| Read Genevieve's Op-Ed on Math Education in The Washington Post on Sunday, May 21st, 2000. | Genevieve's Column Reading Math My mom is a mathematician, and since elementary school, people have assumed that if I was good at math, she’s the reason. They have also assumed that I have an easy ‘out’ for hard math homework. They’ve been wrong. One night, when I was in seventh grade, I was working on my math homework until I got stuck. I got through the first two and was onto the third feeling fairly confident. I looked at it, and was stumped. After a few minutes of staring at it, I put the book away and waited for my mom to get home. When she came home, I took out the problem and showed her. She looked at it, and not completely remembering, she said, "Well, let’s see. What does the book say?" "I don’t know, I didn’t look," I told her. "That’s the first place to look," she told me. "That’s the first place I look, too. Even if I know how to do it, it sets up the context in which we’re doing it." A bit embarrassed, I took in what she said. We looked at the work together, and figured out the problems. The next time it didn’t make sense, I looked at the book first. From then on, when it didn’t make sense, I read the book first. A weird thing happened. I learned how to read math. Knowing how to read math didn’t make the work any less hard, it just helped me understand, and find my way to the answer.
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