In Jr. High I failed basic algebra. I'll be the first to admit here that fourteen year olds have a very bad sense of what is the end of the world and what is not, so I try to keep my experience on this subject in perspective. But it seems clear from forums like this one and so many others that people's early experiences with mathematics resonate far down the line. And with math there's the feeling of absolutes. Either you are good at it or you're not, either you get it or you don't, either you are smart or you are not supposed to get it anyway. Because math is hard right?

At the start of the new school year I was embarrassed to show up on the first day and face the other kids who asked me why I wasn't in the "smart class." I wasn't by any means the highest achiever at school, but I still played on the team. Failing made me want to cling to my smart label even more, yet because of that one class I felt it all slipping away. My sense of identity was at a fragile state, resting timidly on band stickers I put on my book covers and the macrame in my locker. I think failing math hit my sense of self confidence pretty hard.

I hated math. I hated it for making me feel stupid, and I hated it because there was nothing enjoyable about it. It was just there, like a big black wall I would run into every once in a while. It would stare me down, not letting me know why it was there or why I should care, just intimidating me and forcing me to walk around it. Like a good teenager, in the face of my frustration and my shortcomings, I rebelled.

I slunk into my new class with scowling eyes and a plan of attack: I would push my frustration back on the establishment. I would not conform to math! Math was pointless, suppressive and totalitarian. The whole thing stifled my creativity and individuality. I, forward thinking 8th grader that I was, would not be contained by such a bourgeoisie institution.

Like I said, it was 8th grade. Passions were high and political terminology was new.

I believed there was nothing this teacher could do to make math any less frustrating, or to make me feel better about being held back. I was ready to hate the crurel, toad-like miser who would waddle up to the chalk board and scratch out meaningless equations that he would force me to memorize. Oh, what a shock he was in for.

And then my plan immediately started to crumble when I found out that my teacher was young and female, and began the class with a hands-on demonstration about geometry and a short lesson in physics. This was the first real class she'd taught, and while I still harbored hopes that she would be mean or useless, she turned out to be neither. She was funny. She talked to us about what math meant, where we could find it in the world, how it was applied and why she loved it. Maybe that was more of a shocker than learning what math was good for. Finding someone who liked it just because. I didn't know on the first day that I would eventually come to trust this woman like a close friend, and confide in her the anger I felt at not understanding. And while I didn't realize it at the time, the fact that she was female was also having an affect on me.

That's not to say things turned around right away.

The first few weeks of class went something like the previous year - I'd sit up late at the kitchen table with my dad, trying to make headway on my assignments and frequently breaking down into tears of frustration. I felt like a failure, and I was anxious and afraid to go to school the next day with yet another incomplete assignment. Worst of all I felt helpless to change the situation. No text book could tell me what I needed to know, and this was before we were privy to any online homework sites. My dad did the best he could, but he wasn't a math whiz either. He tried to be patient and would sit and read through my text book, trying as hard as I did to understand it all. A few times I turned my frustration around on him and would storm up to my room, doors slamming. The big black wall was surrounding me. I couldn't find a way around it, I couldn't see where I was going and I was starting to feel like any confidence I had in my intelligence was all wrong.

The first Friday afternoon in class, my new teacher opened up a book called "Five Minute Mysteries." These short stories were all like episodes of Law and Order or Murder She Wrote, in which a tantalizing mystery needs to be solved. At the end of the story you are asked to solve the case, and the answer is listed at the end of the book. Personally, I thought of them more like episodes of The X-Files (in retrospect I still harbored the geek gene). I had read shorter versions of these stories as a kid and I loved them. I loved hearing them and thinking, thinking, thinking, and then getting the answer.

These stories were a strong teaching tool, because through them my teacher revealed the essence of mathematics. Each problem is a mystery waiting to be solved. If you learn to speak the language and acquire the tools, you can break down the mystery, interview the witnesses and balance the equation. Quite frequently, the path to the solution is not straight forward, but the result of a series of creative moves. This connection to something that I loved so much started to push back the big wall. It gave me some space to breath. I felt like maybe I could stick with a math problem if I thought the ending would be like solving a little mystery.

I can't recount all of the teaching techniques that my teacher used to help me understand things. I do remember afternoons in her classroom, still struggling with problems. She saw the tears a few times. I remember in class playing with demonstration toys and doing group exercises. I remember when the after school homework sessions started to change. I was still getting the answers wrong, but at some point I finally trusted my teacher, and her abilities, enough to start asking the "stupid" questions I'd kept hidden in my previous classes. I wasn't afraid to tell her, after fifteen minutes of struggling, that I still didn't get it. And I remember that she was not only patient but happy to be there, excited by math and glad to walk me through things as many times as I needed. It takes a lot of questions to get the answers in mathematics, and quite frankly, I think many teachers are not equipped or not willing to listen to them all.

