number neutrality and other math myths

In a staff lounge discussion, I suggest to the math teacher that immigration might not be either/or. Perhaps they are not legal/illegal, but extralegal and perhaps the solutions lie in paradox and mystery.

"That's why I teach math. There are answers. It's objective. It's neutral."

"Except pi."

"What do you mean?"

"Pi doesn't resolve. It's messy. It's eternal. I have a hunch that geeks have fun on March 14th, because intuitively they get that pi might not be an anomaly as much as a reality.They mock it because it makes them uneasy." He looks at me as if I'm crazy. He wants so badly for math to be neutral.

Computers are binary. Math is not.

***

My son failed math in pre-school. It's among the five n's on his report card. He can't copy letters very well either. So, I focus on "geometric awareness." Apparently he can't identify a diamond, so I draw one for him.

"That's a square," he says. Then pauses, "or it's a diamond. But it's really just a square that can't stand up straight." He looks for a minute and draws a diagonal line. "It could also be two triangles, right, daddy?"

"Which is it?"

"It's all of them. But it's not a circle."

My son isn't a genius by any means. He just hasn't learned that math is the subject with "right answers."

***

People say it's a "universal" language, but it seems to me there is a layer of math mythology in America (perhaps in the West). Or not. Perhaps this is simply the message I internalized in my own suburban experience:

• Math is logical
• Math is binary
• Math is meant for money and those who do well in it will make more money
• Math is neutral
• Math is sequential
• Math is a skill and not a concept
• Math is concise
• Math is about the product, not the process
• Math is universal
• A number is the direct equivalent of a reality (Again, my son challenges me on this today. He tells me that 5 is not the same as five apples. He says it's just a picture to represent the five apples, but it's not the same.)
• Math is concrete
• Math is governed by laws
• Math knowledge is permanent - what we know will be valid forever

I look at the list above. I'm not sure which ones are true or false or a little bit of both. But I internalized this mythology as a child and learned to HATE math. It wasn't until college that I began to change.The reality is that math is often politically and socially charged. A simple glance at a professional development meeting suggests that math is used just as often (perhaps more reverantly) than words to persuade. Our decisions are "data-driven," which is a more alliterative way of saying "number-enforced."

incidentally it was a set of lecture notes from vlorbik that got me thinking
i'm not sure where or how he influenced me -- or which of his *thoughts* are my own here
but i'll go in all lower-case in honor of his thinking 
:)