Math From Every Angle

When my daughter was in third grade, I was concerned by her increasing aversion to math. I talked to her about it in bits and pieces and then finally decided to lay it all out in a letter. I find writing often helps me think things through more clearly. I can’t say that her turnaround regarding math was immediate or solely due to that letter—she also had an excellent math teacher for the next few years who challenged and encouraged her—but I like to think it made a difference.

Here is what I shared with her:

Dear daughter,

I love you dearly. And because I love you, I am a little worried and disappointed with your attitude toward math. There are many reasons to love math and (even if you don’t love it) to make sure that you are doing your best to continue to work hard at it.

Math allows us to make important decisions. Everything from figuring out how much time you have each day to work on projects and play with friends, to figuring out how much we can afford to spend on fun things like vacations and dance.

Math allows me to figure out how long it will take to pay off the house, how much lumber I need to build a loft, and how much money I should be saving each month to pay for when Momma and I get old and can’t work anymore.

Math is beautiful. Repeating patterns like fractals are created using math. We naturally find things that have patterns and unique geometries to be beautiful. Understanding space, proportion, repetition, contrast, and other mathematical ideas are critical to art.

Math helps us describe the creation in unique ways. We can see patterns in development in trees and pinecones, we can understand how healthy your heart is by counting beats per minute, or looking at how strong your heart is by measuring your blood pressure. We can look at how populations are changing, how fast things grow, how atoms combine in molecules, how much energy it takes to move a train, how long it takes for us to go around the sun. All of these use math, and they are just the beginning!

Math helps us understand God as a creator of order. When we see all of the patterns in the creation, the orderliness of it, we can understand that God is reliable, that he is faithful in how he creates and sustains the universe.

Not learning math really well now is going to make your life much harder in future. You have at least 8 more years of math ahead of you, and each is going to build on the previous year. This means that if you don’t understand the math you learned this year, you will likely not understand what you learn next, and then the next year will be even harder.

This pattern will continue for the next 8 years at least. Not only will this not be fun, but you will waste a tremendous amount of your time, your teachers’ time, and probably my time as well, and you will still probably not understand math the way you should. This is like building a house with a faulty foundation.

I want the best for you. I don’t want you to learn “the hard way” that math is important. I don’t want you to regret not working hard on your math. I don’t want you to suffer because you don’t have critical math skills to make good decisions about money, and time, and I don’t want you to miss out on the beauty and fun that you can enjoy when you can see the world mathematically.

You have a wonderful mind, and you are fully capable of growing your mathematical reasoning into a powerful force for good in the world. Please don’t waste your ability, or the opportunity that you have to learn.

Love,

Your Dad

As a high school student, my daughter now excels in math. I asked my daughter recently if she remembered the letter and whether it made a difference. She said that it had, more than just speaking my mind piecemeal to her would have. I think there was something important about having a variety of different perspectives or “lenses” on the importance of math all together in one place—that she could come back to repeatedly. She could start to see that math isn’t just an isolated set of ideas. The bigger picture had a chance to settle in.

As a Christian, I understand that there is a quantitative aspect to all of reality. As an educator, I want students to understand, appreciate, and make decisions about reality in ways informed by quantities. This is easy to see in some disciplines like business or physics. But even in disciplines like art, that may seem distantly related, math is relevant. Space and proportion in composition are quantitative understandings. Pitch, tone, harmonics, and scales in music can be more fully understood with a strong foundation in quantitative reasoning. In many cases it may be easy to “get by” without adding dimensions like these to specific disciplines, but our experience of reality becomes richer, deeper, and more meaningful when we bring a more holistic vision to all areas of our lives.