Although I do think voice is important, I do not necessary agree with that everyone should have a voice. I think having a voice is just like the age restriction on getting your driver license, people have to reach a certain mature level to have their own voices. There are many things that simply cannot be understood by younger minds, and also younger people’s mind are very easily influenced. Going back to the Chinese teaching, although everything is structured based, but the things we are forced to learn is talking about virtue. However, something I do not agree is that people still think those virtue are absolutely true when they grew up, I guess that sounds contradictory with my own point but I just think there are just too many aspects that people have not considered.
Another thing that I want to talk about is math teaching is facing similar issue of English writing. Constructional Math is being use in many formal education now, it is probably one of the worst system that have ever created. It is not just me, many mathematician and engineers agree with this too. I think this is also part of the reason why people’s math skill are generally weaker compare to other subject. Basically instead of doing straight multiplication, in constructional math they want the student to multiply it by other numbers and then do subtraction after. This only works better in certain cases but they use it on every problem in elementary school. I guess my point is that if only school just let the student do the problem with whatever approach they prefer, the math ability for the general population would be significantly better
Chu Chi Pai's Blog 
I agree that not everyone has a voice because it depends on their maturity level. I also think that finding your voice is influenced by what you learn and experience. I feel that students’ voices are shaped by the things that they learn, but you make a good point about education forcing students to learn something a certain way.
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This is definitely a unique idea – comparing the idea of education in general, boxing students into what they want them to do. It’s actually pretty similar to my own on writing log. I do agree that if education was more open to having students solve things on their own and be more focused on the understanding of theory rather than the actual correctness of an answer, that we would have both better understanding and better test scores. It would just be quite the long process to fix. I really liked the math example you used.
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Interesting take on Voice and how it applies across disciplines. I always think of it strictly in an English or composition setting, but the fact that it can be applicable to a different discipline (let alone Mathematics) is intriguing. I also never thought of voice as an approach to composition, but, in a way, I see your point. We are trained to try and find and define this ‘voice’, but in the process of finding and analyzing it we lose what made it ‘ours’, and it just becomes another method or approach to writing. In this, I agree with you: we shouldn’t necessarily try to define our individual voice and use it in a specific or calculated manner, but we should just use whatever tools are implicit in us already, answering the question without necessarily thinking too long about how we did it.
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Really interesting post! I think you brought up some interesting aspects of teaching the subject of math that parallels English. I do however think that the solution that you are finding in the subject of math is what in the English world they call voice. I also think the voice is natural to a certain extent and it is always there, in some pieces more than others.
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