One winter day, I distinctly recall sitting all the way through algebra, tapping my foot in anticipation of its end. As soon as the bell rang, I hopped up and ran to the front. I grabbed my teachers attention and began to spout off what I felt was a perfectly wonderful and exciting story of how I'd solved one of the homework problems. I'd told her how I'd thought it was funny that I couldn't do it at first and how I finally figured it out. After that day, I genuinely started to look forward to math class.

Slowly the dark, unreachable cliff that stretched up before me and all around me, fell away. The wind came in and the sun came out and I was sailing over a vast open sea. New skills appeared on the horizon like islands, and I navigated the rough waters with patience and confidence. It was fun to see how fast I could shake the answer out of a short problem, or take a tricky word problem and gently extract the equation. I was Moulder. I was Scully. I was good at math.

I still didn't think I'd become a physics major, even at the end of high school when I'd finished up two years of calculus. With two more great teachers along the way I'd fallen in love with that subject as well, although I was still never the very best at it. I just acquired the tools and continued to crack the cases. There are many people who can't focus on math unless they have the application close at hand, and while I like this, I think there are many people who would truly enjoy the satisfaction of solving math puzzles if they only had someone to help them overcome the big wall. It's a mind block for many people to learn the language of math, but it's not impossible. Like learning any language it's often stressful enough to try to string together the correct words in the correct order without considering implication and tone. But at some point the words just start to flow.

This topic seems to generate more discussion than many others on this site. There are probably many folks who feel the way I did, maybe without realizing it: that they want to understand math, and want to get around that wall, they just don't know how. I give so much credit to this teacher I had, and many others I had after her, and I continue to believe that good teaching has everything to do with getting kids to move past that wall early. Students should have the resources and support to approach their frustration with math as many times as it takes to move past it.

In my time at the American Physical Society I worked with members of the education department there. Their group explored how one of the biggest problems in our primary school education system so far as math and physics goes, comes down to a lack of communication between teaching departments and math and science departments at universities. Quite often, even if undergrads want to become math and science teachers, they are separated from taking real math and science classes. This lack of communication also means that those departments do not assist in building curriculum that the future math and science teachers take. Just like any other subject, teaching mathematics is not the same as teaching English or history, and the curriculum needs to reflect that.

So it's true that math class is tough. But I so titled this post in a swing of irony. When the phrase "Math class is tough," was uttered by Teen Talk Barbie at her debut in 1992, Mattel was met with some understandable outrage. The comment, coming from a female cultural icon, was not sympathetic or followed up by a "But we'll get through it!" It implied what too many people have already pointed out: giving girls the notion that they will do worse in mathematics than boys, or are less apt to do well, is a self fulfilling prophecy. Talking G.I. Joe never uttered such a phrase. I won't ever be able to measure how much of a difference it made that my eighth grade algebra teacher was a woman, but I know it did. The struggle that I had with math was definitely not unique to my gender, but in a male dominated field, it did change how I overcame it. I'm not sure where I'd be if I hadn't accepted the idea early on that not only could I do math, but I would not be anomaly or rarity if did. Women do math, just like men. And some women will fight to study what they love no matter what; but why should they have to?

Talking Teen Barbie is only one example of the many gender biased sentiments expressed by kid's toys these days. Comedian Jared Logan remarks that commercials for girls' toys during Saturday morning cartoons are alarming in their disregard for eliminating stereotypical gender roles ("It's like Susan B. Anthony caught an assassin's bullet and suffrage never happened.") He goes on a rant about a fictional "Shop 'till You Cook" game for girls. On that note, I'll leave you with a segment of an NY Times article that some of you may remember from 1993, when a group of people took this issue into their own hands:

Your son tears the wrapping paper off his fierce new "Talking Duke" G. I. Joe doll and eagerly presses the talk button. Out comes a painfully chirpy voice that sounds astonishingly like Barbie's saying, "Let's go shopping!"

Does your son:

A) Furiously vaporize the doll with his own phaser rifle?

B) Go shopping with Joe?

C) Say: "Mom, I suspect we're the lucky victims of an elaborate nationwide publicity stunt designed to ridicule sexual stereotyping in children's toys. This barbaric little action figure you gave me may turn out to be a valuable collector's item."

If the answer is C, your son may be a collector's item himself, for he has correctly divined the latest socially conscious news media prank to hit the nation's toy stores. Painstaking Alterations

For the last several months, a group of performance artists based in the East Village of Manhattan has been buying Talking Dukes and "Teen Talk" Barbies, which cost $40 to $50 each, painstakingly swapping their voice boxes and then, with the aid of cohorts, replacing dolls on the shelves of toy stores in at least two states.

The group, which asserts it has surgically altered 300 dolls, says its aim is to startle the public into thinking about the Stone Age-world view that the dolls reflect.

The result is a mutant colony of Barbies-on-steroids who roar things like "Attack!" "Vengeance is mine!" and "Eat lead, Cobra!" The emasculated G. I. Joe's, meanwhile, twitter, "Will we ever have enough clothes?" and "Let's plan our dream wedding!"