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

[Shagnasty]

@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.

I agree with you. I think the whole approach to math education in the U.S. needs an overall. That means completely rethinking it, not just getting better teachers for the existing model.

You could start by making it much more user friendly and hands on so that students don’t feel like they are trying to translate ancient Greek to solve a simple problem that could be explained in a much more interesting way. I work in software development and one of the worst things you can do is name your variables things like a,b,x,y and z because it makes code very hard for others to read but math textbooks are all over that technique and worse. Just make up any reasonable example of what those letters represent and what the answer means. Oh hell no, they won’t do that. That wouldn’t be abstract and useless enough.

Believe it or not, it can be fun to figure out when those trains will collide or just how fast that bullet will go if you make it relevant to things students think are cool. You could also ditch Algebra II as a requirement. If you pay attention, you will notice that the GRE (the test for college graduates aspiring to graduate school) has almost no higher math in it. It stops at cleverly designed problems that require no more than 9th grade math at the highest. That should tell you something. All of those extra high school math courses are deemed useless and non-predictive even for college graduates (if someone wants to go to real math graduate school, there is a special subject test for that just like there are many others).

I have no idea what other countries are doing but I would warn against trying to follow the Asian model. Many of them are obviously very bright but they overemphasize math so much that cheating is rampant and the levels of rote memorization that they are forced to do interferes with a healthy life in American terms. I work closely with many native Asians and it is rare for me to be impressed with their problem solving abilities or math skills in real life (there are some exceptions).

Let us not forget that the reason that many Asians are doing it is because they either want to get into the very few slots for good universities in their own country or they are trying to get into any decent American university. U.S. colleges and universities are still the best in the world and there is no shortage of them or students to fill the best ones many times over even if they just accepted students from American public high schools. I don’t buy the argument that we live in a unique culture of ignorance for that reason and many more.

[Jackmannii]

@puddleglum

For the same reason people think cookies taste good, because it is true. Math takes intelligence and focus which not all people have.

Durn right.

I did very well in math all the way through freshman algebra. Then I hit geometry in my sophomore year of high school, and was disappointed to find out how stupid and unfocused I’d become.

[Thudlow_Boink]

Here’s an article from The Atlantic by Jo Boaler, an expert in math education:
The Math-Class Paradox: Mastering the subject has become less about learning and more about performance.

The article blames a lot of American kids’ struggle, hate, and fear on the fact that math classes emphasize performance, speed, and getting the right answer over learning, thinking, and exploring:

Students from an early age realize that math is different from other subjects. In many schools across the U.S., math is less about learning than it is about answering questions and taking tests—performing.
The testing culture in the U.S., which is more pervasive in math than other subjects, is a large part of the problem.

…which doesn’t encourage a “growth mindset” toward math:

Educators know that the most productive math-learning environments are those in which students receive positive messages about their unlimited potential and work on interesting and complex problems; in which they feel free to try ideas, fail, and revise their thinking. Students with a “growth” mindset are those who believe that their ability is not “fixed” and that failure is a natural part of learning. These are the students who perform at higher levels in math and in life. But students don’t get the opportunity to see math as a growth subject if they mainly work on short, closed questions accompanied by frequent tests that communicate to them that math is all about performance and there is no room for failure. When students inevitably struggle, most decide they are not a “math person.” The last decade has seen a nation of children emerge from our schools terrified of failing in math and believing that only some students can be good at it—those who can effortlessly achieve on narrow tests.

[puddleglum]

@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.

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.

The reason is that english and history are not hard to do just hard to be good at. Anyone can tell you whether a film is good or compose a short story, they are just likely to suck at it. However, ask the average person to do any math more advanced than addition and subtraction and they won’t be able to do it at all.
It is like soccer versus juggling. Take a person who has never played soccer and explain the rules and they will be able to play it very poorly, but ask a person who can’t juggle to do so and they won’t be able to do it if their life depended on it.

All the types of intelligence are correlated so the people who are really good at one thing and are actually really bad at another academic discipline are the exceptions and not the rule.

[bump]

@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.

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.

I think the difference is most of the other disciplines are more subjective; there’s rarely ONE correct answer, and often your grade is determined by how well you can explain your variant. You can write a history paper on a topic, and as long as you back it up, cite your sources and have a cogent argument, you’ll get a good grade, even if i’ts not necessarily the conventional thinking on the subject. Same for most of the other humanities courses.

Math, as taught in the US is utterly unforgiving. There’s usually ONE correct answer, and the teachers will often still ding you if you don’t get there by the correct path. Even the sciences are often more about the process than about the results than math is.

