Don’t Make It Harder Than It Needs to Be

The other day I was feeling off. Full of insecurity and self-doubt, just generally kind of icky about my life. So what did I do, as the mature adult I am? I took it out on the nearest innocent bystander, my husband.

He's the calm, cool, collected one in this relationship, so he blew it off. Blew me off, honestly. Unfortunately for him, my hot-headed Sagittarius self does not understand "cool off." I don't cool off, I catch fire. By the next day I was ready to run him over with my car (figuratively. mostly).

We finally had it out. After an extremely long, difficult conversation, he pulls me into his arms, kisses my head, and tells me everything is going to be okay. And I sit up and say, "Why didn't you just do that at the beginning?! We could have skipped all the rest!"

He genuinely didn't understand what I meant. He'd been making the conversation more complicated than it had to be ( which, side note, is unusual for us. He's normally the one turning complicated things simple. I'm the one stressing over every tiny detail.)

But that's the thing, isn't it? We tend to overcomplicate what doesn't need to be complicated. I wasn't asking for a difficult conversation, tears, and anguish. All I really needed was a kiss on the forehead and the reassurance that I wasn't the monster I'd built myself up to be in my head. But for him, emotions are complicated, and so he proceeded accordingly.

Math works the same way.

We look at the big scary problem on the page and it feels like too much. But when we break it into pieces, it just wants a forehead kiss and a sweet treat. Okay, not exactly. But when we take it one step at a time, we realize each piece was simple all along.

I hated linear equations growing up. Didn't understand them, thought they made no sense, wrote them off as too hard. It wasn't until I started teaching them to my own kids that I realized: slope just means how much the line leans, and the y-intercept is just where it crosses the axis. That's it. That's nowhere near as hard as I made it out to be in my head.

But when we expect something to be hard, we usually make it hard. How many times have I stood in front of a genuinely simple problem with my heart racing, positive there was no way I could do it? Now it's complicated, when it didn't have to be. I tell my kids constantly: don't make this any harder than it needs to be.

Between you and me, math is a puzzle. Lots of small pieces that have to fit together just right. I'm not saying it's always simple. But when we break it down, it becomes so much more doable.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Same with math.

A line is just going from one place to the next. An equation is just adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing. Take it one small step at a time and you'll have your answer before you know it.

And don't be afraid to throw in a little extra love and care for good measure. Math needs love too.

If "break it into small, doable pieces" sounds like exactly the reassurance you need right now, that's the whole heart behind the Math Map. It takes the big scary "where do I even start" feeling out of math and walks you through it one manageable step at a time. You can find it inside the Wonder Vault.