I’m tired. It's April 15, 2025

I emailed a math parent about an education article they sent me ...

NEW, 1-on-1 math and non-math strategy sessions.🚦Click here to find out more.
In February 2025, I made it official and started offering two specific 1-on-1 strategy sessions to students. Hoorah me! The purpose? To help students get math and remember math!

1. I) Math strategy sessions,

2. II) Non-math strategy sessions.

I’m tired.

Hey Mathies,

Good day from Ottawa, Canada. Hope your day is going well wherever you are in the world.

I’ve been at this a long time. This, meaning the 1-on-1 tutoring and coaching math that I’ve done for over half my life, 30 years and counting, and I am tired. I am tired of seeing the same mistakes and patterns occur again and again and again in math education, and it’s become like fighting solo against a tsunami.

The tutoring and coaching work that I do is a lifelong passion, but the tiredness comes from seeing students beaten down and disheartened by the same issues that existed 30 years ago when I first started my math business. And these are the same issues that existed when I was a struggling math student in school, and last time I checked my parent’s generation had the same issues.

These same issues have stuck around for over half a century? Yes, and the frustration isn’t just that the same issues exist, it’s that we as a population seem to have accepted them: Math is hard. Why do I need math? I don’t get math. I forget. I don’t remember. I give up. I don’t get it …. Those have been around forever! My frustration and beaten down tiredness come from the fact that in almost no other area in this world has the same 50-year-old problems not been given the attention it deserves to solve them once and for all, or at least better them. Individuals in, for example, sports, medicine, the arts have all experienced massive improvements in the past 50 years ago, but not so for math learning and students. And we wonder why our students continually struggle 😕 or move away from math 🙄 or give up 😑.

The post this month is actually an email I wrote to one of my math mothers last month, March 2025. I was responding to an education article she sent me that was written by a reputable magazine. The education article focused on why interest in learning drops in school and the fallout from it. All points in the article were valid, but as you’ll read in my response to her below, I am tired of us not getting to the core of these issues in education.

Thanks for bringing it to my attention, and I appreciate you sending it to me as they offer insights that may differ from other publications I read. I read the article and well, I got triggered. Another terrific and informative article by them, but not sure it gives much hands-on and detailed steps for parents to follow or necessarily helps them understand the deep-seated roots at work here. And yes, solving challenges with the 'student-learner' has no quick fix, but I get frustrated when I read an article that offers solutions to a problem, without speaking to the 'emotional' reasons why a child would have these issues. And yes 'blaming' the school system has its merits, though what's the point in mentioning that if changes there will shift the needle very little.

My point is if this is the present reality our students are in (which is just a different version of past challenges over the decades), then can we not get to the core of the issue that exists. It's like trying to solve a problem at a surface level without getting down to the roots and seeing what's causing the big problem. Parents have always nagged - my parents nagged me and I'm sure yours did - nagging is caring wrapped up differently, but the question is why is there that drop in love of learning over the years?

Blaming the curriculum is an easy whipping boy or teachers or the educational system, but why is there never ever, ever, a conversation around steps a child has to follow to learn? Or having kids understand motivation? Or how feelings and emotions play a key part in their learning? Or how habits are formed and having that conversation from an early age. Or setting objectives and the difference between that and a wish? Or failing, which on its own will undermine any human's self-confidence, but failing when you understand it's part of the full learning picture is understandable and accepted.

Failing is the best feedback, but no one wants to fail or is ‘encouraged’ to fail - it's avoided like the plague! In other words, as wonderful as the sage advice, 'learn from your mistakes' is, the whole education system is set up to deride a student when they make a mistake (i.e. perfection not met). It's like focusing on pushing kids to get the right answers, and then we wonder why they lose their interest in their academic learning. The goal is not the right answer, as to me that's like making perfection the objective, it's like making the destination the end all and be all, versus a focus on the 'journey' which is where the learning happens', and that never ever gets talked about.

My final thought on this:

Here we have a very reputable magazine, publishing a well-researched article, yet they include a nonsensical image at the top of the article - at a minimum one that will have the reader glance at and subconsciously think (looks complicated, math is hard ...), and then they continue. Or if the article was meant to purposefully disengage me with that image as a reader, then use it as an example in the article. And yes, the image got me emotionally charged (aka got my attention), though I have a feeling I am the sole outlier on this.

I wrote about these unspoken and ‘invisible’ issues in a September 2023 article, Math isn’t what makes math hard!

I am tired. But I will forge on, because there has to be a way to solve this problem. There has to be!

Edison
Edison Hopkinson, Mech. Eng., B.Ed
Insightful strategies for math (and life) 🚦❕