Ellen Freedman Can Cure You of Math Anxiety

We laugh about Dead Lips today, but the truth is, he really humiliated me.

Dead Lips: he was a tortured LBJ democrat, perhaps; or a Nixonite with a completely fused cervical spine. Ramrod of posture with a slap of gray Brylcreem tilted askew on his scalp. Full pocket protector. Plaid shirt. You know the man. To make it funnier, Dead Lips had had a stroke; years ago, maybe, or just last week. Who could tell? He could barely move his facial muscles. Syllables issued out of his semi-sclerotic mouth area, and that was all. He shuffled and groaned back and forth at the front of the classroom. Happily, Dead Lips was slow and mute enough to be pointed the wrong way when students casually altered his grade book after class or stole calculators, pencils and reams of graph paper out of the classroom's supply closet. On one particular morning, Dead Lips had a small seizure when a student in his homeroom refused to stand and pledge allegiance to the flag. I had Dead Lips for first period Introductory Geometry and I heard all the fresh gossip about his pissy attack before I even sat down. He was the worst teacher, and this?math anything?was my worst class. And after that commie punk in homeroom snubbed the flag, Dead Lips was primed for a morning struggle.

Sometime during my reverie, Dead Lips sensed me in the back row, and called on me, for the first and only time in his career. And I didn't know how to solve the geometry problem he had shakily chalked on the board. But Dead Lips would not let up. Dead Lips harangued me and repeatedly blurted my ignorance to the silence of a crowded, bored and snickering class. My face burned with bloody shame.

"Well, that was like beating a dead horse," Dead Lips intoned as the bell rang.

By the end of that class, I was full-blown math anxious. I'd had many hateful, elderly math teachers in my past, but after freshman-year Dead Lips, I resigned myself to being stupid past plus, times and minus.

By now, Dead Lips has been buried in a forgotten discount grave. His birth name, however, is forever etched in my marrow, and to write it here would bring the awful math teacher (and the awful freshman math student) alive. He reminds me that I'm illiterate in the language of math.

So I'm artsy, dramatic, emotional and therefore bad with numbers, yet I am smart enough to know that numbers, and their prismatic equations, are the words in a language I just don't understand. To be good at math sounds cool, untouchable and left-handed to me. Always will. But Dead Lips was right: I was ignorant, and still am, because I don't want to learn anything beyond the mathematic equivalents of "Hello, my name is" or "Where is the bathroom?" I don't even care to be pidgin fluent. As a female, just a straight-up carrier of the math retard gene, I can't learn math.

All of these misconceptions are untrue, according to Ellen Freedman. A professor of basic math at Camden County College in Blackwood, NJ, and a crusader against un-fun math, she says math anxiety is bred, not born. "All it takes is one bad experience in the classroom, for males or females." As far as her own math anxiety: "I had a teacher in third grade who told me that I had to recite my times tables as fast as he snapped his fingers." And if math anxiety is primarily seen in females, it's because "women take longer, and more care, before they speak. Who says math has to be a rapid-fire memorization thing?"

Prof. Freedman is on a roll: "Who says math has to be taught at desks in a quiet room with bright lights? Everyone's so nervous. Did you know low lights, talking and music are a learning tool for some math students?" This would explain why I can figure out how much to tip on a restaurant bill.

Freedman's self-described "feelgood" interactive website, www.mathpower.com, designed as a study aid for her Camden students, is all sherberty colors and silly music that sounds like "Peanuts" meets softcore. It's a Romper Room for the math anxious. On one page, genies dance to cheesy electropulse trance over two columns of algebraic equations waiting to be factored. Freedman's smiling, blonde pageboyed visage floats about, adding encouragement and comic relief. Initially, I thought it was a kiddie site. It turns out the fans of Freedman's four-year-old website are even more eclectic in age and station than in her live Camden class, where the median age of a student in her basic math class is 30.

"I get tons of thank-you letters from all kinds of people," Freedman sighs. "A college administrator who is hiding his math illiteracy until he retires. I got a letter from a guy on death row. He wants to learn algebra. Go figure."

There's a section called "Student's Math Anxiety Bill of Rights" that reads like Al-Anon literature: "I have the right to learn at my own pace and not feel put down or stupid if I'm slower than someone else." The page is scored with a Casio take on the Chariots of Fire theme. There's a students-helping-students section: I found LaToya's multiplying monomials tutorial to be very easy.

It turns out Prof. Freedman's sherberty little site gets a million hits a month. In addition, Freedman and Mathpower.com have received awards from AOL's Academic Assistance Center ("containing the highest levels of educational material, wholesome family values and constructive entertainment") and Microsoft's 1997 Innovators in Higher Education Challenge Award for being one of the "'top twenty' technological innovators in higher education in the nation." The Chronicle of Higher Education, in its 1999 Almanac issue, called Freedman "[t]he Dear Abby of Math." But Ellen Freedman isn't residing cozily on the comics page, spooling out crap advice to Dead Lips types. The anxious, the poetic, the clove smoker, the white-collar worker who should know statistics, but doesn't: she's out to make them all understand.

Born in Philadelphia, a "first generation college" child to parents who "were bright but uneducated," Freedman went from undergraduate at Temple to teaching high school math in her native city. After a stint as a computer systems analyst and a job assisting a physicist ("Too weird?he was like the Back to the Future guy"), Freedman went back to school and got her master's in learning disabilities at Rowan, where her passion for teaching math as a fun, living language first came to fruition. She's the cool math teacher I wish I had: occasionally her office hours at Camden (where she has been teaching for about 10 years) are held at an Internet cafe. This seems like art teacher behavior, not math teacher behavior. In addition, she is working on a CD-ROM, which will allow non-Camden students to take her algebra classes online.

Yet I still think of algebra as a dead subject, like high school Latin. Cram it, recite it and forget it. And when you need it, it's not there. And then this conversation happened:

Me: What do you say to detractors who complain that knowing algebra isn't going to help anyone in their careers? That it's not as important as, say, knowing English?

Freedman: Two things. Math alters how you think. It absolutely trains you to be a problem solver. And number two, if you are using statistics of any kind in your job, you need to know algebra.

Me: What's the correlation between statistics and algebra?

Freedman: Well, the movement of the stock market is based on algebra's Cartesian graph.

Me: By Cartesian graph, you mean using y=mx+b, the formula of a line, to plot coordinates and intersects on an x and y axis?

Freedman: Right, and there's probability embedded in the slope of the lines. You go through algebra and beyond, into calculus.

Me: So by knowing algebra, calculus and the probable rhythm of the slope, you can plot the habits of a surly Dow Jones and more or less not be surprised by anything?

Freedman: Exactly.

At this point, I had what my father would call "sunrise over Marblehead." I didn't forget all my algebra. I understood what Prof. Freedman was talking about, and I could converse back. I suddenly remembered that I once did, in fact, have a nice algebra teacher, maybe the year after Dead Lips, and with her clever graphing assignments she must have been a lot like Prof. Freedman. When she was my teacher I still must have been distraught over my math stupidity, but what she was teaching must have gotten through to me. I can't remember what she looked like. Nor can I remember her name.