5 ms·

I’m no mathematician, so I only took basic school math, but I hated every moment of it. Mostly because overwhelmingly there was never any context or justificati

by bedobi 3y ago

I’m no mathematician, so I only took basic school math, but I hated every moment of it. Mostly because overwhelmingly there was never any context or justification for learning any of it. Why does this exist? What actual real world problems does it solve? How did folks come up with and it, prove it works and start using it? Crickets. Just learn this formula, then that. The first time I heard the ancients calculated the distance to and size of the moon with trigonometry I was floored. Oh ok so that’s the kind of cool shit they came up with it for. Now I’m listening.

loloquwowndueo 3y ago
Sounds like you had crappy teachers.
- latency-guy2 3y ago
  Establish why its "crappy teacher" and not "crappy student". I've seen far more of the latter than the former. I don't think its hard to find something interesting about math either, and it is immediately applicable, even with what I think is extremely stupid in the form of common core as presented in the USA, you are literally being presented story problems about common every day occurrences and activities.
  - atoav 3y ago
    As someone who routinely teaches (Non-STEM) university students practical applications of math I can assure you that none of the students that told me "I am bad at maths" went out of my class without an understanding of the topics we talked about. Yet I routinely hear a: "Wow, if they told it to me this way during school I might have cared!" or "It really made my head smoke, but it felt good." Step 1 is believing that every person that doesn't have cognitive problems can understand an abstract concept if it is explained well and they got the motivation to understand it. Then you need to create a situation which motivates them to understand it and now you only need to explain it well. Many math teachers fail already at step 1. They believe 90% of their students are too stupid to understand things, while this is just a convinient explaination for their own failures. I once was convinced of being that student. I met one kid that I couldn't teach anything because he would forget things I told him 15 minutes befoee. He was a refugee from Afghanistan and severely traumatized. The truth is that we should look to the best when teaching and we would be stupid if we didn't. And the best are people like 3blue1brown. If your class falls significantly below such a level of clarity and engagement it will suck. During my own math education I had teachers that left out the most fundamental applications. E.g. something like an integral has clear applications, it is a new super power with which you can solve new problems — yet all we did was learning a receipe and solving abstract problems. The fact that it was a super power was something I had to figure out myself, later. And this was common. I even was lucky because I had a good physics teacher who managed to being up a lot of what we learned in math and give it a more practical feel, but most of my friends from other schools were not so lucky.
    - bedobi 3y ago
      This is exactly how my education went. Oh you're not engaged with my shitty teaching and forcing you to do endless abstract nonsensical formulae with zero contextualization or application? Then you're the problem - you have cognitive defects, you are plain dumb and stupid, you are disinterested, you don't care about your education etc etc so I cannot help you. Now let me spend my time on "teaching" the kids who mostly already know what I'm "teaching".
      - latency-guy2 3y ago
        > This is exactly how my education went. No it didn't. I am very confident it did not. All students that make it past grade school go through nearly the exact same sequence and motivating examples beginning from geometry, high school algebra, and then some introduction to calculus if not calculus outright. And the motivating example has always been how to calculate area, and if advanced enough, volume, for all kinds of shapes, regular or otherwise. This is not a recent development, its been the motivating example and the entire purpose for calculus having been invented. I am so confident in this that I am here to call you a terrible student and that, yes, you likely were a terrible student, especially since your characterization is the exact standard excuse I hear from terrible students. So now I have to drill - what was "nonsensical"? What had "zero context"? You immediately have lost the claim of "zero application", so we don't have to go there. If your claim is beyond K-12 math and into university, then I would be too upset to even argue with you if that is your actual position. Making these claims after more than a decade of learning math tells me you have trained yourself to forget all you learned.
        atoav 3y ago
        Interesting form of confidence. I didn't write the comment you replied to, but I wrote the original comment. The first fact I want to have written down is that there are bad math teachers. And sadly it is not uncommon for them to be bad, as I mentioned most of my collegues from other classes and schools had bad math teachers and some of them were people that liked math. Now as an educator I am aware that students are quick to blame other people or the system for their own deficiencies, but I can tell you for a fact that our math teacher failed to explain us what an integral was actually for in an parsable way, even after multiple times of asking. She just knew how to do the formula stuff, she never used it herself on real applications. And when she did explain things, she always did it once, much too briefly in the beginning, so that by the point at which we started doing her always decidedly abstract examples nobody knew what the fuck this was for. As I said, our physics and mechanica teachers were better math teachers than her. As for the integral I had to go and look it up myself, the internet was still young and there weren't many grown ups who knew how to look such a thing up and when I saw the explainations I wondered why nobody ever told us..? I understand btw. why it can be an advantage to understand math in purely abstract ways, but in her case she just didn't want to talk much and stick to the examples. And that is bad teaching. Ah and before we get into a discussion about specifics, like many on this site I grew up and live happily outside of the US, so educational plans etc. might differ.
