The Untangling

The word ‘math’ makes Susannah hyperventilate. The “M Word” she calls it. Her breath strains in shallow bursts, rib cage pumping rapidly. Sweat beads on brow. Emotional and physical traumas both produce the same threat response in the brain whether it’s a sabre-tooth tiger attack or a math attack. This is a modern evolution of the brain’s threat response: same response, varied threats.

Susannah is my 83-year-old step-mother-in-law. She is sharp, thoughtful, generous, and possessed of a philosophical clarity that caught me off guard more than once during the days we spent together in Colorado. She agreed to let me interview her about her lifelong relationship with mathematics.

I wanted to understand what had happened in her life that formed this story of terrifying math monsters. Of hating mathematics. How did the word math become an enemy and what did that cost her?

JoyMath began with the staunch belief that mathematics belongs to everyone but has been stolen from us. Not sudden theft, but gradual shame, confusion, and exclusion, accumulating into deflation, a slow sinking into the belief that we were never enough.

“I am not a math person.”

I hear this constantly. From kids defending their confusion. From parents at pickup. From adults at gatherings. From conversations with teachers quietly admitting a weakness. It arrives quickly and casually, as if it were simply a fact about themselves, like eye color or height. It’s not wrong, it’s a form of protection: verbal armor.

The thing to understand though, is that armor is a protective story not a fact. Stories can change.

I wanted to understand this story pattern more deeply, not as an abstraction, but through sitting with a specific person and listening to how it actually happened. When Susannah told me on the phone that she had a kindergarten level of math, I suspected that wasn’t true. There was a valuable thread here I needed to follow. I’ve talked to plenty of kids who claimed they weren’t math people and it always felt fixable. Give them meaningful experiences in mathematics where they have choice, voice and belonging. Shift their trajectory a bit and they’ll be okay. But Susannah isn’t just starting out, she is an octogenarian. She has lived a whole lifetime holding this negative relationship with mathematics. How has that affected her story? What harm has it caused? What could be possible if she had a meaningful experience now with mathematics? What might change?

I flew to Colorado with a bag of materials and a recorder. I asked if she would talk to me honestly about mathematics. She said yes, and then asked how she could prepare so she could be a good pupil.

That answer told me everything I needed to know about where to begin.

Through my time with her, I learned that Susannah’s avoidant and venomous relationship with mathematics has two distinct origins that grew into one ugly monster over a lifetime.

The first origin is simply the letter grade: C.

Algebra showed up in Junior High. Before that, math had been unremarkable. “It was just something you did. I went from not really having strong feelings about math or anything to — I can’t think this way. I don’t like this. I don’t want this.”

The first C Susannah ever received was on a math test. “That humiliated me and only made me feel more and more like I hated it because I hadn’t gotten a good grade. That was not acceptable.”

The high standard was self-imposed. Her parents didn’t pay for grades or monitor homework closely. “I just had my own set of requirements, morals, whatever, and they required better than a C grade.” I asked if anyone noticed this shift. Nobody did. Not teachers. Not parents. Nobody asked questions and the system simply moved on without her.

“I felt like a failure. And when you feel like a failure, you become one. And so I became an absolute failure at math. I got a C, and that was unacceptable. So — boo to math.” She laughed when she said it. “And it has lasted forever.”

The second origin came later, built slowly across decades of noticing what mathematics enables in the world.

“We spend more time using math to make weapons than we do to do anything else with math,” she told me. The trebuchet in the 1300s. Guns aimed by the same reasoning that once aimed a catapult. “Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it has to be done,” she said. “I guess it’s kindergarten thinking, but it’s my thinking.”

She didn’t let math off easy for its better uses either. “Math has been wonderful. Vaccines, surgeries, all kinds of stuff that helps people. And we spend more money using that same math to do unconscionable things.” Both simultaneously true.

I pushed on the “we” in her statements. To examine our own thinking, we have to examine who we mean by “we.” Who gets to decide which problems math solves? Whoever holds power decides what needs solving, and that’s rarely about compassion. It’s about domination, power, and posturing.

“And the tool they use most to get there is mathematics. Maybe that’s part of my adult dislike of it.”

This is not bitterness. It is historically accurate. Mathematics has been used to design weapons, build surveillance systems, optimize financial instruments that extract wealth from vulnerable people, and construct arguments that make inequality look inevitable. Susannah looked at that pattern clearly and made a well-considered decision about how close she wanted to get to the tool.

The child’s shame made her vulnerable to avoidance. The adult’s observation gave that avoidance a philosophy. Together they produced a woman who has spent a lifetime keeping a careful, principled distance from something she is, as it turns out, quite good at.

I did not expect to find a small knotted misconception in her history.

Somewhere in those early algebra classes, Susannah developed a specific procedural misunderstanding about balancing equations. She believed that to balance an equation, you subtracted from one side and added to the other — opposite operations on opposite sides — rather than doing the same thing to both. It’s an understandable mistake: +2 and −2 cancel to zero, so the logic feels sound.