For many students, this dichotomy of perfection or utter incorrectness engenders a lot of dread and apprehension, and turns them off from the subject.

[RivkahChaya]

I’m very good at writing papers, and I can scratch out a B paper on a subject I barely know anything about, just but writing something that a whole lot better composed than anyone else. I used to have fun in my English classes making up BS theories I didn’t really believe and defending them-- albeit, in those cases, I had actually read the book, although sometimes not in class, sometimes years earlier. Such is the life of an English major.

You get points for being different, if you do it logically, and with all your tenses agreeing, you subjunctives in the right place, excellent punctuation, and a few original metaphors. English professors eat up original metaphors like free cake. (What, you want original in a Dope post?)

Anyway, you don’t get to play with math like that. If you’re in a Ph.D program, there may be some room for creativity, but that’s not really what math is about. Math is about wrapping your brain around something that’s already there.

There are just two different ways of thinking. Maybe some people are good at both. Maybe that’s even what makes a genius.

But it does seem like the “English” camp is a little bigger than the “math” camp.

That’s kind of surprising, now that I give it some thought, though. The really, really good language people are good fakers. Just as an example, I took the SATs for shits and giggles when I was 15. I had not taken anything past Freshman Algebra, and I did poorly at that. But I scored 640 on my math, which was a fairly respectable score, and I did it by bluffing. I also scored a 720 on my verbals. I didn’t have any ambitions to go anywhere but the state school where my uncle taught, and I could get faculty-child fee remission, and 1360 was good enough there. My verbal was also high enough to test me out of the Freshman composition class. So I never bothered to take them again. Never took the PSATs.

I also once, for a psych experiment, took a test that was meant to determine how well a person takes standardized tests. I scored a 98%, or 49 out of 50.

Anyone whose strength is math ever take anything like that? I took it when I was a Freshman in college, and I had to volunteer for psych experiments to pass the intro psych class I was in.

[RivkahChaya]

@bump

For many students, this dichotomy of perfection or utter incorrectness engenders a lot of dread and apprehension, and turns them off from the subject.

It used to, until my seventh grade math teacher, who told us that if we SHOWED OUR WORK, like she was always telling us to, she could look at it when we got a problem wrong, and maybe give us partial credit. If we used the right method to solve a problem, but made a computational error that got us the wrong answer, we might still get 1 point on a two point question.

I used to bluff my way through math, often using trial and error instead of the correct method. I stopped doing that for this teacher, and got my first A in math in years.

[amarinth]

@Thudlow_Boink

The article blames a lot of American kids’ struggle, hate, and fear on the fact that math classes emphasize performance, speed, and getting the right answer over learning, thinking, and exploring:…which doesn’t encourage a “growth mindset” toward math:

Don’t most classes in middle (& even high school) emphasize performance, speed, and getting the right answer?
I’m pretty sure that in English, Social Studies, Foreign Languages, Science, (hell, even one of my PE classes) I was graded on those things. Comparing Spartan society to Athenian society has right and wrong answers - and a student who can produce those answers more quickly is going to get a better grade than one who can’t. The article fails to answer why that’s a problem with math, specifically. (It gives the example of teachers calling on students who raise their hands first. Teachers do that in all of the other classes, too.)

I do think that math builds on itself in a way that other subject don’t. If, for some reason, you didn’t understand one of the books you read in 8th grade literature, it is unlikely to matter that much in 10th grade literature when you’re reading an entirely different set of books. On the other hand, if you don’t really understand how to manipulate fractions, it will make everything more difficult when the concept shows up again when you’re learning about decimals or percentages or algebra and so on. I’ve also observed a lack of intervention that is there with reading. When a student can’t really read well, it seems more likely that someone will have noticed and tried to do something before the student is hopelessly lost - while when a student can’t math, they’re often moved forward to the next class.

[RivkahChaya]

@amarinth

I do think that math builds on itself in a way that other subject don’t. If, for some reason, you didn’t understand one of the books you read in 8th grade literature, it is unlikely to matter that much in 10th grade literature when you’re reading an entirely different set of books. On the other hand, if you don’t really understand how to manipulate fractions, it will make everything more difficult when the concept shows up again when you’re learning about decimals or percentages or algebra and so on. I’ve also observed a lack of intervention that is there with reading. When a student can’t really read well, it seems more likely that someone will have noticed and tried to do something before the student is hopelessly lost - while when a student can’t math, they’re often moved forward to the next class.

Many elementary schools even have whole reading remediation programs, and are in a hurry to refer any kid with a hint of dyslexia for diagnosis. There are even schools devoted to teaching dyslexic students. I never heard of any of that for math.