Just the other day, my 7 year old daughter was having a typical day of getting ready for her school in the morning. Her routines consist of getting up shouting ‘ yeppy! Another school day’, then brushing her teeth, then violin, then breakfast, then finding her missing sock before we head out. Sure enough, while I was packing her lunch box, she asked ‘Mommy, do you know where my other sock is?’ You’d think by now she’d be tired of this help-me-out routine! But, no, not her. So instead of getting upset, I told myself, ‘I’m going to try a new trick on her!’ ‘Why don’t you find it yourself dear?’ I replied ever so sweetly. Either she was surprised at my response or she was just having a glorious day or the music my husband had put on was just perfect, she went on her search for the missing sock, while SINGING along with the song that was playing: ‘oh where, oh where, did my dog go?’ only she substituted dog with ‘my sock’. The amazing thing was that she not only found the missing sock in half of the time, neither one of us was yelling or screaming and the day went exceptionally well from there. Later on, my husband commented that ‘maybe we all should be singing ‘oh, where, oh where, did my sock go’ when we want to find something.’
That got me thinking — what if, just what if, my students, those who come to me with eroded math confidence, can sing a song’ of ‘oh where, oh where, did my MATH go?’ While getting the help they need to find their links to math again. Wouldn’t that attitude be so much brighter and lighter?
You see, I believe that everyone can do math. Just like the missing sock, it is not you can’t do math, but your innate link to your ‘mathability’ is either missing or eroded. That’s all. While trying to find her missing sock, I’m convinced that my daughter wasn’t telling herself ‘I’m too dumb to find this sock. It’s not there. I’m just born stupid. Finding the sock is not in me.’ Instead, she probably was just wondering ‘where can it go?’ — much like the song she was humming along ‘oh, where! oh where, did my sock go? Oh where, oh where did it go?’
So at the heart of learning math with ease and grace, or the Zen Way of Learning Math, is this: A deep faith that math is in you. You are as gifted as the person next to you, math is a thing we are all born with. You job is to find it and have fun while finding it. Just like my daughter knew her missing sock is somewhere in the house, and she was having fun singing along while finding her missing sock, you too can start with a firm belief that math is in you somewhere and go about having fun while finding your math. At the end of either searching quest, both you and her shall succeed. Whether it is the missing sock or the missing link to math, it is just missing temporarily.
The second secret ingredient to learning math the Zen Way is to have a cheerful disposition in life. As children, we are born with abundant cheerfulness inside of us. As we age, that cheery outlook can get eroded away if we are not careful at replenishing it. You see, the Universe at large does not care one way or the other how we feel about things. If we give negativity out, it will replenish that; and if we give positive energy out, it will just replenish that too. Just like the ocean doesn’t care if you take a small bucket of water or a truck load, either way it is so vast and abundant, it will just replenish whatever you just took. So when you have a chance to send a positive comment, perform a positive deed, do it! What goes around comes around – your kind gesture yesterday at the hot-dog stand may just be returned to you as a well-needed explanation on a math problem you’ve been struggling today! Bad grades got you down? Send a positive thought to the kid who did Ace it. Why not? Just as St. Francis of Assisi said, ‘It’s in giving that we receive,’ it is in giving the positive energy that we receive it . It is not only what we do that matters, but also what we don’t do that defines who we are. Refuse to be bought down by a negative comment or a bad grade or have jealousy grip us when someone else did succeed while we are temporally missing our link to math. Remember that the silent space in between musical notes defines the music as much as the music notes them. Be cheerful and seek opportunities to see the goodness in every encounter. This will surely speed up your quest for connecting to your math.
Honoring your mistakes is the third intrinsic ingredient to the Zen Way of learning math. Imagine you saw two people walking in a well-lighted tunnel — one can see and one is blind. Both of them were walking too far to the left and both bumped their head. The one with the perfect vision laughed it off with ‘that was a stupid mistake’ and proceed to walking again. The one with less than perfect vision, however, stopped, and said to himself, ‘hmmm, I didn’t like the headache. I wonder what had happened! I think I was walking too far to the left and had just bumped my head on the wall. I’m going to walk a bit to the right so I don’t repeat my mistake again.’ Of the two who do you think will end up with a bad headache? That’s right, the one with the perfect vision. Why? he didn’t bother to learn from his mistakes. The blind man however took the time and learned from his mistake by honoring it instead of laughing it off with ‘that was a stupid mistake!’ I always tell my student, no mistake is stupid — all mistakes cost points. If you have a hole in your pocket and it’s leaking out all the coins you’ve worked so hard to earn, you don’t call the hole ‘stupid’, you just mend it, don’t you? So why label a mistake, however small, ‘stupid’? Did you know that there are only so many types of mistake you can make? If you could learn from each one and improve your performance by 1% a day, you’d improve your performance by almost 50% in merely 7 weeks? Or as we Chinese say, ‘persistent water droplets can put a hole in the hardest rock’, why not honor your little mistakes and have them help to reconnect you to your mathability?
The last secret ingredient of learning math with ease and grace is to take meaningful actions. Often students learn math the backward way: “If I have higher grades, then I’ll feel more confident about my ability to do math and I’ll like math more and I’ll do more math.’ The way it actually works is the reverse ‘I’m going to do more math since I know it’s in me to master it.’ Having the faith that math is in you is the first step in learning math with ease and grace, and then you will do what you need to do to master it and the grades will follow. Someone once pointed out, you can have anything you want, but you can’t have everything you want. So if mastering math and finding your missing link to math is important, then meaningful actions are needed to back up your words. Actions like preview the class material, asking help for the n-th time on a problem you are stuck on, actions like forgoing attending a party but to rest well for an exam, actions that will move you closer to your math, no matter how infinitesimally closer. You see, words themselves mean nothing unless we, the speakers of the words, match them with actions. One mismatch is no big deal, right? You say. If you take one spike out of your bicycle wheel, what happens? Nothing. What about two? Ten? Twenty? Our words are the spikes for the wheel of our lives, and the integrity of our ability to match our words with our actions is the cause of what we have and have not in our lives.