Teaching Logic to Mathphobic Students

2005 by Teed Rockwell

Invited Paper for the 14th annual California State University Symposium
on University Teaching. CSU Channel Islands, April 2011

Some Introductory Autobiography

I ordinarily dont like to talk about my personal history in a paper, but in this case
its really unavoidable. This paper is about my analysis, and partial repair of, a particular
failing of mine: I am terrible at Math, a problem made even worse by the fact that I get
paid to teach it. I was able to overcome this problem by means of a particular kind of
introspection into my own mental states. Consequently, I really cant tell this story without
putting a lot of my own personal history into it.
The structure I will use for this paper is a three part, more or less chronological,
division. The first part will cover what I learned about myself while trying to overcome my
math incompetence. The second part will be the various ways I applied what I learned
while teaching my logic students. The final part will be the lecture I developed to teach my
students the best mental strategies for doing logic problems. I have only given this lecture
twice, but both times it got very promising results. It is my hope that those of you who
teach math more regularly will be inspired to develop similar techniques which will get
even better results.
Most math teachers know there are lots of people who are very good with words
and very bad with math. However, because Im interested in cognitive science, I looked at
this problem in a very particular way. One thing weve learned from neuroscience is that
we can learn a lot about the way our minds work from studying cognitive deficits. There
are cases, for example, of people who have nothing else wrong with their vision, but cant
recognize faces. From this we know that the part of the brain that recognizes faces is
different from the part of the brain that recognizes other things. Similarly, the fact that
some people are good with words and bad with numbers shows that the mind must be
doing something different when it uses words than when it uses numbers.
A few years ago, I took a workshop on a kind of therapy called Neuro-Linguistic
programming, or NLP. One of the things NLP does is analyze the subjective experience of
skillful people, and find out whats going on in their minds while they are behaving
skillfully. NLP does this by breaking their subjective experience down to a series of
sensory patterns, which of course are either Audial, Visual, or Kinesthetic. (Cooks or
perfumers probably have skills that involve smell or taste patterns, but the rest of us
usually dont.) They say that the reason that people have different skills is that different
people are better at processing and interrelating different kinds of information. Some
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people are better at hearing sounds in their minds, others are better at making pictures in
their minds, and others are better at responding to patterns in the sense of touch. People
develop skills by creating flow charts from one kind of sensory modality to the other, or by
manipulating patterns within a single sensory modality. Most of the time we are not aware
of what kinds of patterns we are sensing or imagining when we are doing something
skillfully, we just know that were in the flow and everythings going right. But if you
introspect carefully, you can slow these processes down, and see what is going on in your
mind when you are using your skills.
The exercises I took in that workshop eventually made me realize that I do almost
everything by manipulating sounds in my head. Sometimes this has a lot of advantages. It
means, for example, that I dont have to translate my thoughts into words, because they
already are words. My wife, who took the same workshop, tells me that she frequently has
the experience of seeing her ideas with her minds eye, and not being able to verbally
express them. That never happens to me. Im either completely speechless or I know what
I want to say and say it. (As most of my friends know, its usually the latter.)
When I write a philosophy paper, I hear the ideas in the paper as words. Whenever
Im writing about other philosophers, I hear their voices raising objections and asking
questions. I then write something in response to those objections. If I hear a philosopher
objecting to that response, I write another response, and so on until I dont hear any more
voices objecting. As I learned how to introspect this process, I began to notice that I heard
each philosopher as having a distinctly different voice from the others. Philosophers I had
met face to face, or who had given lectures Id attended, would speak to me in their own
voices. But I would subconsciously create a voice for philosophers whom I hadnt met.
Nietzsche had a ringing tenor, Hume a ponderous Baritone, and Plato, for some reason,
had an upper class British accent. One thing that really made me aware of this process was
the voice I had subconsciously created for Berkeley philosopher John Searle. Because he
was trained in the Oxford/Cambridge school of analytic philosophy, the style of his writing
made me hear his voice with a Cambridge British accent. When I heard him speak, I
discovered to my surprise that he has a Midwestern twang almost exactly like John
Waynes. That is how I hear his voice today when I write papers on his work.
There are, however, times when hearing voices or talking to yourself are very bad
strategies. I eventually realized that I was bad at math because I relied on verbal strategies
for doing calculations. If I was given a problem like {(4 x 12) /2 }+4, I would say to
myself things like Four times twelve is forty eight. Right, now divide that by two and
thats how much? Wait, what was the original first step? Oh right, it was forty eight. So
two into eight is four, and two into four is two. So if theres no carrying, that should mean
the answer is 24. and so on. If I broke the train of thought anywhere, Id have to start over
again. It was rather like learning to recite a long and complicated poem. By the time I had
learned to follow this sentence to the end, everyone else in the class had done ten
problems.

