My 14-year-old son and I homeschool and we both feel this way about math. My son didn't go into detail about why math makes him sad when his math loving geology professor aunt asked him why he didn't like math. He told her it wasn't that he couldn't do math. He never had a problem doing math (except for the problems dysgraphia causes) but we worked around those problems at home. He hopes to eventually take a CLEP test and be done with it. She told him that he would be limiting himself if he didn't go beyond algebra. I get the feeling that she thinks I should push him to do more. She made me feel like we were behind in math because he is only working at grade level.
She, like probably a lot of other people on this board, thinks math is beautiful. Because of things that have happened recently I associate it with ugliness and sadness and anxiety and I think my son is feeling something similar. Probability, angles, degrees, and curves are words we associate with sadness and anxiety because of his scoliosis issues. For three years we lived our lives watching the numbers on the clock making sure he got the required number of painful hours in the brace. Getting enough hours in the brace meant he did not get enough hours of sleep because he could not sleep in it. At each appointment there was a number that we had to avoid. The numbers kept creeping closer to that awful number each time he went to the doctor no matter how much pain he went through in the brace. Then there are blood pressure numbers that go up because of anxiety and the doctor tells me my risk of having a stroke or heart attack in the next 10 years--so there are those awful probabilities again. I check the nutrition information on everything I eat for cholesterol (more numbers) and count calories and exercise for the recommended number of minutes every day trying to get as healthy as I can so I can help my son when he goes through a six-hour surgery and five days in the hospital. Ugly, depressing numbers everywhere I look--and then there are the numbers on the scale. There are no euphemisms for the "bad" numbers, a number is what it is.
We are just having a lot of trouble seeing the beauty in numbers right now and I am not going to push him. I think we both need a break, but then I start thinking about what my sister-in-law said. Is my son limiting himself if he doesn't go beyond algebra?
