I committed my first fraud early, at convent school in India where maths class was getting progressively harder and leaving me behind. The apogee of my struggle came when I got back a test paper awash in red, with a smug looking 0/20, circled for cruel emphasis. Failed tests necessitated a parent’s signature; I groaned at the thought of the embarrassment to my physicist father who solved maths problems in his sleep. Determined to spare him, I practised his signature a hundred times before signing the test on his behalf, but being a perfectionist, I erased so many attempts that the paper thinned. Undeterred, I signed and returned the test.
Sister Priscilla was appalled. A strict Catholic nun who brooked no nonsense, she promptly put my bemused class through extra prayers. Cleansed of sin, I concluded that cheating simply wasn’t worth it for all the trouble it caused others. I never cheated again but I also never learned the reason I failed that test. The class moved on and my parents, the opposite of helicopter ones, trusted me to self-correct.
Relentless practise helped me gain respectable ground that included taking calculus in high school, but I never shook off the notion that I wasn’t “meant” for maths. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy when I was admitted to an Ivy League engineering school and feared it was a mistake. Gladly for me, a career in medicine turned out to be a great fit. And while an oncologist doesn’t need an exceptional command of maths, I have always wondered just what would have happened if my “fraud” had been treated with the aim of remedying the problem, not the sin. After all, no one is born “bad at maths”.
While others avow the “beauty” of maths, I haven’t been courageous enough to find out for myself. But my opportunity came in an unexpected way this year when I was admitted to Harvard to study public administration.
Students take compulsory courses in maths and economics that underpin how the world works. With trepidation, I took one called Politics and Policies: What can data tell us, its stated aim being to teach future decision leaders the ability to interpret reports and make informed decisions based on data. Suddenly, I was immersed in hypothesis testing, artificial learning, probability, experimental designs and multiple regression tables. From interpreting Gini coefficients and CO2 emissions to determining the confidence intervals of polls and the statistical significance of cash transfers to the poor, my head swam with sums. For the first time in my life, “Excel” was a noun.
After a 30-year monastic break from maths, I approached it with the mindset that there was nothing to prove, but in my heart of hearts, I needed to know that I wasn’t a failure at maths. Finally, as the mother of an impressionable daughter, I wanted to disprove the common narrative that being bad at maths was in the genes.
Within a few weeks, my resignation turned to appreciation and then, surprisingly, I began to look forward to my class. I liked understanding whether economic figures made sense and the Covid data was significant. I learned to distinguish between correlation and causation, signal and noise. Where previously I might have believed the conclusion of a paper, now I could make up my own mind by reading the tables and graphs. Recently, my class successfully deconstructed a paper published by a Nobel laureate: the old me would have laughed at the mere thought.
Although the most recent results show improvement, Australia has struggled with achievements in maths and science with Australians students being three years behind their Singaporean counterparts in maths. Experts still point to the need to help students at the lower achievement level as this has significant implications for national progress.
On reflection, I can think of three things that might give every reluctant maths student a chance.
An excellent instructor
Not everyone is lucky to be taught by a mathematics professor at Harvard, but those qualities are replicable. Apart from being highly qualified, she was patient and encouraging, with a basic principle that resonated with me. “You don’t need to know it all but there are certain things you need to know really well and the rest you must be able to intelligently question.” All too often, schools focus on a busy curriculum instead of securing the fundamentals. Doing more isn’t the answer; slowing down and showing students real-life applications paves the way for deeper learning.
Regular assessments
The preparation for each class was reading key concepts and taking an open book quiz which counted toward the final grade. In the early weeks, this was my only motivation to answer the five questions, but soon, it became evident how they focused my mind. Accompanying the quiz were longer assignments that could be discussed with others but completed individually, with students signing a pledge of integrity. My group contained a journalist and civil servants: alone, we might have struggled; as a supportive community we soared. Regular assessments that are not set up to fail students are one of the best ways of consolidating knowledge.
Extra help
Every class, whether at a small school or an Ivy League institution, has students too shy to ask questions and reluctant to hold back the whole class. But inevitably, it is not just the lone student wondering how to add fractions, divide decimals, read regression tables or calculate the margin of error. Each of my classes was linked to extra help sessions taught by the professor or skilled fellows. These sessions were literally a place where no question was too stupid. Here, I learned how to navigate an Excel worksheet with a mouse and another student discovered that turning an iPhone calculator sideways converts it into a scientific calculator. Sometimes, we re-did the class problems, ensuring we understood the steps.
Establishing a regular time for help reduces the friction of individual action and removes stigma.
As the semester neared its end, I was anxious to get one of my last tests out of the way because any denominator of 20 still conjures a numerator of 0. So, when my test was graded, I looked at it repeatedly to absorb the mark of 20/20.
Sister Priscilla would have been pleased at the milestone but unfortunately, we have lost touch. Instead, I showed my dad the results and told him that this time, he didn’t need to sign my test.