pylua 3y ago
That is a consistent problem with the education system no matter what the topic is with few exceptions.
- mycologos 3y ago
  I think the economic returns to "decent understanding of X plus decent communication skills" are much higher when X is math than when X is art or language or history, so you need a greater passion for teaching to select it in spite of that fact, and this shrinks the pool of good math teachers relative to other subjects.
- bobajeff 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure math is the most poorly taught subject out of all of them. Social studies, current events, history, literature arts are mostly skills most people use everyday. Math is important so every school is required to teach it however not many schools can. The issue with math is there are never going to be very many good math teachers as that would require many more people who know math. How many adults even know math beyond basic arithmetic?
  - melagonster 3y ago
    Even the basic content from textbook is not real mathematics. the daily work of mathematician is very different to calculate some interesting things.
melondonkey 3y ago
Hard to meet everyone where they are and at the same time give them a relevant practical application for their own life. Good learners just soak it up and look for the application later. But that also doesn’t fit all. It’s hard to even write a pop song that everyone likes so math education that appeals to all is almost impossible
skhunted 3y ago
I’ve been teaching mathematics for decades. Know how many students like the cool applications at the time they are taking the class? Very, very few. Usually, it’s later on in one’s journey through life that appreciation for the cool applications occur. At the time of taking the class doing cool applications inspires 1, pisses off 50 because it’s too hard, and leaves 49 rolling their yes.
- atoav 3y ago
  Haven't thought is for decades, but was my environments favourite math tutor, because I managed to ground everything in people's reality and rell them a compelling fiction in which knowing how to do the thing was actually a super-power. You know like the survival tricks certain preppers learn and never use — that, but with math. Even if the examples were sometimes over the top, involved flaming moats and other xkcd-like freakiness I got students where their teachers told me it is hopeless sitting there participating with glowing eyes. Meanwhile in my own math education I had a teacher who made us do integrals for what felt like a year without telling us once what the hell it is needed for. I had to figure that out on my own. My colleagues who didn't care just learned it by hard and forgot it immediately after. But I guess they got thought all the material and got ok grades so their education was a success. What bullshit. Now, 15 years later I relearn a lot of those thinga because school made it sound boring only for me to later discover it is one of the most exiting things your brain can do. But that is about thinking on solutions to actual things not learning steps and doing them and getting punished for making one mistep.
  - skhunted 3y ago
    What bullshit. Now, 15 years later I relearn a lot of those thinga because school made it sound boring only for me to later discover it is one of the most exiting things your brain can do. But that is about thinking on solutions to actual things not learning steps and doing them and getting punished for making one mistep. This is precisely what I was referring to about people who come back at a later time and relearn the stuff. They want applications. At the time a class is taken very few actually want to dive into applications. The subject has been taught the way it is taught for a reason.
bawolff 3y ago
> How did folks come up with and it, prove it works and start using it I mean, anything at the university level should include proofs on why it works. I would go as far as to say you aren't really doing math if there are no proofs.
- lupire 3y ago
  elementary level too! Humans crave understanding. This is what we finally have with modern materials like Eureka.
golol 3y ago
Did you not have a physics class around the same time you learned calculus and linear algebra? That makes it obvious what the application is.
constantcrying 3y ago
This is completely asinine. What you say applies to every subject in school. I interpreted poetry, learned ancient history and dead language. Yet somehow the single most useful tool of thought humans have developed needs to justify itself so that you will learn it?
eternityforest 3y ago
I did a (not fully third party reviewed for errors, watch out) project to record all the math related "cool shit I'm glad to have discovered": https://github.com/EternityForest/AnyoneCanDoIt/blob/master/MathELI5.md https://github.com/EternityForest/AnyoneCanDoIt/blob/master/...
jrm4 3y ago
It's really this. I was a "good" student so I got pretty far in college math; and none of it has stuck with me without a real life application. At ALL. What's kind of killing me now, as my kids go through algebra et al, is that now we have a VERY OBVIOUS way to make this interesting and we're severely underutilizing it, which is video games. "Draw a rainbow in Minecraft" or "Figure out the trajectory of that frag grenade" seems just gobsmackingly obvious as a path here.

