The New Math is My Father’s Math

My father is an engineer. For a time, in the 1960s, he worked on the heat shield for the Apollo modules that took us to the moon. When the missions stopped, he took a job in public works and spent the rest of his life there, raising our family.

Dad was skilled at maintaining a home. He built furniture for the house, kept the yard beautiful, fixed what was broken—and always worked with a small pad and pencil nearby.

Left-handed, his dark pencil marks slashed at the thin paper with conviction. The tiny plan of a room, a sketch of a new desk, varied perspectives on the landscaping outside were ever populated with dimensions, distances, numbers.

To this day, I write right-handed, but with the hook of a lefty, smudging the graphite as I go. Grammar school teachers tried to correct this, but never succeeded. I wonder now if I was not mimicking Dad. If so, that was not his only lesson I learned by osmosis.

Dad always counted in tens and ones and hundreds. Whenever we had to add or subtract, multiply or divide in the course of a suburban day, Dad would perform the arithmetic in his head out loud. I never realized he was teaching my sister and me.

“The space is 13 feet? Well, 10 times 12 is 120, and 3 times 12 is 36, so that’s 156 inches…by how many feet?”

Jump forward thirty years and I’m sitting in my dining room and my oldest is showing us her math homework, leaping around the number scale. The adults in the room are confused and I realize for the first time that I use routine math differently than many people I know.

I also suddenly understand the arguments surrounding Common Core math—also called “number sense.” It is not a new way of teaching math, or a needlessly complicated way, and certainly not a less intelligent way.

It is math with both more common sense and more brainpower. It is the everyday calculation of rocket scientists.

I also, in that dining room, instantly comprehend the emotions surrounding Common Core math as well—as a father who wants to be useful to his daughter. We parents never want to fail to help our children, yet we fail them so often in order to hold onto our pasts and ourselves.

It is tough to accept the sons and daughters we guide and instruct will someday grow smarter, teach, and take care of us.

The most telling Common Core criticism I hear from parents fully acknowledges the old math lessons never worked for them: “Once they graduate, my kids will never use this stuff regardless. I never did.”

I myself have said, as a fine arts major, that “I’m not a math person.” Yet I also understand, as a writer, how often the stories we tell about ourselves turn out to be wrong.

Thanks to my Dad, I am actually good at math, and perform it in my head all the time.

Thanks to number sense—and the insistence of good teachers—so will my daughter’s generation.