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 don’t like to talk about my personal history in a paper, but in this case it’s 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 can’t 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. Every time I have given this lecture, it has gotten 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 I’m…