California tries to close the gap in math, but sets off a backlash
I don’t know how math education has evolved since the late 90s - early 2000s when I experienced it, but it was far more damaging to my self esteem and my relationship with math than anything else.<p>I learned from a pretty early age that solving long equations with a pencil and paper is simply something my mind is never going to be good at. I hated every minute of it, and it was a huge source of anxiety for me and my parents. My mom, a house cleaner at the time, managed to muster the money to get me a tutor, which got me through high school and into college.<p>Fast forward 15 years and my relationship with math couldn’t be any different. In the context of my career where math has a practical purpose and I no longer have an artificially imposed requirement to memorize, I actually have quite a bit of use for and natural curiosity around math.<p>I’m not saying that my experience means that math education should change dramatically for everyone, but it certainly fails a wide swath of people like me. Their math education is traumatic, that they are “bad at math” is reinforced into their brains by the educational system, and they live the rest of their lives avoiding it. (I’m married to someone like this!)<p>I’m just glad that I was able to see how math as it is experienced in the classroom is pretty dramatically different from the way it is used in the professional world, and that I’m only bad at the former, not the latter.