The "Invisible" Walls: Why Math Elitism is Hiding in Plain Sight

Let’s be for real for a second. We’ve all heard the talk about how math is just hard or how some people have it while some people don't. But if we’re being honest, math has this level of elitism that some people are actually comfortable with. There’s a gatekeeping energy where the complexity is the point, and quite frankly, I’m over it.

As an educator, I’m not here to help you deal with the walls. I’m here to break them down. I’m talking about the intentional barriers and even the unintentional ones that we’ve just accepted as the way it is.

The Ghosts in the Equation

One of the biggest hurdles my students face isn't the math itself, but rather the invisible math. We have this habit of hiding things and then acting surprised when students are confused.

Think about the variable x. We all know there’s a coefficient of 1 sitting right there, but we never write it. Or consider the Invisible Two. When you take a square root, that index is blank, but for a cube root, we suddenly decide the number matters. We are literally asking students to calculate with ghosts, and then we wonder why they feel haunted by the subject.

Haha. But no, seriously. Something has got to give. My students struggle semester after semester when they are factoring rational expressions and either the numerator or denominator are all "gone" because they "cancelled out." They see a magical one appear and they are left lost. Then I have to swoop in and let them know that it was there all along. I wish it was taught differently in the beginning, but, hey, I digress.

The "I Suffered, So You Should Too" Trap

I’ll never forget sitting in a department meeting and feeling the air get heavy with a specific kind of attitude. There was a sense that math has to be hard because it was hard for me. That "rite of passage" mentality is exactly what gets us into trouble. It creates a culture where we perpetuate systems from hundreds of years ago just because that’s how it’s always been done. It’s a cycle of academic hazing that doesn't serve our students today, and it definitely won't serve them tomorrow.

We’ve created a world where math is one of the only places where using resources is considered cheating. In any other profession, using your tools is called being efficient, but in math, we often treat it like a moral failing.

A Call for a Culture Shift

We don't just need a policy change because we really need a practitioner revolution. We, the teachers and the instructors, the professionals, need to come to the table and have some uncomfortable conversations:

• What math is actually important for the future?

• Which processes are vital, and which are just hurdles we kept for the sake of tradition?

• How do we redefine work so we aren't just moving goalposts for the sake of elitism?

  
  

If it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make change. It’s time to stop designing math courses that protect the prestige of the subject and start designing them to serve the brilliance of the students in front of us.

Y'all, this is just the beginning. We have to shift the mindset before we can shift the results. Stick with me! We are going to cause a change one blog post at a time.