As an engineer, and generally as someone inclined to science and logic, I always wondered why my classmates struggled at math. In grade school, I didn’t notice until parents started murmuring words like gifted, talented and remedial. In high school the divide became more apparent, but I chalked it up to the natural distribution in a student population. Then I went to an engineering college and all of a sudden I was the guy struggling. Despite the marked shift upwards in talent, college had no shortage of students who labored through math classes. But it only dawned on me then, in college, why even engineering students who were inclined towards mathematics still struggled.
Way back in freshman year of high school I started to accept that math was just “hard,” and kids – even some of the brightest – would never even grasp the fundamentals. But English class, on the other hand, didn’t seem to produce such pronounced disparities. For clarity, when I use the term “English class” here I’m referring to the place you read books at an appropriate level, wrote reports on them and slogged through the nebulous rules of irregular verbs, fragments and semi-colons. But English class was also the place we learned how to write well. In “English class” you learned to write coherently, effectively and with a purpose. No doubt I attended school with kids who struggled with English too, but that class just didn’t produce the same fits of temper and angst.
In English class, once you learned to read and speak the language functionally, you pretty much couldn’t go wrong. Sure you had to develop a vocabulary, follow basic grammar rules and communicate clearly enough to be understood. But once you got it – mostly because you’d been listening to your parents talk since birth – your little essays and interpretations of Salinger were always right, so long as they weren’t completely absurd. Clearly English class had a strong measure of subjectivity, which certainly made it more tolerable, if not flat out easier, than math. And, subjectivity aside, as I once suspected, there’s a natural distribution of intelligence in a student population. But despite our innate differences, we’ve all – every one of us – been listening to our parents, relatives, neighbors and older siblings talk since our very first day. So, between the (relative) subjectivity and, by high school, 15 years of hearing the language daily, it seemed perfectly normal that English induced considerably fewer tantrums than math.
So by the end of high school I surely knew why math was so much “harder” than English, right? Well it wasn’t until college that I discovered a more subtle and more plausible reason for the disparity. As I took various calculus, differential equations and statistics classes, the purpose and the utility of mathematics became ever more apparent. Math became another language to me; another way of communicating to the world. I developed a vocabulary of functions and identities. I followed basic formulaic rules and learned to communicate in mathematics well enough to be understood. I realized math wasn’t an end in itself but a way to communicate the dynamics of time, space, motion and the natural world. Imagine the great 15th century scientists telling us that the moon was really, really far away from Earth. Such equivocacy is dissatisfying just to type. If Copernicus or Galileo hadn’t calculated the distance & given us a number, we couldn’t stand in awe of it. Imagine teaching a student the French language, but never telling them about the country of France, its culture or contributions, or how that child may someday ask a Parisian where the Eiffel Tower is (Où est la Tour Eiffel?). The more I saw math as a language used in the context of utility, the more clarity and appreciation I gained for the subject.
That’s when it occurred to me. English class was so much more palatable because I understood, from the outset, that my learning had application and purpose. Salinger, Shakespeare and Dr. Seuss taught us about the human experience. Charles Dickens and Upton Sinclair presented social and political issues that high school kids were just learning to wrap their malleable brains around. The themes weren’t just on the page but in our lives as well, at least to a degree. At no point did I recognize long division or trigonometry outside math class.
Most satisfactorily, in English class my little essays and other writings evoked a reaction. Sometimes it was an emotional reaction and sometimes it was an adult response to a surprising point made by a child. In either case what I wrote didn’t exist to be compared to some answer sheet, to be verified or refuted and then discarded for the next exercise. Gradually, it dawned on me that writing, or written communication, whether mine or a famous author’s, exists as a means to end. Through creative story-telling I could take my audience on journey just like those blazed by so many famous novelists. Using an informational style I could pass on facts, observations, inferences and conclusions in an attempt to solve a problem. Another style, one of the most powerful I’ve come to learn, is persuasive. I could write persuasively to solicit my reader’s feedback, buy-in and/or approval. Often, molding a set of facts and figures into a coherent narrative produces an undertone of persuasion, turning your reader into a well-informed ally. In any style, I realized that writing served a purpose and performed a function. Unfortunately it wasn’t until my college years that I had a similarly profound and satisfying insight about mathematics.
In my current work, informational (e.g. technical) writing proves invaluable. I tend to keep a concise and factually dense style, as it conveys the most information at the lowest time expense. But I’ve certainly applied a story-telling style to argue a technical point and wrapped the facts in a persuasive narrative irresistible even to calculating engineers. In fact, done properly, that technique can actually mask loopholes and minor flaws in a technical paper, which of course I realized only from proofreading the work of others. Obviously masking shortcomings through creative writing isn’t exactly noble. But then again neither is learning math as an activity unto itself. So why do we do it? Maybe if the subject was taught with the same sense of perspective imbued in English class, a perspective it took me until college to see, my classmates wouldn’t have struggled so mightily.