The creators of NLP had had a great deal of success helping bad spellers by
teaching them to switch from audial strategies to visual strategies. They claimed that
students who stored memories of words as pictures were almost always good spellers,
those who stored the words as sounds were bad spellers. I was a terrible speller, and stored
words as sound. I gradually began to notice that I had many other inabilities that sprung
from the fact that I rarely used visual strategies for anything. For example, Ive never been
able to read maps very well. If someone sends me into a room to find a wallet or set of car
keys I wont see them even if they are right under my nose. Also, if Im exiting off the
freeway I always have to take the lane nearest to the exit, because I cant visually follow
the divider line to the exit and be sure that both lanes actually feed into the exit. I also
never paid any attention to diagrams in books. I thought it kind of strange that people put
pictures in adult books, seeing as the words had all the information, I thought those
diagrams were just decorative. This sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud, but I
never said it out loud, so I never noticed. All of these tasks require me to pick out a single
visual pattern buried in a large and complex field of other visual patterns.
I can do pattern recognition quite well in audial patterns. I can listen to a
performance of Hindustani Music and often tell you what Raga is being performed, and
what notes in the raga are being emphasized. I can tell the difference between a major
seventh and a diminished chord in a jazz piano performance. And I can often read peoples
emotional reactions from their voice tones. But I cant make anything like these kinds of
discriminations visually.
Studying NLP had made me aware of these deficits. Being offered teaching jobs in
logic made it necessary for me to overcome them. Now that I realized that audial strategies
didnt work, I monitored myself closely and made sure that I changed strategies whenever
I started to work on problems by talking to myself. And whenever I developed a strategy
that worked, I would share it with my students.

Teaching Visual Strategies

(To Myself and My Students.)
One of the first things I did was try to do arithmetic calculations by using images
instead of sounds. This got results quite quickly. I soon learned to do two-place arithmetic
in my head, something I could never do by talking to myself. I was very proud of this and
told a mathematically skilled friend about it. I said that I looked forward to being able to
do even longer and more complicated calculations in my head. You dont need to
visualize in your head if you do good scratch work the friend said.
This was a very important revelation, because no one had ever told me what scratch
work was for. Consequently, my scratch work was done grudgingly, out of a sense of
uncomprehended obligation, and was usually impossible to read, even for me. Being
naturally lazy, I would try to write down as little as possible, and do as much in my head
as possible, which meant more reliance on talking to myself. Now that I realized that good
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Math strategies are visual, I could see the relationship between what went on in my head
and what I wrote on paper. This was how I explained the relationship to my students.
Whenever possible, try to do calculations in your head. When a calculation gets too
complicated, however, you will experience what I call the wugga-wugga effect. In
other words, the picture you are trying to make in your head will dissolve (wugga-wuggawugga), and you will be left with a mental blank screen and an anguished screaming
voice in your head saying Ill never learn how to do this! However, this is not the voice
of truth, any more than the voice of Plato in my head is really Plato. What you need to do
is to write out the calculation in a nice neat hand, because an unreadable calculation is as
useless as a blurry mental image. Being able to see part of the calculation in front of you
on paper makes it possible to continue doing the calculation in your head, until you
experience the wugga-wugga effect again, at which point you need to go back to using the
paper. Skilled mathematicians are people who have learned to establish this relationship
between mental images and paper images. Because most math teachers have learned to do
this subconsciously, they dont tell their students about it. Consequently, there is a belief
in what is called natural math ability which Nature magically bestows on some students
and withholds from others.
Of course the ability to visualize varies from person to person. There are virtuosos
of visualization, many of whom become great scientists or mathematicians. Richard
Feynman, for example, writes that he could evaluate complex topology theorems by
constructing pictures in his head that obeyed them. And Nicola Tesla was apparently able
to design machines by creating not just internal images, but full-scale hallucinations that
floated in front of his eyes. This ability enabled him to tell his technicians how to build
prototypes without ever making blueprints. It also had the disadvantage that he would
sometimes bump into mailboxes, because the machines he was designing kept obstructing
his view. People like this probably rarely experience the wugga-wugga effect, and in this
sense could be seen as having a natural ability to become good at math. But the rest of us
can increase our ability to hold pictures in our heads, and can learn when we need to
switch from internal images to scratch work. In addition, many of our students may have
this natural ability to visualize, and may be doing badly in math because they dont know
how to utilize it.
The ability to create stable images in our heads and/or on paper is not enough,
however. Math also requires you to be able to recognize patterns in those images, which
will tell you what new images need to be generated for the next step in the calculations.
This is even harder for me, which is why I have trouble reading maps and finding my car
keys when they are in plain sight. It is also why I often have trouble following the
reasoning in mathematical textbooks. Often I see a text which says lets start with this
formula followed by a string of mathematical gobbledygook. The text then says when
we perform operations X and Y we get this result, followed by another string of
mathematical gobbledygook. Before you can even try to understand the text, you have to
be able to see the differences between these two strings of numbers. If both strings just
look like gobbledygook to you, rereading the text over and over will be of no help. This
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kind of visual recognition is a skill which not everyone has, and even people who have that
skill may not realize that it is necessary for understanding math.
How does this kind of visual recognition work? What is it like experientially to
have the flash of insight that makes you realize that the image before you is an example of
THIS particular mathematical principle? This is a complicated question, and the few
answers I have are applicable primarily to the only branch of math I know anything
aboutsymbolic logic. To do logic proofs, we begin with a list of logic equations, and are
told that the last one (the conclusion) is derivable from all the others (the premises). There
are several rules of inference that enable us to transform the premises into other equations,
and then combine these transformed equations so as to derive the conclusion. The first step
then, is to be able to recognize that, in a list of say ten equations, # 2 an #6 are an example
of one of those inference forms. The students are taught an exemplar of each inference
form. Modus Ponens, for example, is if P then Q, P, therefore Q. In each problem,
different letters, or multiple letters, would be substituted for P and Q, and the two premises
of the inference line may be on two different lines. For example, if AL is on line 2, and
(AL ) (D B) is on line 6, then we can combine lines 2 and 6 to derive DB. From
there, the student must make chains of such inferences that lead to the conclusion.
However, if the student does not know how to perform that first step, no chains are going
to be made. I often told my students that performing this first step was rather like playing
the kids game Wheres Waldo? only it was wheres Modus Ponens?. In each case,
you are trying to find a small recognizable visual pattern within a large and complex
visible field.
Eventually I decided to not just tell my students about this similarity, but give them
a chance to experience it. My plan was to start them out playing Wheres Waldo, and
then move from there to other visual recognition games which had a greater similarity to
recognizing logical inferences. I started by projecting pictures from one of the Wheres
Waldo? books. These are complicated crowd scenes with the Waldo character buried in
the crowds, and my students tried to find Waldo in the crowds. Next we play a game in
which we search a matrix of apparently nonsensical letters for words that were buried
within it. Some of these puzzles are commercially available in childrens puzzle books.
However, I found those too difficult to start with, because some of them had the words
backwards, diagonal, etc. So I created a sequence that looked like this:

