The majority of us aren’t in college. And doing well academically is not a precursor to success after you graduate, simply graduating is that precursor, and success is defined there as making money, making the value of education nothing but a meal ticket instead of knowledge, skill, and wisdom. Your argument is proof of my point, if we didn’t have a culture of ignorance warnings wouldn’t be necessary.
First as a college student, then a professor and as a parent I found this to be very true.
Well, actually as a grade school student, too. All of mine were total Math-phobes.
E.g., one time I was tutoring an Ed major on some Math. She realized I was going over some basic Algebra and exclaimed: “Oh, I don’t need to know that. I’m going to be teaching k-6.”
This was an incredibly common attitude. Primary Ed teachers hated Math. They refused to really learn it. In teaching, they would just go thru the motions. Many couldn’t explain the answers given in the teacher’s key. (We ran into this with our kids’ teachers.)
In college, if you weren’t good enough to pass the regular courses in your major, you’d drop down to the Secondary Ed track.
It was treated as something of an oddity to come across an Ed major who actually knew their stuff.
One thing to keep in mind is that teachers are overworked and underpaid. If you want better quality teachers, you’re going to have to pay a lot more and give them a much lighter workload (which means hiring more teachers).
Russian is hard.
This was kind of me. Math wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t easy. I am not good and doing things fast so those tests in the early school years made me think I wasn’t very food at it. Then there’s my dad who’s quite good at doing things in his head who couldn’t understand I couldn’t get it and why. I was also bounced around from the remedial classes and normal classes in 2-4 grades.
When I got to geometry I understood it pretty well, I think I got all As. Algebra was ok, I got most of it. I took a pre-calc class and was ok as well. But when I had to take a pre-calc and calc class in college it really clicked. I think part of it was the teachers were good, and it started to make sense where some of these formulas I had been using for years came from. All of those physics formulas became clear then and I mostly got it.
I then tried to take a linear algebra class and had zero idea of what was going on. The teacher wasn’t that great, the book was horrible, and I couldn’t understand where all these numbers were coming from. Kind of like Shagnasty, if I don’t have read world examples I don’t usually get it.
It all makes sense once you’ve read it in the original Klingon.
No, TriPolar has a point. The United States does have an anti-intellectual streak that runs very deep in our culture.
Kids in college may be warned about lagging in academics, but that’s just justifying the need for an expensive education by the college faculty. Teachers will do that. Families that value education may emphasize academic excellence to their kids. But a large portion of the public in general has a bias against smart people.
While there are little piddling displays of support for intellectual pursuits in school, science fairs, math tournaments, and so forth, the real push for competition in schooling has always been for sports. That’s where all the glory is. Not in winning the spelling bee, or any other brainy type of accomplishments. Where are the huge championships for the sciences or poetry that make news stories?
The kids who are smarter than their peers aren’t admired by them. They are derided, and targeted for bullying. Remember the term “nerd” used to be an insult.
In popular culture, smart folks’ abilities are seen as some sort compensation for being hopeless in social situations. Stories about nerds are always about their social awkwardness, and it is always seen as a huge problem to be solved. The nerds are never celebrated for their intellectual prowess.
And that same pop culture, the only exceptionally smart people who aren’t socially awkward or unattractive are villains, who use their intelligence for evil. And the hero never outthinks the villain. He just shoots him, or pushes him into a vat of acid or whatever.
My own family told me that I shouldn’t talk about my good grades, or look too smart.
I’m guessing they thought more people would like me if I acted dumb. They were just going along with what they were reading in the American culture.
This is something that the much-maligned “Common Core” is supposed to address, and that is the fundamental flaw in the way mathematics are taught in the US.
For the vast majority of us, up to at least algebra, math instruction came down to this simple formula:
[ol]
[li]Here’s a problem.[/li][li]Here’s how you solve this problem.[/li][li][pass out worksheets][/li][li]Here’s a bunch of similar problems that can be solved the same way.[/li][li]Go![/li][li]You have now learned how to do this math.[/li][/ol]
Notice this type of lesson is 100% “what” and “how”; at no point is the “why” explained, and really, the “why” is the important part of the lesson. This style of teaching inevitably results in the great majority of students simply memorizing that single process just long enough to pass the test, after which it is promptly forgotten. Nothing has been taught, and nothing has been learned. Everyone might as well have stayed home.
