“The premise of this book is that most of the received wisdom about how writing works is not only wrong but harmful.” — Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences about Writing
It’s September.
Back to school. Pencils and books. I always loved school and September was a happy time for me. I also loved to write. I’ve since learned that I was one of the lucky ones.
The more I write the more fun I have. The more I teach writing the more fear of writing I discover.
“You’re a writing teacher?” someone recently asked me. “That sounds like nails on a chalk board to me.”
What is this all about? I’ve begun to ask students and those in casual conversation anecdotal questions about this fear. Answers range from,“I HATE writing” (an attorney) to “I hate school writing assignments – they’re boring,” (a fourth grade student).
My friend, Suzanne Fiederlein, wondered whether there are similarities between fear of writing and fear of math, which her husband, Dave Pruett, taught for many years at Virginia’s James Madison University. Dave is the perfect person to discuss this subject with: he is also a writer. I asked him about his thoughts on the subject and whether, together, we could shed any light on the struggles of our respective math and writing students.
ANITA: Dave, thank you so much for indulging me in my quest: to find out what causes the fear of writing. Because it comes up so often, in my conversations with children and adults, and in my work with students of all ages, I’ve decided to do a little investigating. Someone suggested I pursue a PhD on the subject but that isn’t happening anytime soon. I’m wondering if there is a similarity between the fear of writing and the fear of math. Can you tell me a little about your experience with this?
DAVE: Well, let me start with a tad of background. I have taught mathematics at secondary, community college, and university levels for a cumulative total of more than 30 years. And, I am also a writer. Reason and Wonder, a 12-year labor of love that explores the interface between science and spirituality, was published in 2012 by Praeger. That said, I’ve never given a shred of thought to the similarities between math phobia and writing phobia until you asked the question. It’s a very interesting question that I hope we can explore together. Upon reflection I can see similarities and differences between writing and math fears.
ANITA: Do you think there is a difference between math fear and math phobia?
DAVE: Perhaps this is a simplistic answer, but I think of a phobia as a fear that has grown so large that it becomes crippling. And I am feeling a bit guilty in regard to this question because, in reflecting on a lifetime of teaching mathematics, I don’t think I have ever helped a student overcome a math fear or phobia. Not a great track record. In self defense, most of my teaching has been at the college or university level and has involved courses at least as challenging as first-semester calculus. So, most of the courses I’ve taught self-selected “math-philes” or at least those who are “math tolerant.” The one exception is a college algebra course I taught years ago. I try to make mathematics relevant at all levels and bring it down to earth. Perhaps that approach helps tamp down anxieties, somewhat.
There is, however, a math-related anxiety that I myself have experienced: math-test anxiety. I received my PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Arizona. At the time I was a student there, the preliminary exams were brutal, consisting of an exam in each of six areas of mathematics over a two-day period. Each exam was only an hour in length. I failed three of my six prelims. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the material; it was that the one-hour time constraint provoked enormous anxiety. There was no time to think. One had to have anticipated the problems in advance. Fortunately, my advisors felt I was salvageable, and eventually I retook the three unsatisfactory exams and passed on a second try. And, I might add, the Program in Applied Mathematics has since redesigned their prelims.
Upon reflection, math-test anxiety is fundamentally different from most other types of test anxiety. On a history test, for example, one always knows something about the subject, and one can start with what one knows. On a math test that requires problem-solving or proof, there is often a narrow intellectual gateway to the solution. It takes time to understand what is being asked and time to explore and jettison alternative pathways. Therefore, to try to diminish test anxiety, I always give tests on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when the class period is 75 minutes in length, and I allow students to come early and stay late for the final exam, which unfortunately at JMU, is officially just two hours in length. Exam periods at most universities are three.
ANITA: This makes sense; I can’t remember any of my students being “crippled” by writing anxiety. I can, however, recall many instances when they have simply shut down or been completely un-responsive to the task at hand. My most memorable example is the third grader who would not do any work in his writing journal. Nothing I could do, as a teaching volunteer, would get him engaged (this was years before I got my master’s in education). He would barely speak with me. At the last possible moment, when I was about to return him to class, having completely failed him, it suddenly dawned on me that I knew nothing about him. “What do you like to do when you’re not in school?” I asked him, in a last-ditch, desperate attempt to get some- hell, any- written words out of him. He looked at me like I was crazy, at first, then quietly uttered the word “baseball.” The story ends with me sending him back to class with a page written about his love of little league practice after school. Moral? You have to engage children in writing about something they love, not simply scholastic subject matter. Do you think math anxiety has to do with the way math is taught in the school system?