dog cat badger zebra lion squirrel

aardvark chimp alligator frog fly
And then interspersed other letters to create this puzzle:

debcdognflbncaardvarkenstein
qlaambjlioncuwahflygshcilpen
wsdtalligatorzkarsquirrelcoptox
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magtlewzorstdesioacasbipahopetl
deearocarudarbndgvondelipishbaba
darakrirpizdartlamickeuckmackmim
ramleeadmlediagdtngoughempihahah
We then played one of the more complicated games from one of the puzzle books. Finally
we would actually play Wheres Modus Ponens using a list of logic equations. The
students had to join as many combinations of equations as they could to create examples of
the five basic inference forms. This game would not be the same as actually doing a logic
proof. They would not be connecting these inferences together in chains to reach a
conclusion. They would just be taking one step forward in logical space in a variety of
different directions. But I thought it likely that they would spontaneously figure out how to
travel towards a particular goal in logical space, once they learned to recognize the mental
processes involved in taking that first step.
The results were quite encouraging. I gave my class a test shortly after the
Wheres Waldo lecture and all but three students got As. Of those all but 3 got A plus,
which means they only made one very small mistake. In most cases, it was the same
mistake, dealing with a topic I hadnt covered as thoroughly as I should have. Only one
person in the class got less than a B. In the class evaluation, several students said that the
Wheres Waldo lecture was extremely helpful to them.
I showed the test to a colleague of mine, and asked him if this test were unusually
easy. He said the test was reasonably difficult, and that he would have expected the
standard distribution of grades on it. He suggested that I give this same lecture to one of
his classes and not give it to the other, so we could conduct something like a controlled
experiment. The class that heard the lecture got four times as many As as the other class.
This is, of course, too small a sample to claim anything like scientific proof. But I
hope that some of you will try to develop similar methods of teaching for your branches of
math. Ive already developed new visual skills that just spontaneously came to me. I now
can predict text before Ive read it by looking at diagrams. And when I saw the movie
Spelling Bee, I reflexively started using visual strategies to spell for the first time in my
life. Most gratifying, however, was that I had several students who told me that they went
from being Mathphobic to being Math Whizes. I would encourage any of my readers who
are math teachers to create similar exercises, and I would be grateful if you could let me
know about your results by emailing me at teedrockwell@gmail.com.