by bedobi 3y ago

loloquwowndueo 3y ago

Sounds like you had crappy teachers.

latency-guy2 3y ago
Establish why its "crappy teacher" and not "crappy student". I've seen far more of the latter than the former. I don't think its hard to find something interesting about math either, and it is immediately applicable, even with what I think is extremely stupid in the form of common core as presented in the USA, you are literally being presented story problems about common every day occurrences and activities.
- atoav 3y ago
  As someone who routinely teaches (Non-STEM) university students practical applications of math I can assure you that none of the students that told me "I am bad at maths" went out of my class without an understanding of the topics we talked about. Yet I routinely hear a: "Wow, if they told it to me this way during school I might have cared!" or "It really made my head smoke, but it felt good." Step 1 is believing that every person that doesn't have cognitive problems can understand an abstract concept if it is explained well and they got the motivation to understand it. Then you need to create a situation which motivates them to understand it and now you only need to explain it well. Many math teachers fail already at step 1. They believe 90% of their students are too stupid to understand things, while this is just a convinient explaination for their own failures. I once was convinced of being that student. I met one kid that I couldn't teach anything because he would forget things I told him 15 minutes befoee. He was a refugee from Afghanistan and severely traumatized. The truth is that we should look to the best when teaching and we would be stupid if we didn't. And the best are people like 3blue1brown. If your class falls significantly below such a level of clarity and engagement it will suck. During my own math education I had teachers that left out the most fundamental applications. E.g. something like an integral has clear applications, it is a new super power with which you can solve new problems — yet all we did was learning a receipe and solving abstract problems. The fact that it was a super power was something I had to figure out myself, later. And this was common. I even was lucky because I had a good physics teacher who managed to being up a lot of what we learned in math and give it a more practical feel, but most of my friends from other schools were not so lucky.
  - bedobi 3y ago
    This is exactly how my education went. Oh you're not engaged with my shitty teaching and forcing you to do endless abstract nonsensical formulae with zero contextualization or application? Then you're the problem - you have cognitive defects, you are plain dumb and stupid, you are disinterested, you don't care about your education etc etc so I cannot help you. Now let me spend my time on "teaching" the kids who mostly already know what I'm "teaching".
    - latency-guy2 3y ago
      > This is exactly how my education went. No it didn't. I am very confident it did not. All students that make it past grade school go through nearly the exact same sequence and motivating examples beginning from geometry, high school algebra, and then some introduction to calculus if not calculus outright. And the motivating example has always been how to calculate area, and if advanced enough, volume, for all kinds of shapes, regular or otherwise. This is not a recent development, its been the motivating example and the entire purpose for calculus having been invented. I am so confident in this that I am here to call you a terrible student and that, yes, you likely were a terrible student, especially since your characterization is the exact standard excuse I hear from terrible students. So now I have to drill - what was "nonsensical"? What had "zero context"? You immediately have lost the claim of "zero application", so we don't have to go there. If your claim is beyond K-12 math and into university, then I would be too upset to even argue with you if that is your actual position. Making these claims after more than a decade of learning math tells me you have trained yourself to forget all you learned.
      - atoav 3y ago
        Interesting form of confidence. I didn't write the comment you replied to, but I wrote the original comment. The first fact I want to have written down is that there are bad math teachers. And sadly it is not uncommon for them to be bad, as I mentioned most of my collegues from other classes and schools had bad math teachers and some of them were people that liked math. Now as an educator I am aware that students are quick to blame other people or the system for their own deficiencies, but I can tell you for a fact that our math teacher failed to explain us what an integral was actually for in an parsable way, even after multiple times of asking. She just knew how to do the formula stuff, she never used it herself on real applications. And when she did explain things, she always did it once, much too briefly in the beginning, so that by the point at which we started doing her always decidedly abstract examples nobody knew what the fuck this was for. As I said, our physics and mechanica teachers were better math teachers than her. As for the integral I had to go and look it up myself, the internet was still young and there weren't many grown ups who knew how to look such a thing up and when I saw the explainations I wondered why nobody ever told us..? I understand btw. why it can be an advantage to understand math in purely abstract ways, but in her case she just didn't want to talk much and stick to the examples. And that is bad teaching. Ah and before we get into a discussion about specifics, like many on this site I grew up and live happily outside of the US, so educational plans etc. might differ.

