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>> “the math that’s being taught has no relevance to my life" I think our math education do fail in that way. Math essentially is a logic system where you set
by hzhou321 10y ago
>> “the math that’s being taught has no relevance to my life"
I think our math education do fail in that way. Math essentially is a logic system where you set up premises and derive and make sure everything is consistent. That can be applied to real life such as accounting and physics, or it can be applied to an artificial game -- number theory is such a case. Our education emphasize on the latter part, and it is quite irrelevant to real life, and it is hard. I am in mid-life now and on reflection, fractions, for example, had zero use for my life, and I am in the career of scientific computing. What we need is a concept level of understanding of mathematics -- realizing that the key idea of mathematics is basically consistency. Most importantly, the math required in the real life is not hard -- it is necessarily intuitive. What the education we receive is the technical gaming part of mathematics, e.g. how to actually find the roots of quadratic equation. I don't really remember the formula now, but I now have an intuitive understanding of the quadratic curves and the meaning of roots. And the same goes for quintic equations. It is not hard at all. I roughly sketch out the curve and I immediately have a rough idea of where the roots are. And at work, it is simply an exercise in programming. It is hard following the way in our education, though.
The purpose of education is to show them that knowledge exists, but not the knowledge itself. Knowledge itself is misleading. It is more important to recognize what you don't know than to remember what you know.
To clarify, I personally do not hate math. And I respect the discipline of mathematics. However, doing math (the way our education system assumes) is just like doing music or art, or playing star craft, it is not for everyone.
PS: on further reflection, not only useless, the concept of rational number has been quite damaging in our understanding of the real world.
- justifier 10y agoI was thinking about education last night and here is the idea I am developing.. I encourage ongoing criticism Students study varied subject matter but only one subjects' grade 'matters' and can be chosen by the student Personally, I think our maths education suffers from a lack of freedom.. I do think it can be for anyone but only because I believe anyone can bring to it whatever they'd like, whereas education tells you what areas need to be studied and how is competition the foil of expression?
- baobrain 10y agoCould you elaborate? For example, What would motivate a student to put towards any effort in their non-main courses if it doesn't affect their grade? Edit: clarity and accuracy
- justifier 10y agoExactly, it would be unnecessary The student could just coast through a course.. they would have to sit through all lectures and would be assigned problems and reading but only one course would track their retention I feel this is basically already what is happening in education with the prevalence of students' creative ways of undermining the current grading paradigm But with the ancillary benefit that a student would be freed to actually do the work to foster an interest in at least one subject Also, the student could be free to explore other subjects in ways outside of the means of tracking retention I was pushing my math research since I was a child but instead was forced to abandon it and had calculus forcibly replaced as 'how I should think about mathematics' even though I fundamentally disagreed with its concepts If I was free from the stress of doing poorly from the standpoint of grades I could have focused my interest on my own mathematical insight and simply allowed my education to expose me to calculus wherein I would have retained an appreciation for mathematics and developed one for the practicality of calculus practices