But it doesn’t work. Her equations never balanced. Every answer came out wrong. So she reasonably concluded, given what she’d been told, that the problem was her. This is what happens when teachers grade for right or wrong answers instead of looking for the misstep underneath them.

During our second session, without yet knowing this, I drew a simple equation. I talked through the terms. I drew a scale. I showed her that to keep both sides equal you must do the same thing to both sides to keep the scale balanced. So if you subtract four here on the left side, you must also subtract four there on the right side. Not opposite operations. The same operation, applied equally.

She went quiet.

“That’s one reason why I never was able to do it,” she said. “Because I was adding three and then taking three away. My method was wrong. My thinking was wrong.”

She had carried this error for roughly seventy years. Not because she was incapable. Not because her brain didn’t work. Because nobody looked closely enough to find it. The system moved on, leaving a flaw in her algebraic foundation that made everything built above it unstable.

This is not a math failure. This is a teaching failure and a structural failure. This is what happens when a system optimizes for coverage and compliance rather than understanding. It is the outcome of a single-minded goal of moving everyone through the tunnel rather than noticing who fell off the side and why.

Susannah fell off the side at age fourteen or fifteen, over a procedural error that nobody caught, and the fall was recorded as a fact about her rather than a fact about the system.

I was so curious about how this all affected Susannah over the years that followed. Did she just avoid math? Did she avoid math-adjacent subjects and careers? Did a lack of confidence in herself grow into other areas of her life? What I found was truly fascinating.

Susannah maintained for decades that she had a kindergarten level of ability in mathematics. The evidence does not support this.

As a paramedic for over a decade, she calculated drug dosages for every weight and age combination she might encounter. Systematically. Alone. In advance. That way, she’d never have to figure it out under pressure. She identified every variable. She solved for every unknown. She memorized the results. Proof that her memory could carry what she wouldn’t call mathematics. For years she applied algebraic reasoning to high-stakes problems, carefully and correctly. She just never called it math.

When I asked her how she dealt with calculating tips, she responded that she mentally decomposes the total into 10% and then halves it to find 5%, recomposing it back together for a 15% tip. This is exactly the kind of flexible number sense teachers want from their students: understanding a number conceptually enough to take it apart and put it back together, rather than depending on memorized steps.

As we spoke during our second session in her living room, I began to understand that what I see as inherently mathematical, she does not. Susannah gestured to a woven basket on her coffee table, and rattled off all the mathematics related to the construction of this basket: its dimensions, necessary quantity of material, proportional relationships, structural requirements. Then she said: “It’s just simple.”

She works on jigsaw puzzles in the middle of the night. Alone. Away from her husband’s need for one right way, which left no room for hers. After midnight was where she found the safety to use her own. Then she’d come show him in the morning.

In all of these cases, she performed mathematical thinking accurately and confidently in safe, low-pressure spaces that she built for herself. In none of these cases did she call it mathematics. Whatever felt relatable, simple, beautiful, or useful, she sorted into “not math.” Whatever felt complex, weaponized, or abstract, she kept the name “mathematics” for that alone.

I think, deep down, she knew she’d never fully let math into her life. That there was more to it, but protecting herself felt necessary. She maintained the boundary the way you maintain one with someone who’s hurt you: carefully, deliberately. What she did was practical, warm, human-scaled, useful. What she called mathematics was cold, abstract, weaponized, exclusionary. She refused to let the enemy claim what she valued.

This is one of the most important things I learned from my interviews with Susannah: math avoidance is not always a failure of understanding. Sometimes it’s a form of self-protection so successful that the person doesn’t realize, or won’t admit, that what they’ve been doing all along is mathematics.

Susannah believes mathematics is the primary enabling tool of domination, war, and the concentration of power in the hands of people who use it badly. She is not wrong.

But mathematics is also the tool that enables vaccines, surgeries, ecological modeling, the measurement of biodiversity loss, the architecture of cathedrals, the weaving patterns of the basket on her table, the flight path of a monarch butterfly, the growth spiral of the shell on her windowsill. It is al-jabr, the Arabic root of the word algebra: the reunion of broken parts. The same tool breaks and mends, depending only on the hand that holds it.

The subject itself is not the problem. The story we tell about it is incomplete.

There is a fiery, centuries-long philosophical debate about mathematics. Platonists argue it exists independently of humans, of our thoughts, our uses of it, and that we discover it rather than invent it. Social constructivists argue the opposite: that mathematics is a human practice, shaped by culture and power, inseparable from what we do with it, invented, not discovered.

I think both are right and they are not exclusive to each other. Mathematics may exist independently of us, the way water exists independently of the glass that holds it. But what we do with it, how we shape it, weaponize it, teach with it, withhold it, return it, that is entirely human. The water is not responsible for the drought or the flood.

What Susannah is mourning, I think, is not mathematics itself. It is the loss of a relationship with something that could have been beautiful and wasn’t. “I’m not looking forward,” she told me. “I’m looking back. I’m not wondering what’s coming. I’m wondering what we’ve lost. And it makes me sad.”

Her grief is accurate. The dominating, weaponized story of mathematics has crowded out the gentle, wondrous one for so long that most people, even people as perceptive as Susannah, can barely remember it existed.

