Why are people in the United States socialized to believe that math is unreasonably difficult?

[drewder]

My father was an engineer and always, although not purposely, made me feel stupid in math. Really he just had forgotten how to do math at my level. It wasn’t until my last few semesters at college to realize that I am actually pretty good at math.

The biggest problems I see causing math illiteracy are that math requires focus and time that other subjects just don’t, also that the average person doesn’t encounter much high level math in their day to day basis, and third there is no stigma associated with not knowing math. Nobody would accept someone as normal who couldn’t read yet we have no problem with folks who can’t do math.

[RickJay]

@RivkahChaya

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.

They do? I mean, do you know these people?

I can’t think of a country on earth more obsessed with getting their kids to college than the United States.

This is just a completely wrong answer to the OP; aside from the fact that it’s probably not true, it would not be an answer even if it was. People have struggled to learn math since forever.

[bump]

@AHunter3

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.

That’s an excellent way to put it. It’s kind of interesting when you DO finally hear the music, or some variant of it, in that out of nowhere, the volume comes up, and it’s suddenly EASY. Geometry was the first course where the volume came up for me- it was just unspeakably simple and intuitive for me, especially relative to algebra.

But numbers, equations and variables just don’t do it for me- too abstract for me to really get a handle on. So while I’ve literally taken (and passed with at least Cs) 16 credit hours of college level math, I still can’t tell you why FOIL works for multiplying polynomials. Or for that matter, how the quadratic equation works or really what it is.

[puddleglum]

For the same reason people think cookies taste good, because it is true. Math takes intelligence and focus which not all people have. I don’t think anti-intellectualism has anything to do with it. I’m good at math and have never gotten any heat for it. It is more like knowing magic, people are impressed but not awed.

[skdo23]

@Velocity

Not only is math difficult, but the society reinforces it. People hate math and then promote the view that math is awful, and when a student learns math already with the expectation that it will be awful, it is self-reinforcing and the student’s confirmation bias is confirmed and he hates math all the more.

And also a society that ridicules or sneers at people who are good at math, or actually praises math illiteracy, or bad math skills, as an outright virtue.

All of this creates a society in which only people who really love math, will truly pursue it.

And it’s reached the point where saying “I’m not good at math” has become a lighthearted self deprecating joke as opposed to an admission of a (usually) fixable weakness.

Obligatory SNL reference.. It’s Chevy Chase portraying Gerald Ford during one of the 1976 Presidential Debates, for those of you too young to remember.

[R3d_Anonymous]

@puddleglum

For the same reason people think cookies taste good, because it is true. Math takes intelligence and focus which not all people have. I don’t think anti-intellectualism has anything to do with it. I’m good at math and have never gotten any heat for it. It is more like knowing magic, people are impressed but not awed.

Maybe, but I don’t see History or English being thought of as difficult and in my opinion, those take as much, if not more intelligence.

I can’t completely buy this because I think math only takes a certain type of intelligence, but there are many different types of intelligence. I breeze through math classes, but am a complete dumbass when it comes to the arts. Despite how well I do in math, I’m still completely at a loss as to how I’m going to fulfill my arts gen-ed. I’ve racked up two W’s just from having to drop art classes (i.e. Introduction to Film and Contemporary Music History) because I found them too difficult and they completely went over my head (and these were considered “easy A’s”).

So what I’m trying to say is I don’t see why math is seen as a course that’s objectively harder than others. I think it’s subjective. To the contrary, I feel like a complete dumbass in humanities courses.

[RickJay]

@R3d_Anonymous

Maybe, but I don’t see History or English being thought of as difficult and in my opinion, those take as much, if not more intelligence.

Shakespeare is the joke go-to example right after math for “this is impossible to learn and why do I need to know it anyway.”

So what I’m trying to say is I don’t see why math is seen as a course that’s objectively harder than others. I think it’s subjective. To the contrary, I feel like a complete dumbass in humanities courses.

I am sure that for individuals this is unquestionably true. My wife is a mathematician and statistician and finds math, obviously, relatively easy. On the other hand, her command of geography is terrible. My math is mediocre at best but my understanding of history and geography is far above the norm. I can act, but I have no skill at all in the visual arts. Why is that? Beats me.

Our daughters could not be more different. The older one is brilliant at math and age-typical in English. The younger is having a lot of difficult with math but can read and write way above her grade level. Why? Beats me.

