Happy Mother's Day!

Number 8--#MTBoS30

My mother has become unstuck in time.
We know she had a mild stroke sometime last year and it seems to have wiped out her ability to understand and/or tell time.  It's been pretty weird...
She started missing appointments first. Her hairdresser would get angry because her appointment was at the same time each week but she would show up hours late or not at all, or she would show up two hours early and get mad because they weren't open yet.  I began calling her to remind her to go to her hair appointment each week, but then other appointments began to suffer.  We already had someone coming in every morning to cook her breakfast and check that she had taken her medication, so now we have this person taking her to all her appointments.
Then I got calls from her friends.  She would call them every day and tell them that I was coming to visit that day. Every day. Or she would tell them or me she hadn't seen my brother, Bruce, in weeks when we knew he had been there the previous day. They wanted me to fix this.
On one visit, she said she needed a new watch--she couldn't read the ones she had because they were too small. I took her to Macy's and we found one with a large face so that she could read it. After a couple of weeks, we began to realize that she couldn't read this watch either. I sat down with her and spent a long time talking about the big hand and the little hand and what they meant. Finally, she turned to me and said (in all sincerity) "Where did you learn all this?"
So we bought her a digital watch.
She still puts it on upside down some days, but she can read numbers, it seems.
At one point, she told me that the problem with the watch was that it ran backwards.  I told her she probably had it on upside down. She then proceeded to tell me that the clocks in her kitchen ran backwards also.  Ummm...
Now she has a digital clock in her kitchen.
It also became obvious that not only could she not tell time anymore, she didn't know what day it was either.  She had calendars hanging in all rooms of her house, but she would still make statements like "Today's Tuesday, so you'll be coming down tomorrow, Friday, right?"
When I would visit, she would sit at the table in the mornings with her purse calendar going over and over it as if it were written in some incomprehensible secret code.  On the phone, she would make crazy statements and I would tell her to look at the calendar. I finally realized that while she knew that there ought to be some sort of meaning there, she simply couldn't find it.  Looking at the calendar only works if you understand its structure.
In many ways, I think math works like this for most people.  We have turned it into this largely symbolic and procedural language without any real meaning anymore.  If a student can understand the structure of the symbols and procedures, they may begin to develop some understanding. Or they may simply learn to perform rote procedures without understanding them. Unlike my mother, they can learn, but wouldn't it be better if we gave them the meaning first? Then they would have a reason to figure out the symbols and procedures.
Sadly, my mother probably isn't going to recover.  Her caretaker has simply taken away her purse calendar because my mother would spend hours trying to decipher it and in the process drive her caretaker crazy. My brother and I have stopped telling her to "just look at the calendar--it's written on there," because we know she can't make sense of days and dates anymore.  It is just frustrating to us to keep trying to explain it all to her.
How many times in my years of teaching math have I felt this way with students?  "Just look at example 1--it's all written there!"
And it really stresses my mom out--not knowing when something is going to happen.  She knows she has an appointment, but she doesn't know when it is. Is it today? Has she already missed it? I have talked to the girls at the front desk. If the weather is good, she will walk up there everyday and ask them if the hearing aid lady is in. Every. Single. Day. They are patient and kind about it, but I wonder if they understand that the raw fear that is eating at my Mother's mind, the sleepless night she just spent worrying about that appointment is the thing has driven her up there once again? She doesn't "just forget" that she talked to them yesterday. She doesn't know what today is.
How must it feel to our students when we tell them "you have a quiz on this" when they can't even comprehend what "this" is?  How do you study for a quiz when you can't make meaning out of the procedures that you are studying? And how do we as teachers contextualize mathematics so that our students can begin to make sense out of it again?  We need to tell it as a story and weave together all of the connections so that our students can see how what we are learning today is connected to what we learned last week and last month and two years ago. Only then can they become anchored in the understanding and find some meaning in the procedures and be relieved of the stress they must feel each time we expect them to perform what they can't comprehend.
I am a patient person and this has stretched the limits of my patience at times.  But my mom can't be fixed (as much as her friends would like me to).  We have all had to accept that getting frustrated or angry is pointless, that she is not going to get better and that our particular job in life is to help minimize her feelings of stress by keeping time for her.
And this is my job as a teacher as well--to create a safe place for students to develop meaning from mathematics, to find an endless well of patience, to keep explaining about the big hand and little hand if necessary, and to accept them where they are at and find a way to bring them into the story that is math at a place where they can find a fit and begin to move forward.
They, at least, can be fixed.