I sit down at the small round table, rubbing the hand sanitizer I’ve just gotten into my hands. It’s 12:57 p.m. on Thursday, just before my regular volunteering shift in the children’s hospital and I’m wearing my red polo and name badge. I know I’m meeting a student today, but I don’t know how old they are or what we are about to work on—the three teachers in the children’s hospital serve students across all grades, making it almost impossible to prepare. The teacher comes in to join me at the table and tells me about the student. “Today I’m going to have you work with Liam*,” she says, “I’ve worked with him before, but I think working with you might be good for him. He needs to do his math, which he gets kind of anxious about.” I nod and she hands me a stack of paper triangles. I inspect them and realize they are flashcards with numbers in the corners—she’s handed me the stack of 9’s (9*2=18, 9*3=27, and so on…). “We’ve been working on his 9’s.”
Liam was a kind, brilliant kid who not only crushed his 9’s that day, but also mastered rounding to the thousands and hundreds place. I left the hospital that day confident in myself and proud of the confidence I could instill in him and his learning. A stark comparison to the tutoring session a few weeks earlier where I had felt like an imposter.
A past Thursday afternoon in the hospital classroom, I had been working with a high school student on pre-algebra. We had fun graphing polynomials to see how they shifted with different changes to the equations, but soon enough came to a new section where we encountered a problem that this student didn’t know how to solve. I pick up the whiteboard marker to demonstrate how I would multiply the polynomials together and then suggest he graph it to see what it looked like. He graphs the solution I came to next to the original problem (the equation without multiplying together the terms) and… the curves don’t match.
On the outside, I’m cool. On the inside I feel crazy: “What did I do wrong!! I have a Bachelor’s degree in engineering and I can’t even multiply these polynomials together!? Did I just teach this completely wrong?” I motion to the teacher who had just gotten back from another student’s room, “Does this look right to you? Do you remember the rules for distributing these terms?” She looked at me and said, “Nope, sorry!” She starts talking to the student so that I at least have a moment to do a quick google search. When I find an example online and compare it to mine, I realize I did it right. I just dropped a negative, and in that moment I’m heartbroken. Not for the dropped negative, but for the speed with which I believed I had done it wrong—for how immediate my distrust was.
This semester, I took a machine learning class, and who I walked into the room as on the first day of class was much the same person who immediately doubted them self that day at the hospital. I wasn’t sure what I had gotten myself into and I certainly was convinced that the other people in the room were better off than I was. And yet, the ground I have taken in this semester by putting myself into that (seemingly risky) environment has paid off! (Spoiler alert: I loved the class and am SUCH a nerd for machine learning and artificial intelligence).
What I’m learning, and sharing here in writing this, is that:
- I’m not alone in being intimidated or nervous by math sometimes. The more I open up to others about where I get stopped or confronted, the more connected I am to the universality of certain experience. Imposter syndrome is rampant.
- My willingness to step outside of my comfort zone is what brings me the most joy. It is also where I can make the biggest difference in contributing to others learning.
- I love math, and I had been unwilling to claim that before. Owning this unapologetically doesn’t even mean I need to be perfect at it!
So what can we do to inspire the next generation of STEM students + pioneers to discover their love of math and their confidence in themselves? Doesn’t everyone deserve the chance to love math!?!?
Now excuse me while I go help my husband as he’s studying to take a math placement exam… (no really, he is!)
*name changed for confidentiality