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?
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\nThere 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.<\/p>\n
In one of the commercials, a dumb teenagers bemoans, “I don’t see any reason to learn math.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 heaven forbid \u2014 calculus?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The reason that math is so difficult to teach is that mankind has been using the same text book for about 2,500 year.<\/p>\n
I’m not kidding.<\/p>\n
The first math textbook, the first anything textbook, was written by Euclid around 300BC. It was called The Elements<\/em>, and it broke down a system of mathematics that today we call geometry.<\/p>\n Sadly, every textbook and manual since The Elements<\/em> is basically a copy of what Euclid did. No one has ever really bothered to think outside of the box that Euclid wrote about.<\/p>\n Now The Elements<\/em> 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<\/em> would be the priests who did the math back in ancient Egypt.<\/p>\n Yeah, math is really a religion.<\/p>\n Honestly, I don’t think Euclid wanted everyone to understand math. So he wrote his book for an audience that needed<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2376"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2381,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2376\/revisions\/2381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}