Math is Hieroglyphics

Because my job requires me to teach sev­eral dif­fer­ent top­ics to sev­eral dif­fer­ent grade lev­els every day, I fre­quently expe­ri­ence the pro­fes­sional equiv­a­lent of being a par­ti­cle accel­er­a­tor at CERN; two ideas, tiny and unre­lated, swirl around at ever increas­ing speeds until, some­how, they col­lide, cre­at­ing a spray of new ideas and insights.

One of these col­li­sions hap­pened on a recent day when I was teach­ing my fourth grade gifted class about Egypt­ian hiero­glyphs imme­di­ately after a fifth grade math les­son on equa­tions with vari­ables. While explain­ing to my stu­dents that the Egyp­tians often wrote hiero­glyphs out of order, and that some of the sym­bols rep­re­sented sounds, some ideas, some were sim­ply mod­i­fiers or ampli­fiers, and some had dif­fer­ent inter­pre­ta­tions depend­ing on the other sym­bols around them, I real­ized that this is exactly how our math­e­mat­i­cal sym­bol sys­tem works.

One of the frus­tra­tions that I have when teach­ing math is that stu­dents tend to read from left to right, and often when they get to some­thing that hangs them up, they just stop there and try to fig­ure it out. The prob­lem is that beyond the most ele­men­tary num­ber sen­tences (2 + 3 = 5), this approach doesn’t really work. In fact, it is essen­tial for stu­dents to learn that some­times you read from right to left, some­times you read from the mid­dle out, and some­times you have to piece dif­fer­ent parts together in seem­ingly ran­dom order until the whole equa­tion makes sense.

Just as read­ing instruc­tion has to be cen­tered around the mean­ing of the text, not just the sur­face fea­tures, math instruc­tion has to be about prob­lem solv­ing not just com­pu­ta­tion. But the lan­guage of math is a tool for prob­lem solving.

I know I’m not the first to rec­og­nize that math­e­mat­ics is its own lan­guage, but I’m now won­der­ing if it might be wise to explic­itly teach math the way we teach read­ing. How far can (or should) we take the par­al­lel? Would we end up with a math equiv­a­lent of “phone­mic aware­ness”? What about fig­u­ra­tive lan­guage? Sub­text? What might a math cur­ricu­lum look like if it were writ­ten by read­ing spe­cial­ists instead of mathematicians?