In second grade, I was sick a lot. Part of the time, I was faking it, although I did run a low-grade fever that my pediatrician diagnosed as school-itis, telling my mother, “She hates school so much that she makes herself sick.” Real, fake, or psychosomatic, my various ailments caused me to miss a lot of school.
I was absent when subtraction was introduced. The day I went back to school, Mrs. Kirten distributed a test on subtraction, but since the class—everyone except me—knew what we were being tested on, she didn’t call any attention to the fact that this was a subtraction test.
With no explanation that subtraction was a different operation from addition, much less a word or two about how it worked, Mrs. Kirten put a purple-inked mimeographed test paper on my desk. As I looked at the problems, I noticed that each one had a short horizontal line between a larger number and a smaller number. To this day, I remember thinking that Mrs. Kirten made an obvious mistake in every one of her plus signs. With complete certainty, I drew a vertical line through each horizonal line, turning all the minus signs into plus signs. Then I added all the problems.
I received a big fat 0 on the test. No one noticed that the numbers had been added correctly, and the notion that I didn’t understand math was born.
It was a pretty easy notion for me to buy into. Somehow I didn’t understand that either my mother should have phoned my teacher while I was out sick or the teacher should have given me a subtraction debriefing before testing me. Instead, I thought I should have known I was wrong to add the numbers; I should have realized that the mistakes were mine, not Mrs. Kirten’s.
Since I was now believed to be having trouble with math, my mother decided she would tutor me. We’d sit at the kitchen table with a pile of pecans from one of the trees in our yard, and she’d present me with a simple subtraction problem. The pecans were our manipulatives (yep, I used to write curriculum).
“A squirrel has five pecans, and he gives away two of them. How many does he have left?”
“Why did he give them away?”
“It doesn’t matter. How many does he have left?”
“Who did he give them to?”
“He gave them to a blue jay. How many does he have left?”
“Are the squirrel and the blue jay friends?”
If I’d been my mother, I’d have started drinking right about then. Instead, she just stopped tutoring me, telling me that I didn’t want to learn since I wasn’t making an effort to pay attention.
I was paying attention—just not to the thing I was supposed to be paying attention to. Math didn’t interest me. That squirrel and his pecans did. How many he had left didn’t matter; why he’d given two away and what he planned to do with the remaining three was the interesting part. I grasped the concept of subtraction; I’d just have rather heard a story.
You can’t cloak a math problem in a so-called story and expect me to like it any better: A train leaves the station at 6:00 p.m. traveling west at 80 mph. On a parallel track, a second train leaves the station 3 hours later traveling west at 100 mph. At what time will the second train catch up with the first?
That’s not a story. Who’s on the trains? Where did they start their trip? Where are they going now? Why does the second train need to catch up with the first? Is someone on board the wrong train?
Now that’s a story. Or it would be if you could tell me what happened to the squirrel.