[Two_Many_Cats]

@RickJay

They do? I mean, do you know these people?

I can’t think of a country on earth more obsessed with getting their kids to college than the United States.

You’d never know it by our drop out rates.

[drewder]

Very few college students looking for an easy major do theoretical physics.

[Thudlow_Boink]

Dear Students,

Don’t be scared of me! I’m just a mysterious governing understructure to the universe, an amoral and powerful force beyond your control! See? Nothing to fear!

-Math

from “If Math Wrote Letters” at mathwithbaddrawings.com.

[sitchensis]

@drewder

The biggest problems I see causing math illiteracy are that math requires focus and time that other subjects just don’t, also that the average person doesn’t encounter much high level math in their day to day basis, and third there is no stigma associated with not knowing math. Nobody would accept someone as normal who couldn’t read yet we have no problem with folks who can’t do math.

Most people know arithmetic, just like most people know how to read. The difference is that once they learn how to read we don’t continue to throw new languages at them every year until they fail.

It’s probably bullshit, but I was reading the other day that in the English language 3000 words make up 95% of communication. It seems to me that a lot of math disciplines are like that. The easiest 20% of each discipline is the most useful and easiest to learn and after that it’s just a grind until the students are beat down and think they don’t know math.

I teach in a tech program where we are training people for jobs. This is what I need them to do:

Arithmetic
Solve for X with one variable
Ratio and proportion
Unit Conversions
Sin Cos Tan
Pythagorean theorem
Simple geometry
Simple understanding of basic statistics (Excel can run the numbers, what are they telling us)

Now that’s a lot of different parts of different disciplines, but it’s not hard math. But it’s hard to teach someone all of this if the first time I say algebra they shutter and close up because they had such a bad experience.

[P-man]

@gigi

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”.

Our older son (the math major) can’t stand analyzing literature. He’s very good at many types of writing; a journalist friend of ours says that he has some “real writing chops.” He did well on the AP English exam despite making a D in the class. That kept him from having to take a lot of English in college. Critical Reading section of the SAT? He scored 720. Maybe this is analogous to my doing ok on SAT/ACT math sections (although nowhere near number one son’s CR score). The thing about these entrance exams is that it’s often not that hard to figure out which choice makes the most sense even when one doesn’t know what the hell the test is talking about. As far as being more comfortable with one “right” answer, my son would probably agree. I’m the opposite; I love ambiguity.

[robert_columbia]

@igor_frankensteen

It might be connected to the way that we wildly overpay and overvalue Salesmen in this country. When being good at blather is paid the tip top amounts, and actually doing the things required for the salespeople to have product is undervalued, being able to do math is likely to be poo-pooed.

That in turn, may go back to our European roots, where the peasantry are seen as a necessary evil, rather than as an essential resource.

Good point. I saw a press release from my state’s government about how we were doing so horribly in terms of math and literacy skills and that there were all these awesome jobs that were just waiting for someone to get off their lazy behind, get their GED, and find lifelong success. Since math and reading have always been my strongest areas, I went down to my local workforce office and asked where I can get one of those “math and reading” jobs, and it turns out that there aren’t any - at least as one might envision them. The “skills gap” in math and reading actually represents the fact that you can’t become a janitor anymore without a GED because you have to read all that OSHA stuff and whatnot - not that there are real opportunities out there for people with high math and/or reading skills.

[drewder]

@igor_frankensteen

It might be connected to the way that we wildly overpay and overvalue Salesmen in this country. When being good at blather is paid the tip top amounts, and actually doing the things required for the salespeople to have product is undervalued, being able to do math is likely to be poo-pooed.

That in turn, may go back to our European roots, where the peasantry are seen as a necessary evil, rather than as an essential resource.

In the Army there was a saying that there are two types of soldier, infantry and infantry support. In business everyone is either in sales or they are in sales support.

[Kropotkin]

@BetsQ

My suspicion is that there are a lot of elementary school teachers out there who aren’t particularly great at math, and because they aren’t great at it, all they can teach is rote memorization and chunking through an algorithm. That’s boring, and students’ grades depend on their ability to memorize a seemingly random collection of facts - or on their ability to grasp the underlying concepts without much help.

If it makes you mathophiles happier, this is also true of the teaching of history. Which is much harder, as evidenced by the fact that while there are child math prodigies, there are no child history prodigies.

I will try not to let the door hit me on the butt on my way out.

