My dad comes from a family of math lovers who enjoy sharpening their skills by trying to outdo one another at chess. For those unfamiliar with the game, planning how to move your pieces across a 64-square board draws on many of the same cognitive processes used to solve math equations. It requires logical calculation, pattern recognition, and branching logic to map out several hypothetical choices before choosing the best path.
I, on the other hand, can still remember the moment I stopped believing I was good at math. My teacher posted a sheet of manila paper on the blackboard containing several algebraic formulas and quickly discussed them one by one. While I had a basic grasp of what each rule meant, I couldn’t really understand how they fit into the bigger picture or why they were important. So I just dutifully copied each one into my notebook.
But like many other children who rely on rote learning to get through the subject, I never truly mastered algebra. Or the more advanced mathematics that followed. Without a conceptual anchor, it became too difficult to remember what all the rules were and how to apply them. Eventually, I lost interest altogether.
“Fluency is not the same as recall,” explained Dr. Debbie Marie Verzosa, an esteemed professor at the University of Southern Mindanao and former president of the Philippine Council for Mathematics Teacher Educators. “When students learn Math by memorizing steps without understanding how they work, they struggle to adjust when a problem is presented differently. They get confused or forget altogether the moment they encounter more advanced problem-solving.”
To illustrate this, Verzosa shared findings from a study that examined whether Philippine public school students truly understood the concept of one-half. When shown a circle that’s divided VERTICALLY into two equal parts, with one side shaded, 97 percent of Grade 2 students and 90 percent of Grade 3 students correctly identified the shaded portion as one-half.
However, when the same concept was presented with half of the circle shaded DIAGONALLY, those who got it correctly dropped to 71 percent among Grade 2 students and 73 percent among Grade 3 students. The change in orientation should not have affected their answer. Instead, it revealed that many students had learned just to recognize a familiar image rather than fully understand the concept behind it.
I hear a lot of people say that they chose a certain profession or college course to escape from math. As it turns out, math is omnipresent in daily life, and fluency in its language gives people a significant advantage.
Mathematical fluency means being able to work flexibly with numbers and concepts, and use one’s knowledge to explore problems and opportunities in the world. The emphasis in the classroom, then, should not solely focus on whether students got the final answer. According to Verzosa, that approach teaches students that they’re not allowed to make mistakes, which discourages them from trying multiple solutions and figuring things out on their own.
Instead, teachers must focus on the students’ reasoning. “Ask students, ’How did you get this?’” she said. “Children’s answers should not be based on what they think their teacher wants to hear, but should be based on their own thinking.”
Mindset also has a powerful influence. A large-scale study of future math teachers across 14 countries found that 45.1 percent of Filipino participants viewed mathematical ability as a product of talent rather than effort. This matters because teachers’ beliefs can shape the expectations they set for their students. When difficulty is interpreted as a lack of natural ability, some children may be labeled as “not a math person” or “slow learner” instead of being given different explanations, creative activities, and enough time and practice to improve.
We live in an era where many math problems can be easily answered by artificial intelligence. Recently, an OpenAI reasoning model even successfully disproved the Erdos unit distance conjecture, an 80-year-old unresolved problem in discrete geometry.
But this breakthrough does not make mathematical thinking less valuable. Now more than ever, the true value of mathematics is not simply knowing the final answer but the skills you gain in the process of getting there. It develops thinking strategies to approach and unpack a problem, the grit to persist when the initial solution doesn’t work, and the creativity to discover meaningful connections.
Somewhere between memorizing formulas and fearing the wrong answer, I had lost the confidence to explore. A part of me wishes my younger self had a passionate teacher like Verzosa so I wouldn’t have disengaged from my lessons. Through our school’s Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, my commitment now is to help teachers and students approach math with wonder and to develop a deeper desire to master its language. And perhaps, through witnessing their excitement and love for the subject, I will also begin to find my way back.
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eleanor@shetalksasia.com