In case no one’s done it for you, here is a welcome. Welcome to your math journey! Whether you have had math non-stop for years or you’re coming back after a hiatus, I hope you find this reading helpful as you continue your journey.
The first step in every journey is to define the destination. There’s nothing wrong with being a nomad who’s letting the wind take you, but for our sake, it’s important to know what we should be striving for. This section is meant to unravel your bias on what success looks like and what doesn’t.
For years, success to me had been an A, while everything else was failure. This “grades equals success” idea started from family expectations. I expect many people will also have underlying external expectations that shape their idea of success. So, here’s a stab at your definition, did you decide your definition of success or was it pushed onto you?
The tiny amount of sociology I know will say that your definitions for aspects of life are a culmination of things from society pushed onto you. But, I challenge you to decide what you keep and what you abandon from the things given to you.
Is it healthy? Will your definition of success burn you out before you’ve even reached your best? People have often expressed concern that I am working way too much, because they would ask if I’ve eaten, only to be met with “no, because this homework took a lot longer than I thought.” My success as a student relied on “finish in one sitting”, which doesn’t really mix well when homeworks can take more than five hours nowadays. (I’ve gotten better at dealing with this, please don’t think I’m starving myself for the sake of work.)
Is it attainable? Are you pushing yourself to be something that you can’t? This is a dangerous question to ask because you’ll be dealing with “what is something I can’t actually do” versus “what is something that I can do but have been told I can’t”. By the US Constitution, I cannot be the President of the United States since I am not a natural born citizen. That is something I cannot do. In the past, I’ve been told that I couldn’t go to grad school right out of college. That is something I was told I can’t do, but was able to.
How are you going to react if you’re not able to reach this? More often than not, people’s definition of success puts it exactly opposite of failure. I definitely used to believe that. But, a healthier and kinder approach would be to view failure as learning opportunities on the track to success. I add this section, because sometimes, things don’t pan out the way you expected them to. Life gets in the way and you have to maneuver through more than just this mission to this particular success. That’s okay.
I apologize, I actually do not have a definition of success concretely set in stone that you could copy and learn from. It changes every week, I have a different set of things to accomplish weekly. But, what I do know is that at the end of every milestone (a week, a chapter, a semester), I can ask myself, “was that a successful experience?” Then, it leads into the primary ingredient of success to me which is “did I get what I wanted to get out of that experience?”
I guess, this essay exposed to my conscious mind that I don’t have a concrete definition of success. I just know I’ve been successful when I’ve had an experience and I grew from that. I think what I’ve run into is the distinction between success and achievement. To me, achievement is tangible while success is more of a feeling. I achieved my goal of getting into grad school and getting to teach. While I also feel successful in how my first semester went, because I got a lot from that experience, things that aren’t necessarily tangible.
You are not just doing this one math class. You have other responsibilities, you have a life, and you are growing as a person. Therefore, to be successful, you have to prioritize the things you have to do in life. I’ll be the one to say that learning math does not have to be on top of your list all the time. (But, it should still be somewhere on there.)
This section is very personalized, but really so was the last one. But, for this, I’ll lead with my life as an example.
I have concrete responsibilities this semester: four classes to be a student and one class to be a teacher. Then, I have the life necessities: cooking, cleaning, exercising, and basically anything that keeps me sane and alive. Then, I have the cherries on top, the things that make life fun and happy. These are the things that have to be on my list. I am fortunate to be living alone, I do not have to take care of other living beings. You may not be so lucky and you have to juggle a lot more.
With my list in mind, I make a mental (or Google Calendar) note every week of what has to be done for each aspect of my life. Then, I organize them by urgency, by importance, and by ability. One week, I could have an essay due on Thursday, but a long homework due Friday. I know that I can write an essay quickly enough that I prioritize the Friday task over the Thursday one. Another week, I could have a party to go to, and so, I prioritize everything to be done before then. I like to not have deadlines looming at the back of my mind while I’m trying to party.
One last thing for this section, this can get overwhelming. Viewing everything to prioritize them will feel daunting, it happens. Do things one at a time. There’s a reason a five-course meal isn’t given to you in one-go, it takes one bite at a time to get through things. Your hierarchy doesn’t have to be set in stone. Again, unexpected things come up. But having an idea of which plate to eat from first will feel less overwhelming.
I know this is advice easier said than done, since even today, I still struggle with asking questions. So, instead of giving you advice on how to start asking for help, I’ll be discussing the reasons that stop me from asking. Hopefully, I (you) can work through them as I write (you read).
I don’t want to look dumb. No one does, but just like how failure shouldn’t be the exact opposite of success. Dumb shouldn’t be the exact opposite of knowledgable. We are all here to learn things, we shouldn’t expect ourselves to already know the topics and be geniuses at it.
I don’t want to waste the teacher’s time. As a teacher, I know for a fact that I would rather go over a confusing topic five times than move on to the next thing (which may require understanding the previous thing).
I don’t know how to ask a question. I don’t know what I don’t know. More often than not, you actually do know quite a lot more. It’s the critical perspective we have of ourselves that makes it seem like we don’t understand anything. A good first step that I found was to go through something sentence-by-sentence or phrase-by-phrase, then asking for help based on that part.
I’m shy or anxious (and it’s not stemming from the previous ones). I find that my shyness and anxiety comes from thinking I have to be formal in how I ask. The level of formality has sort of died down, and you can send a short email expressing your questions to your instructor or TA. It doesn’t have to be something pristine, a little “the wording isn’t making sense to me” goes a long way in helping you. You will probably get a teacher like me who replies with emojis.
Lastly, before I let you go, I just want to say that I love questions, good teachers love questions. I know that gets said a lot and sometimes the classroom environment feels opposite to that, but trust me, teachers are so desperate for students to ask questions and express confusion. It’s like caffeine, it’s such a rush when you get a student asking for help, because that is one way a student is interacting with the material. I’ve had students just loudly proclaim “what?!” in the middle of class when something confusing comes up. It was not rude, it was the environment I made for the room, and we were able to work through the confusion.
Thank you for reading this. It was sort of a spur of the moment essay that I wanted to get out there for future students to read! Hello, Future Student! I hope you got something out of this, especially the part about being kinder to yourself in your journey through this. It’ll be a chaotic ride, but I hope you’re geared up for this experience.
Uploaded 2022 January 13. This is a part of Johan's random writings, and you can find more here.