Still Fresh and Healing Today February 16, 2015 ISSUE

In this column, readers get a new look at a few of the many articles on JSH-Online.com that have particular relevance to contemporary needs.

Are we ‘honest seekers’?

Carol Moss Alton

Reprinted from the January 22, 1979, Sentinel.

In an article entitled “Math Mystique: Fear of Figuring,” the author comments, “Nobody knows for sure why math rouses so much anxiety.”

“Well, after twelve years of public school math, I can tell you why” came the response from a reader of that article. “Few things in life are so uncompromising as math. One error, no matter how minor, means a wrong answer. It is scary to deal with a subject that always demands perfection.”Time, April 4, 1977, p. 7; But when we stop to think about this, isn’t the existence of an uncompromising basis for obtaining right solutions actually reassuring rather than scary?

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