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I as a child, a teen, and a young adult thought I hated math, I got bad grades and it bored me. I dropped out of school. I later went to college and took remedi

I as a child, a teen, and a young adult thought I hated math, I got bad grades and it bored me. I dropped out of school. I later went to college and took remedial algebra twice. Math in school was purposeless and rigid, a rote procedure to be followed by command because that's what kids have to do. Now, I have grown older, and my curiosity drove me to learn because I wanted to make things, machines and software and probabilistic strategies. Things that necessitate math. If you can't rotate a vector, your guy walks faster diagonally. If you can't think mathematically and you want to lift a 2 jointed robot arm that weighs several tons, you're going to tip it over, and possibly die in the process. You can do it without trig but you can't do it without thinking about math. Once I found purpose, I began to appreciate the beauty of the more elegant solutions. I kind of fell in love with math as an adult. Now I watch numberphile with my kids and make complicated machinery and software at work. I think a lot more people love math than realize it, because they're conflating math itself and what school calls math, which is worksheets and demands, not beauty and creation.

necovek 1y ago
With my kid in elementary school, I can see how math instruction is generally terrible: teachers rarely have any enthusiasm for teaching it. I only had one great math teacher (combining enthusiasm, skill and hard work) and I've been through special math programs (in high school and uni). Again, it is a question of incentives: someone with enthusiasm for math would likely go with a higher paying job requiring higher level math. Still, despite the crappy teachers, I was better than most to persevere at it until high school where I had the great teacher. But this does not scale and we are losing kids to bad teachers: how can we fix this?

necovek 1y ago

With my kid in elementary school, I can see how math instruction is generally terrible: teachers rarely have any enthusiasm for teaching it. I only had one great math teacher (combining enthusiasm, skill and hard work) and I've been through special math programs (in high school and uni). Again, it is a question of incentives: someone with enthusiasm for math would likely go with a higher paying job requiring higher level math. Still, despite the crappy teachers, I was better than most to persevere at it until high school where I had the great teacher. But this does not scale and we are losing kids to bad teachers: how can we fix this?