That’s quite an absolute statement from someone who hasn’t shared a single class with me or my children.
My daughter was most certainly NOT taught to solve basic math problems the same way I was. I did great in math and school and can still do most of it today. Your assertion that I didn’t learn it and can’t help my kids with it because I blew it off in school is insulting at best and idiotic at worst.
I was fine at anything that had logic and a right (true) answer. So math I loved, and diagramming sentences I loved, because there was a framework and a logic. I was fine with being told here is how to solve this, and when it is solved it is true. I don’t need to know the “why”. I was fine as long as I was asked questions about literature, etc., that had an answer.
Where I failed was analysis with no right answer – what are the themes in a piece of fiction, etc. I mean, I struggled through it but never felt comfortable with that.
I will say that I started out as a math major but lost it when the math became more imaginary. I switched to econ because there was still math but it was more “tangible”.
Pretty much the same for me. I’m not even sure what the OP is talking about. I am, have always been and will always be incapable of understanding and executing advanced math functions. I know many people who say the same but I know even more who do not.
I lost math when we started getting answers that weren’t really answers, or maybe the answers were waves on a graph. It felt like I had to memorize a whole bunch of rules to simplify equations and answers started being something like 2ab*6.
My experience was roughly identical until you got to the algebra part. Our family moved from Valdosta GA to Los Alamos NM when I was starting 8th grade. I was placed in an algebra class. It went like this:
[QUOTE=AHunter3’s memory of 8th grade algebra]
“Okay, you remember from yesterday we were doing ‘FOIL’, like this," began Mr. Peters, rapidly sketching in chalk on the blackboard that (x - 3y) (x - 2y) = x[sup]2[/sup] -5xy + 6y[sup]2[/sup]. I stared at it and tried to remember what it was that made it somehow true that multiplying then adding “first, outer, inner, last” as he had shown us was mathematically valid, and also trying to understand what was “better” about x[sup]2[/sup] -5xy + 6y[sup]2[/sup] than the original (x - 3y) (x - 2y), why we were doing this in the first place.
Then I realized he’d written out several more lines with a different mix of letters and numbers and people were raising their hands calling out answers. I realized I’d missed something critical that he’d said. He assigned a couple pages of homework and got up at the end of the lesson and I asked him to explain the process again. “Oh,” he said casually, “you just ‘unFOIL’ it, get the factors, if they have valid factors. Some of them don’t.”
[/quote]
I learned how to do algebra, but I did not find it particularly
• interesting
• fun
• mentally pleasant
School was big on drilling and making us do the mechanical act of solving equations, much like the way that in 4th grade they’d made us do arithmetical calculations ad nauseum ad infinitum. Concepts came along less often and I was perpetually finding myself thinking “Yeah but why would you ever particularly want to do that? What does the answer tell you?”. I had statistics in college and felt the same way then. Yeah fine, so I have these two populations and chi squared is such-and-such. Or I could’ve done gamma. Or the mean and the standard deviation. Can’t you just draw me a picture to show me how fuzzy our grasp of the actual population numbers are? I don’t think in numbers!
I think the latter is the real problem for me. I’m the numerical equivalent of a tone-deaf person who is capable of playing Mahler into a pitch-and-duration analysis machine and discerning that the pitches constituting the chord are these tones and, because of extensive drilling in music theory, is able to recognize “OK, that’s an A minor chord and it just moved from D minor that came before it”, but still doesn’t hear it as music. Numbers just don’t talk to me.