[Hari_Seldon]

I have a number of comments.

As to Lockhart, I read only the first page and have to take issue with his suggestion (by analogy) that no mathematician was involved in the new math. Many were, I regret to say. But the real problem with the new math, was the teachers had no idea what they were doing and trying to do it by rote. Two stories:

My daughter in fifth grade was given the problem of counting the number of subsets of a three element set. “Express your answer as a power of 2.” She gave the obvious answer 2^3. “No, the teacher said, it is 256”. She had misunderstood the instruction and calculated 2^8. That is almost more a problem of English than math.

My son in fourth grade was being taught base 6 arithmetic. The teacher had a bunch of examples like 35, 34, 15, 28, and then 61. She had discovered for the first several (all less than 36) that you divide by 6 and use the remainder as the first digit and the quotient as the second. So 35 is 55 and 34 is 54, 28 is 44 and so on. For the last one, she applied her algorithm and got 101. “No”, my son insisted, “It is 141”. “Why do you say that”, he was asked. He answered that he had learned how to do base 6 arithmetic the previous year (when I had been on sabbatical) in Switzerland. Her answer was classic. “Maybe that’s the way they do it in Switzerland, but this is how we do it here.”

I don’t recall learning addition, but I learned multiplication in fourth grade. We were not tasked with learning the multiplication table. There was a large multiplication table on the wall of the classroom and were regularly given multiplication problems, using the table on the wall. By the end of the year we had all memorized it faute de mieux. Not only that, but I at least had absorbed things like the regularity of the 9 times table (in each row, the tens digit went up by 1 and the unit digits went down by 1) and also that the 8 times table was similar (if you ignored the singularity at 5 * 8) and so on. I have never come on another person who learned it that way.

I had a 7th and 8th grade teacher who gave us make-work homework, which I hated and never did. But even she couldn’t stop me from having perfect tests, although she never gave me an A. She didn’t quite succeed in killing the subject for me, although she tried hard.

Of all the replies I have read two really seem right to me. First the general incompetence in math of elementary teachers, and second the ignorance (not “ignorant”) culture that automatically distrusts anyone who knows anything.

[Baker]

I can do basic math in my head and to some folks that’s weird. But I get used! One of my coworkers will say “How many 3oz portions in a gallon?” and I say “Not quite 43 portions.”

What I don’t understand is why some folks think that’s hard.

[Kent_Clark]

@Baker

I can do basic math in my head and to some folks that’s weird. But I get used! One of my coworkers will say “How many 3oz portions in a gallon?” and I say “Not quite 43 portions.”

What I don’t understand is why some folks think that’s hard.

It isn’t hard because people can’t do division, it’s hard because people don’t know how many ounces are in a gallon. (128;))

How many yards in a mile, easy. How many rods in a mile, not so easy.

[BigT]

I suspect that teachers, especially at the younger levels, are more likely to be good at being “people persons.” They get into teaching because they have a lot of empathy with students. While, if you’re good with math, you’re more likely to go do something that uses it in a project–programming, engineering, science stuff, etc.

I think that, at the extremes, there are tradeoffs. But, in the middle, there really isn’t. But, because anyone who can do the math can figure out that teaching is less lucrative, there’s a mathematical brain drain going on.

And, if you aren’t taught it early enough, I think it becomes to get you brain to think in a mathematical way.

The main thing I would do is look at cultures that do well with math, and see how they handle this sort of thing. I saw some Koreans try to take an SAT prep test and they found the math easy. (They specifically cited a lack of word problems).

I wonder what South Korea does with math that we don’t.

[Sattua]

I suspect that Americans aren’t bad at math, they just aren’t phenomenally driven to excel at difficult higher-level mathematics the way students in certain other parts of the world are. Want to talk about everyday math that most people use? It ends with basic algebra and a little bit of geometry…maybe trig. What do students spend years of middle and high school learning, though? Abstract shit that involves absurdly complicated and unforgiving calculations, and that really, really has no practical application for the vast majority of careers.

Of course, my viewpoint is skewed. I was well into my thirties before I realized I wasn’t “bad at math,” the way my engineer dad and programmer mother made me feel. I was a B student in a two-year-accelerated math program, who badly needed to be taken back to basic algebra for a refresher course before I began calculus.

Math education, in my experience, involves zero refreshers. Didn’t learn that theorem in sixth grade? Too bad, you’re screwed the rest of the way out.