badly most textbooks are written and edited. I don't know why that wouldn't also be true of math textbooks. I do remember that the math textbooks of my primary and secondary school years seemed to skip necessary explanations, and to make assumptions that were never discussed or clarified, and that my teachers could never answer the questions to which I needed answers if I hoped to make any progress. Probably many of my teachers, especially at the primary level, didn't have much understanding of math themselves and had learned what they "knew" simply by rote.
I remember a parent/teacher conference for one of our sons who was having some trouble in English class and I explained to his teacher that I had taught, I was an autuhor and so on, and how did she think I could best help him. She thought a minute and then grinned: "You could brainstorm!" as if that solved everything. I told both boys that it was clear their English teachers didn't write because how they taught writing was awful.
P.S.: the three things don't always go together. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-there-a-link-between-music-and-math/
Thanks for the link to the Scientific American article. I may have been propagating an outdated hypothesis:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21239364/
Can't help wondering if your son's teacher was steeped in Gabriele Rico's "clustering" technique.
http://www.efrogpress.com/2014/07/22/clustering-a-prewriting-technique-that-overcomes-writers-block/