DAVE: I taught high-school mathematics for three years, and during that time I got a lot of “I hate math” responses either from students or from acquaintances who had just found out what I did for a living. And so, I began to probe a little deeper to find out why. These conclusions are anecdotal and not from any rigorous statistical sampling of “math-phobes.” But a funny thing happened. Ask enough questions and you quickly find out that no one is born hating mathematics. In fact, the opposite is true. Most people actually find mathematics appealing and even magical until one of two things happens: they encounter a caustic mathematics teacher, or they reach a point where they can no longer grasp concepts and become frustrated.
Also, not all students learn in the same way. Some are visual learners, some aural, some read-write, and some kinesthetic. Toward the end of my career I tried to present each concept from multiple perspectives so that nearly everyone would have an entry point.
ANITA: You have touched upon two concepts that have proven incredibly helpful to me as a teacher of young children for many years. First, when you spoke about no longer grasping concepts, I thought about the amount of support a student needs when they hit the wall for the first time. Some students have the resiliency, another important concept, to move forward, but some require a lot of support from the right teacher/tutor to see that they have simply hit a wall, not that they “can’t do math.” In the early childhood world there is an idea that it is crucial for young children to learn to tolerate discomfort. The sooner they do, the easier it will be to take on life’s inevitable challenges as they grow up. When you can tolerate discomfort and have the right support at the same time, you can move forward in any area. The second concept you mentioned was the one that got me through grad school: the work of Howard Gardner, and his Multiple Intelligences theory (the way all students learn differently). I love the fact that you were teaching your students from differing perspectives! I’d love to see that in action. Finally, as a writing instructor I have found that storytelling works as a writing tool because it is fun and student driven (see my baseball boy above). Is there an equivalent for you in the teaching of math?
DAVE: Well, stories enter in a couple of ways. Mathematics is often taught bloodlessly, as if it were handed down, fully developed, from on high. The older I get, the more interested I become in the history of mathematics and science, in general, and in the principal characters of that history, in particular. What one quickly discovers is that many of these characters led difficult lives, and often their mathematics or science offered an oasis of relatively tranquility in a life of utter chaos. For example, there’s Galileo, who was hauled before the Inquisition for espousing a Copernican world view, or Kepler, whose mother was tried for witchcraft. Or Newton, who felt abandoned by his own mother, was an alchemist in secret, and suffered mental illness, most likely from mercury poisoning, while dabbling in alchemy. As much as possible, I like to tell the stories of these mathematical and scientific giants in order to humanize mathematics and science.
There is an altogether different sense in which stories enter mathematics. What we used to call “word problems” in calculus, we now call “story problems.” The rhetorical shift was supposed to remove some of the anxiety, because many students are terrified of “word problems.” From decades of teaching experience, I have gradually realized that the difficulty students have with story problems is not mathematical in origin. It’s linguistic. There are many ways to define the discipline of mathematics: the abstract science of quantity and space, the handmaiden of physics, the “alphabet with which God has written the universe,” the art and science of symbolic logic, for starters. For my students I often define mathematics as a very terse foreign language. It’s a foreign language in that one has to learn its grammar and syntax, but unlike most other human languages, mathematics is extraordinarily parsimonious: one can express so much with so few symbols. So, the difficulty that students have in story problems is not mathematics, it is in translating from English (or their native tongue) into mathematics. For that reason, we will often parse each phrase in a story problem to extract its mathematical expression.
Oddly then, mathematical aptitude and writing well are closely aligned. In mathematics one says what one means and means what one says, striving for clarity and leaving out all that is not relevant. In writing well, one does much the same: eliminate all unnecessary words.
Speaking of stories, I’d like to tell a personal one to illustrate. When I had completed the first draft of my master’s thesis in applied mathematics, I handed it to my advisor. After a few days, he handed it back and asked a loaded question: “Dave, is this indicative of your writing style?” I answered “yes.” He followed: “It’s got to change. This reads like folklore. Go buy Strunk and White.” I did, and it made a world of difference in my writing. I learned from this classic little guide to writing that every unnecessary word is a parasite that robs one’s writing of a bit of its power. Enough unnecessary “weasel words” and even the most elegant thoughts turn blah.
On this topic, I think of the prolific author of novels, James Michener, whose books have been read by an estimated 75 million people worldwide. He once confessed that he did not write well but that he edited well. Same for me. The first three drafts of anything I write are not fit for human consumption: wordy, poorly organized, and full of weasel words. It takes at least three revisions to trim the fat and scour dictionaries and thesauruses for just the right words.
ANITA: This is amazing; I always say I learned to write from Strunk and White! Also, I love the idea of math as an “oasis of tranquility.” I have occasionally tutored elementary school students in math, and I have been surprised at how much I enjoyed returning to it, after so many years away. The need to focus on math, the inability to think about anything else, provides that oasis for me. Interestingly, I once met a surgeon who told me he loved his work because he could not possibly think about anything else when he was in surgery. This seems to me to be about the comfort of laser sharp focus.