JoyMath orients people toward remembering how to discover mathematics in a wild landscape, before it becomes fused with domination.

The interview sessions worked because they started with listening.

In addition to the interviews, I had planned out two algebra sessions, with structured explorations, and sequenced activities. In my math bag: compass, protractor, tangrams, books, mirrors, pattern blocks, a Singapore Math workbook, and a calculator. I was unsure what the sessions would truly look like until I sat with Susannah for two hours and heard her story.

I realized that she didn’t need or want a tutoring session, but to understand why and how I lit up with excitement when I talked about mathematics. I needed to connect with her curiosity and wonder.

In the first session I put everything on the table and said: what catches your eye? She reached for the mirror.

We spent an hour with mirrors, dice, flashlights, and shadows, noticing what changed and what stayed the same as angles shifted. She measured with a protractor, a tool she’d never had the chance to hold before. We talked about the human side of mathematicians throughout history. When I said something about wrapping up, she wasn’t ready to stop, so I got out the compass, drew a circle, then overlapping circles, each intersection revealing new shapes. New angles. New possibilities. “Playing with math,” she called it.

Then I showed her more “playing with math,” connecting the intersections with straight lines, watching new patterns and shapes emerge as we talked. I invited her to do this with her granddaughter too: color it in with colored pencils, then tape it to the window and let the light turn it into stained glass.

In the second session, I shared my method for approaching difficult math topics: start small and simple, then grow outward toward complexity, surfing the waves of curiosity as they come. I explained algebra first as if talking to a kindergartner (something is hiding, can you find it?). Then to a third grader, a fifth grader, and finally an adult. I told her about al-Khwarizmi, the founder of algebra, and the word al-jabr: the reunion of broken parts. Bone-setting. Mending what is broken by finding what is missing.

When I got to balancing equations and drew the scale, something shifted in the room.

“A big help,” she said quietly. “Why I never could balance it.”

At the end she made a list: a beginning algebra book, a compass and protractor, Magformers. A shopping list for mathematics materials, at 83, from someone who had avoided the word for sixty years.

“It’s opened my mind to it a bit,” she told me. “I don’t feel as threatened by it. I don’t take it as a personal enemy. And that’s a big step, because I’ve always thought of math as a personal enemy. It’s my one big area of failure.”

After the session she went to find her husband. “I learned some things!” she sang.

She didn’t need to be convinced of anything. She didn’t need algebra problems or a curriculum or a lesson plan. She needed someone to listen to what had actually happened to her, and to find in that story not a deficiency but a wound. One whose scar tissue made complete sense.

This is what I mean by refuge before voice. You cannot ask someone to speak into a space that has never felt safe. You cannot ask someone to engage with something that has only ever hurt them until the conditions change. The mathematics didn’t change. The conditions did.

I keep returning to an image I had during our time together.

I am actively listening to the journey of a human life, not intrusively, not with a plan, but attentively. I am noticing the fragments of mathematical story scattered across the decades: the C grade, the humiliation, the error nobody caught, the drug dosages calculated alone at a kitchen table, the basket named and then dismissed, the puzzles worked at midnight, the grief at what’s been lost.

I pick them up gently. I hold them together, not to fix them, not to rewrite them, but to let the person see them all at once, perhaps for the first time. This happened, I confirm. And this. And this too. Look at what you’ve been carrying. Look at what you’ve been doing without knowing it. Look at the mathematics that was always yours.

And then I hand it back. All the broken parts now linked by naming. Not mine to fix, only mine to notice and name, with compassion. “You have the power to resequence your story,” I want to say, “to transform it from a series of failures into a web of relationships and feelings that are yours to hold, yours to re-pattern.”

This is a critical piece of JoyMath’s actual work. Not making people love mathematics. Not filling them with enthusiasm they don’t feel. Not asking them to become something they’re not. Simply returning, as gently as possible, what was taken and trusting each person to decide for themselves what to do with it.

Susannah may never work through an algebra textbook. She may or may not use the compass she’s planning to buy. She is 83 years old and scaling down, not out. She told me so herself and I believe her.

But she said something else too, at the end of our time together: “It has made me use little gray cells that have been sitting back there saying, ‘why do you ignore us all the time?’”

That is enough. That is everything, actually.

The story we’ve been told about mathematics, that it belongs to experts, that struggle is failure, that some people have it and others don’t, that its highest purpose is calculation and its greatest achievement is a weapon, that story is not inevitable. It is not even true.

It is just a story. And stories can change.

I write new ones. I gather fragments of outdated stories. I untangle knots and untruths. I hand threads back, loose and visible, to the people they belong to. I build spaces where mathematics can be gentle and curious and alive. Places where a woman of 83 can pick up a compass for the first time, draw overlapping circles, and say, with genuine surprise: “I love this.”

Mathematics was always hers. I am only helping her untangle the knots, then handing the threads back to her.

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Tia Knuth is the founder of JoyMath, a community mathematics initiative dedicated to rewilding mathematics. She writes at JoyMath.me.