The Book for Math Empowerment: Rethinking the Subject of Mathematics. - Review - book reviews

The Book for Math Empowerment: Rethinking the Subject of Mathematics

by Sandra Manigault Godosan Publications, 1997, Stafford, Virginia 112 pages, Soft cover: $12.95

A student once told me, "Mathematics is something you do, not something you understand." Sadly, among secondary as well as post-secondary students, this perception of mathematics is rather widespread.

Over the past thirty years, and more intensively since the 1980s, mathematics educators have developed innovations to reform pedagogical practices that contribute to this perception. These reform efforts have mainly focused on changing curriculum materials and teaching methods. In efforts to address student perception of performance in mathematics, few educators have directly addressed students around issues that they can indeed influence. Only three books come to mind: Marilyn Frankenstein's 1989, Relearning Mathematics: A Different Third R-Radical Maths; Claudia Zaslavsky's Fear of Math: How to Get Over It and Get On with Your Life, published in 1994; and the subject of this review, The Book for Math Empowerment: Rethinking the Subject of Mathematics, by Sandra Manigault.

In a clearly original approach, Professor Sandra Manigault helps students work on their own psychology so that their attitudes about themselves and mathematics are positive.

Divided into two parts, the book is for, according to the author's introduction, "those with a history of negative math experiences who wish to experience math recovery and math empowerment; and those who wish to provide positive math experiences for their children or their students." Manigault takes a decidedly therapeutic and spiritual approach to helping individuals recognize, and then eliminate, their learned dislike of mathematics.

The book's first part contains three chapters, each presenting tools for personal empowerment. Here is where the originality of Manigault's approach is most evident. She challenges conventional and received -- even trendy -- ideas about mathematics learning. For many educators and students, Part One may be uncomfortable at first because the approach is novel. However, read it with an open mind and suspend judgement until you have tried the approach.

The author begins by presenting affirmations for reprogramming the mind. She recommends to those who do not love mathematics that they say the various affirmations daily to "clear blockages from past turbulence" and to chip away at one's own resistance to achieving in mathematics.

She then goes on to outline the "dos and don'ts" of study and uses anecdotes to illustrate them. Here, and elsewhere in the book, she provides exercises so that readers further reflect on themselves.

Interestingly, she emphasizes the need for students to have time for themselves for renewal and to align themselves with a "Higher Self" or "Creator." And, she encourages students to take responsibility for their actions and to realize that success, rather than being something that just happens, is "conceived, visualized, planned, executed, and reworked."

Furthermore, Manigault addresses topics such as "mistakes in thinking," studying in the midst of pain, and befriending the rules.

The second part of the book contains five chapters which extend the tools presented in the first part. One chapter addresses parents specifically, while the audience of another chapter is the teachers. Using her own experience as a teacher, the author provides advice which can easily be implemented.

With the use of research and her own experience, Manigault suggests important connections between musical education and mathematical learning. As a student of the piano from the age of seven, she maintains that through music education, individuals develop "thinking patterns and study skills academics long to see in their math and science students: patience, willingness to practice, persistence, organization, ability to adapt to new situations, problem solving techniques, and so forth." She also informs us of research studies demonstrating the positive influence of musical education on brain development and for children's spatial reasoning.

Here the author proposes useful and important questions on which teachers should reflect. From among her questions, I was particularly struck by two: "Does knowing the nature of [students'] problems make you empathetic or cynical?"; and, "As your students exit the classroom, do you ever hear a `thank you'?" As I reflect on these questions, I realize that I am gently being prodded into action. Manigault is asking me not only to think about my attitude toward students, but also to transform my pedagogical acts into one that -- in the face of poor student performance -- clearly demonstrate empathy and offer effective remedies.

Manigault has injected into the discussion of post-secondary mathematics education a most critical variable -- the student. She does so by helping students, parents, and teachers recognize the responsibility of the individual to change what only they can truly change -- their affective relation to mathematics and their view of themselves as a mathematics learner.

The Book for Math Empowerment is as important as it is original. Manigault brings to her work more than twenty-five years of teaching in varied contexts. Currently, she teaches mathematics at Northern Virginia Community College, where she developed this book as a response to her students' needs -- which are not unlike the needs of the students I and others teach.

Dr. Arthur B. Powell is an associate professor of mathematics in the Academic Foundations Department at Rutgers University-Newark, New Jersey. His latest book Ethnomathematics: Challenging Eurocentrism in Mathematics Education, a coedited collection was released in 1997 by the State University of New York Press.

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