had been assigned to the "advanced" math group. The teacher asked the class: "So if I have 5 apples and then grab 2 oranges, what do I have?" My nerdy teen self (as opposed to my current not-teen nerdy self) raised her hand high and confidently answered "Seven fruits". The teacher started laughing, other students started laughing and I got the message, the way I think was not "math like".
[On a side note, years later I asked my partner who has a math degree the same question and they also said "Seven fruits", so I couldn't have been that wrong, or I definitely found my "media naranja"]
Moving on!
During High School I ended in a strange relationship with math, every year I would be placed in "advanced" math, then drop out after failing the first test, just to go back to "regular" math and fall asleep in class. All this time I hated this one subject where everything seemed so arbitrary. Why did X move? Why are you negative now? What's with all the triangles? I couldn't picture all these Xs and Yx in my head and no diagram seemed to work. I got my A out of pure memorization of rules, but little understanding.
I love learning, I loved school, I hated math (only second to P.E., but that's another rant).
That remained unchanged until my second year of grad school. Knowing that if I wanted to be a researcher I would have to use Statistics at some point, I took "Intro to Statistics for Teachers" as an elective, mostly because It was the only grad-level math class that fit my schedule. Now, I had taken a stats class before in undergrad, but passing that too had been a product of memorization and by the time I reached my Masters it was all gone.
Prof. Bonilla was a chill dude. He always spoke calmly, no matter what had happened before that day, he has a sense of humor that made the hours go by and a talent for randomly quoting Metallica songs. He made us repeat a mantra every day "Numbers are my friends". But the most important thing for me, he gave simple, relatable examples.
You see, the thing about Stats for Teachers is that they don't need to be about large populations or bushels of apples and oranges. In this class, the main example was one we could all visualize because we had all seen before, it was a classroom, and for me, that made all the difference. See (ha!) now Math didn't exist in this abstract realm where apples and oranges had to be kept in separate baskets or whatever that lesson was about. It was about learning more about your students so you could better serve them, it was about verifying if the new test format was too hard, if the new lesson plan worked better than the last one. I had never been a teacher, but I had been a student and this type of math not only seemed tangible, it was downright usable!
Stats for Teachers didn't go beyond T-tests, but the foundation changed my outlook on Math and quantitative research. And when I found out about regression I COULD visualize it, even when it starts to get intangible (if not artificial). Numbers are my friends.
So this is my proposal. Instead of pushing calculus in High School and making teenage fishies feel like they are not good enough for math, let's bring Statistics into the mix. I'm not saying that calculous is not important, or that it should be eliminated, I'm simply suggesting that maybe if more students had the chance to start with Statistics before calculous (or even Geometry!), we wouldn't have so much math anxiety and math aversion among college freshmen. It might even convert some haters.
Numbers are my friends
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