My boss points at a number on a spreadsheet: “Well, this is clearly wrong!” I say “How do you know?” He says “Well look at it. The component values are 1.823, 1.907, 0.435, but this one is coming in at 0.0294” And I look and I look and I scowl and I venture to say “Umm, so I guess it’s a lot lower?” And he reviews the mathematical relationship of the numbers wherein it is these added then multiplied by that one and I still have to do the calculation to see what kind of figure would be expected there instead of 0.0294, and get 1.6225, and I can see that they’re different but it doesn’t jump off the page at me the way it does for him. Much the way that the tone-deaf person doesn’t hear a horrid clash of instruments in a wrong key if the horns go to A flat minor instead of A minor — you could point to the measures where the notes were written wrong and point to the ones preceding and compare them to the notes written for other parts, and they might go “Oh, so that transition was written wrong for the horns”, but they don’t “just get it”. Me, I don’t hear the music of math. And it’s seriously godawful fucking boring.
Well, that’s a load. I recently returned to college and no one has ever said it. Maybe they say it at yours, but it’s not universally true (so to speak).
This can not be said enough. Universities do a deplorable job of teaching in the math/science/STEM areas, making it either an obligatory non-priority of their researchers that then gets deferred to unskilled TAs, or pushed into the laps of unvetted and unmanaged adjuncts. Nothing will kill potential love and skill of math and science like universities.
I hated math throughout K-12. I eventually got it, but I learned to do it on the sly. My dad has a degree in physics which he was actually earning while I was in grades K-5. I’m struggling with 8+5 and Mr. Physics is trying to explain it to me. It was torture. Sheer torture. The worst was estimating. I’d do the problem, get the correct answer, and then write down something that was a little off. I could NOT grasp the concept. I took algebra, geometry, and trig. I made As, but I didn’t get it.
then in college, I took a math course for those who were going to be elementary school teachers. Every class day when we came in, there were a series of math problems suitable for elementary students on the board. At the top was a number in a circle. that was the base we were to work the problems in. It forced us to think like a kid facing something new. I found I really liked teaching math. I taught remedial math for a few years before I got out of teaching.
Now I’m a buyer. I use estimation every single day I work.
I think anti-intellectual is on the money. Americans aren’t really anti-smart-- people who can think their way out of a jamb are heroes in the US. It’s good to be crafty or canny, because it’s useful, but the US has no use for thinking for its own sake. You even see it among people who you’d think would be an exception-- even people on campuses, for example, often don’t like to see someone with real knowledge (not just a little trivia) outside their primary field. When a lawyer plays the violin, a chemist speaks three languages, or a film studies grad student can quote the Federalist papers, people regard them with suspicion.
So then the question for people like you is, how much of this is Nature and how much is Nurture? Is this due to lack of training, or lack of experience, or lack of inherent aptitude?
I have to admit that this thing about not liking math is alien to my own experience.
I used to have books of math problems that we bought in the store. I’d take 'em on vacation and work through them.
When I was in grade school I was annoyed that kids at another school were getting math ahead of what we had – we seemed to be plodding along, repeating the same stuff over and over. I discovered that on my way back home from school that the junior high I passed was still in session for an hour or so after we finished. One of the classrooms I passed had a class in Algebra I, and I used to sit under the window and listen. I loved it. A few years later, I had the same teacher, in the same classroom.
I took Algebra II during the summer so I could take pre-calc, so I could take calculus my senior year.
we used the same text book (in a sort of “junior” edition) that they used in my college course. The college handed out the syllabus for the first term of calculus, so I arranged to borrow a copy of our high school text so I could study up the parts I missed for the college course. when I got there, I took all the tests for first term calculus and passed them, so I could go straight into Calculus 2.
The thing is, I didn’t think there was anything weird about this. It all seemed easy and natural to do. The other people taking the summer course felt the same way about it.
I remember when I was reviewing algebra texts prior to going to grad school. I’m in the bedroom while my husband and kids are watching a football game. My husband came into the room to find me bawling my eyes out because I’M STUPID.
For me, it is like a foreign language. I’m an excellent speller and grammar nerd. I like to read and write. But you throw a word problem at me and I go tharn. I know what the question is asking, but I have no idea how to set up the math problem to get to it.
Heh. I did remember thinking how hard it would be to teach math to someone who didn’t get it, when it is so clear in the teacher’s mind. My father decided to teach my brother and me algebra at home over the summer so we could skip it in high school. He used our little play blackboard. 
I got all of it except for some reason word problems that use d = rt (“a train leaves a station at 50 mph…”). The day that finally clicked was a really good day!