pylua 3y ago

That is a consistent problem with the education system no matter what the topic is with few exceptions.

mycologos 3y ago
I think the economic returns to "decent understanding of X plus decent communication skills" are much higher when X is math than when X is art or language or history, so you need a greater passion for teaching to select it in spite of that fact, and this shrinks the pool of good math teachers relative to other subjects.
bobajeff 3y ago
I'm pretty sure math is the most poorly taught subject out of all of them. Social studies, current events, history, literature arts are mostly skills most people use everyday. Math is important so every school is required to teach it however not many schools can. The issue with math is there are never going to be very many good math teachers as that would require many more people who know math. How many adults even know math beyond basic arithmetic?
- melagonster 3y ago
  Even the basic content from textbook is not real mathematics. the daily work of mathematician is very different to calculate some interesting things.

melondonkey 3y ago

Hard to meet everyone where they are and at the same time give them a relevant practical application for their own life. Good learners just soak it up and look for the application later. But that also doesn’t fit all. It’s hard to even write a pop song that everyone likes so math education that appeals to all is almost impossible

skhunted 3y ago

I’ve been teaching mathematics for decades. Know how many students like the cool applications at the time they are taking the class? Very, very few. Usually, it’s later on in one’s journey through life that appreciation for the cool applications occur. At the time of taking the class doing cool applications inspires 1, pisses off 50 because it’s too hard, and leaves 49 rolling their yes.

atoav 3y ago
Haven't thought is for decades, but was my environments favourite math tutor, because I managed to ground everything in people's reality and rell them a compelling fiction in which knowing how to do the thing was actually a super-power. You know like the survival tricks certain preppers learn and never use — that, but with math. Even if the examples were sometimes over the top, involved flaming moats and other xkcd-like freakiness I got students where their teachers told me it is hopeless sitting there participating with glowing eyes. Meanwhile in my own math education I had a teacher who made us do integrals for what felt like a year without telling us once what the hell it is needed for. I had to figure that out on my own. My colleagues who didn't care just learned it by hard and forgot it immediately after. But I guess they got thought all the material and got ok grades so their education was a success. What bullshit. Now, 15 years later I relearn a lot of those thinga because school made it sound boring only for me to later discover it is one of the most exiting things your brain can do. But that is about thinking on solutions to actual things not learning steps and doing them and getting punished for making one mistep.
- skhunted 3y ago
  What bullshit. Now, 15 years later I relearn a lot of those thinga because school made it sound boring only for me to later discover it is one of the most exiting things your brain can do. But that is about thinking on solutions to actual things not learning steps and doing them and getting punished for making one mistep. This is precisely what I was referring to about people who come back at a later time and relearn the stuff. They want applications. At the time a class is taken very few actually want to dive into applications. The subject has been taught the way it is taught for a reason.

bawolff 3y ago

> How did folks come up with and it, prove it works and start using it I mean, anything at the university level should include proofs on why it works. I would go as far as to say you aren't really doing math if there are no proofs.

lupire 3y ago
elementary level too! Humans crave understanding. This is what we finally have with modern materials like Eureka.

golol 3y ago

Did you not have a physics class around the same time you learned calculus and linear algebra? That makes it obvious what the application is.

constantcrying 3y ago

This is completely asinine. What you say applies to every subject in school. I interpreted poetry, learned ancient history and dead language. Yet somehow the single most useful tool of thought humans have developed needs to justify itself so that you will learn it?

eternityforest 3y ago

I did a (not fully third party reviewed for errors, watch out) project to record all the math related "cool shit I'm glad to have discovered": https://github.com/EternityForest/AnyoneCanDoIt/blob/master/MathELI5.md https://github.com/EternityForest/AnyoneCanDoIt/blob/master/...

jrm4 3y ago

It's really this. I was a "good" student so I got pretty far in college math; and none of it has stuck with me without a real life application. At ALL. What's kind of killing me now, as my kids go through algebra et al, is that now we have a VERY OBVIOUS way to make this interesting and we're severely underutilizing it, which is video games. "Draw a rainbow in Minecraft" or "Figure out the trajectory of that frag grenade" seems just gobsmackingly obvious as a path here.