Back to anxiety. I once had a parent tell me her daughter was miserable in my class and didn’t want to come to school. “She is?” I responded. “She seems happy when she’s here.” I explained that the beginning of the school year is like crossing a river; no matter how challenging, the goal is to get to the other side. How have you gotten your students to cross the river of math anxiety?
DAVE: The image that your question conjures is quite provocative. I want to go from here to there. But between is a raging stream. How do I get there successfully and safely? Proofs are like this in mathematics. I start here with the hypothesis. I want to go there, to the conclusion. But the way between is uncertain. It’s not a well-worn path. More of a dense jungle with dangers, including stream crossings.
This image then brings me to what I think is perhaps the most seminal similarity between proficiency in mathematics and in writing: both are very, very difficult. It takes courage to do both well. Perhaps the gravest mistake that teachers of writing and mathematics make is in leaving the false impression that it’s an easy process.
ANITA: So, this gets us back to the issue of discomfort. It sounds like you’re saying that teachers have a responsibility to state, at the outset, that the process can be hard but that the students are up to the task and that they will have the full support of the teacher to work through this process. I’m seeing my students and feeling like they think they need to get it right the first time, and that there is something wrong with them if they don’t. Back to needing to tolerate discomfort. Ultimately, do you think there are several factors at play when you talk about fear of math?
DAVE: The antidote to fear is courage, which is the willingness to move forward in the face of fear, a kind of persistence despite obstacles and dangers. Here too, some personal reflections might be useful.
There have been perhaps three times in my mathematical career when I had major conceptual breakthroughs. They weren’t earthshattering to anyone else, but they were important for my projects at the time. In each case, I had worked long and hard beforehand, often in utter frustration, as if I were fumbling around in the dark. Before each breakthrough, though, I’d gotten a gut-level sense of being close to the solution. And each time, I did something to mix up my normal routine, as a way to loosen the intellectual logjam. For example, the first time, when I was a master’s student at UVA, I’d gone to a Christmas party on a Saturday after a day of intense work. Back home, afterwards, I decided to crawl into bed, but to work on the problem in bed for another hour or two, until midnight or one in the morning. During that time the solution revealed itself. That moment was one of immense relief and satisfaction that it had all been worth the effort.
The process of writing Reason and Wonder had similarities. In retrospect, it seemed a bit like how I would imagine sculpting. I did not start the book with a well-formed roadmap of where it would start, how it would end, and how to get there. I started with the vague notion that I had a book in me. It was like setting up a block of marble and having the faith that there was a beautiful object imbedded inside. Only I didn’t quite know what the object was. So, I started chipping away. The early days of writing were so frustrating. Getting words onto paper was so much harder than I’d anticipated, and when I read what I’d written, it was awful. After a couple of summers of this, all I had was a couple of short biographical sketches of scientific characters that I could use as spice in my courses. But I kept making passes through the material, like chipping away at the marble with finer and finer chisels. Eventually something of beauty and value began to emerge. Then, and only then, I let a few trusted friends read drafts. They gave invaluable suggestions. The last stage of writing was like sanding and polishing. It is the latter stages of writing, the polishing, that I enjoy. The early stages are so hard and so frustrating. But in this regard, mathematics and writing are very similar: one needs to tolerate a lot of frustration and a lot of wandering in the dark to give birth to something of beauty.
ANITA: Well, you really hit upon something here, which has haunted me ever since I was a graduate student at City College. I had a very formidable advisor, and on my master’s thesis, she told me I did not do enough outlining of the project; that I had simply started writing. “I never put pen to paper until I know exactly what I am going to say,” she told me. Since then, I have had many conversations with writers about this, and, surprisingly, most tell me the exact opposite. “I write to find out what I want to say,” my friend, Clifford Thompson, explained. Still, I think my advisor had a point, which is that you do have to have a blueprint for what you are presenting to the world; you have to break down the process or you can, as I certainly did, go off in a direction that would later need a tremendous amount of editing, which caused frustration for both her and myself. In math, I think of the order of operations; you always break things down, no? Perhaps math and writing also have this in common, the need for an order of operations.
DAVE: Mathematics is very rational, but it is also very intuitive. Intuitive approaches to problem solving don’t necessarily follow a blueprint or a roadmap. In these cases, the most efficient, logical pathway may become clear only in hindsight. Same for writing, I suspect. Some know where they are headed when they write, and some, as you suggest, “write to find out what … to say.” Whatever works.
This has been an eye-opening conversation for me, Anita. I think the nugget we collectively stumbled upon is the importance of helping students to understand: “This is REALLY hard, and if you at first fail, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong with you. But if you try and try again, it definitely means something is right with you!”
ANITA: And for me, as well! I loved investigating this subject with you, Dave; it really helped me understand the writing anxiety issue, which has been on my mind for several years, from a new perspective: that of mathematics.