The Rising Cost of Innumeracy
As a math teacher in Hartford for 14 years, I have heard the following phrase over and over. "I'm just bad at math. No one in my family can do it, I'm just never going to get it." My response is always that of course they can, but it is a cultural problem that is solvable with a little help from the other adults in the students' lives. When I was at Bates thinking about philosophy, one of the things that interested me was John Locke's tabula rasa (blank slate) philosophy. To paraphrase, he is saying that we are all born blank slates and we can all learn to do anything. This is powerful stuff, especially as it applies to my students above. If they are truly blank slates, I can help them write numeracy on their mind's chalkboard in sharpie. To this end, I run a seminar every year on the first day of class to discuss whether or not the blank slate is a real thing. Then, my socratic questions become mathematical. For instance, "do you think