November 1, 2010

Forget Math

Filed under: Main — admin @ 12:01 am

I shied away from computers in high school and college because I mistakenly believed that they were all about math. I was wrong, but that doesn’t help the general issue: Why is math considered such a negative in our culture?

There are commercials being run in the US about how crappy American students are doing at math and science. According to one stat boasted in the commercial, the US ranks 28th out of all countries in the world for doing well at math. That’s pretty sad.

In one of the commercials, a dumb teenagers bemoans, “I don’t see any reason to learn math.”

Let me tell you one reason, honey: Because if you don’t know basic math, you will be swindled out of ever dollar you have.

There is basic math, which as far as I’m concerned is just enough to understand the concept of compound interest. Maybe not to be able to calculate compound interest, but to be able to figure out that paying $100 a month for 5 years to buy a $2,000 car is a rip-off.

Beyond basic math, you really got to wonder why they push math on such a broad audience. If you’ll never use math in your job or as an adult, then why bother with polynomials, trigonometry, or — heaven forbid — calculus?

When I eventually got into computers, I figured out that it was the computer that did the math. All I had to do was figure out which equation to plug in. That should be the way everyone approaches math; be smart enough to know which equation to use.

The reason that math is so difficult to teach is that mankind has been using the same text book for about 2,500 year.

I’m not kidding.

The first math textbook, the first anything textbook, was written by Euclid around 300BC. It was called The Elements, and it broke down a system of mathematics that today we call geometry.

Sadly, every textbook and manual since The Elements is basically a copy of what Euclid did. No one has ever really bothered to think outside of the box that Euclid wrote about.

Now The Elements isn’t a bad book. I’ve read it. But it wasn’t intended as an instruction manual for everyday folk. In fact, the only people who would be interested in studying The Elements would be the priests who did the math back in ancient Egypt.

Yeah, math is really a religion.

Honestly, I don’t think Euclid wanted everyone to understand math. So he wrote his book for an audience that needed to know the information. That perspective has framed math instruction for 2,500 years, and that’s why I believe people don’t like math: They’re not supposed to, at least not in the manner in which it’s presented.

The solution is to find another way to teach math. I believe the human brain innately loves to do math. Someday, hopefully, someone will come up with a better way to teach it.

6 Comments

  1. A week or two ago I saw a Pizza Hut commercial that said their medium pizzas were 5 dollars. The person on the commercial continued to say “That 5 dollars includes tax, because, people like pizza, they don’t like math.”

    Wow, even though our public schools spend 5000$ on each student every year, they are all failing miserably. My state’s (Minnesota) education is pretty good compared to the rest of the nation, but it still isn’t that great.

    Comment by gamerguy473 — November 1, 2010 @ 12:52 pm

  2. Well! There’s a good example: you need to know math to figure out sales tax.

    Being a nerd, I went shopping at the grocery store once, and added up all my purchases in my head. I then computed the sales tax, which was then 5 percent. As the checker scanned my items, I said, “It will be $41.32” She was blown away when the total was exactly that.

    And probably the only reason I did that exercise was to blog about it someday, but that’s another story.

    Comment by admin — November 1, 2010 @ 12:56 pm

  3. I remember a Maths Teacher saying “There’s a difference between maths & sums”, I was / am bad at sums, fair to midling at maths.
    Sums are what is a * b, Maths is what is x if y = a^2 + b^3/x, its the difference between knowing the operations and methods.

    Comment by glennp — November 1, 2010 @ 2:27 pm

  4. That’s a good perspective. I remember when they would teach us the polynomials, the “maths”, that I would always wonder what the hell they were for. Then, one teacher showed us an example of how the function could be used and it made sense. That was wonderful, but such teachers are rare.

    Comment by admin — November 1, 2010 @ 2:31 pm

  5. A wonderful article on mathematics (as a subject) and mathematics (as a tool) is Lockhart’s Lament: http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

    As someone who has an interest in some ‘advanced’ (i.e. graduate school level) mathematics while having an engineering background, I appreciate the dilemma between making the subject interesting (which, if taught correctly, it is) vs. making the tool interesting (which is virtually impossible, especially for young children).

    Physics and computers really helped me enjoy mathematics in school. Writing those early DOS games, figuring out projectile motion etc. was enjoyable – it gave instant gratification to pushing symbols (and now I find pushing symbols is enjoyable in itself).

    The problem is that most school problems have absolutely no interesting consequences (and I include compound interest in this category – even though it is useful in the sense of reading is useful to fill up tax forms): If Mary is three times as old as John was when he ate three eggs when the fox wass alone with the chicken blah blah…

    /rant /pet peeve

    Comment by sriksrid — November 1, 2010 @ 5:32 pm

  6. If Mary is three times as old as John was when he ate three eggs when the fox wass alone with the chicken blah blah…

    love those types of problems! My son is taking an advanced math class and he had a swath of those types of questions. I was eager to do them myself! I suppose that type of problem just hits a sweet spot in my math-brain, but I understand how others can despise them.

    Comment by admin — November 1, 2010 @ 5:51 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.


Powered by WordPress