I think the reason I, personally, hate math is because everyone was always telling me that it’s easy. “Come on, this is basic stuff! You should be able to rattle this stuff off the top of your head!”
Except that I can’t. It takes me ages to figure out even simple arithmetic. I can do it, but it takes me longer than average, and I have to concentrate a lot harder on it than most people do. And you’re telling me that it should be a piece of cake makes me feel like a stupid piece of shit, which, frankly, only makes me shut down (because if I can’t do this “super easy” thing, then why the hell bother trying?). Math is hard for me, period. And people who try to pretend otherwise are only fooling themselves. As for “real world” stuff, I find that just as hard as isolated, abstract stuff, so take that as you will.
What I really wish is that someone had said “look, I know this is hard for you, but you can do it. Also, here are some useful tips to learn so that you can speed your mental process.” I might appreciate math more if someone will just acknowledge that no, in fact, it is NOT easy, but it is something that I can learn, and get better at.
I disagree with this contention that you can’t have creativity with arithmetic. My first-grader solves arithmetic problems creatively all the time, if by that you mean that she doesn’t really follow a rote algorithm for doing it, but figures it out. If you ask her to tell you what 17 + 58 is, she’s likely to talk through it by saying, “Well, 17 + 60 is the same as 10 + 60 + 7, so that’s 77. 17 + 58 must be two less than that, so it’s 75.” Or maybe tomorrow, if you ask the same question, she’ll decide that it’s 10 + 50 + 15, and get to the same place. She doesn’t usually do the “7+8=15, write down 5 and carry the 1” thing, because she doesn’t really remember that algorithm very well. Instead, she understands the numbers more intuitively, and “invents” a method to get to the answer she wants in each case. Her teacher has commented that hearing her explanations seems to help her classmates understand arithmetic better, too, even though she (and they) are often surprised by how my daughter gets from A to B.
Sure, sooner or later she’ll probably have to memorize the algorithm. Hopefully by the time she gets to that point, she’ll also be intuitively solving other math puzzles, and will maintain the problem-solving skills part.
It sold well over here, too. Stephen Hawking didn’t get a guest role on several American TV shows by being totally obscure and incomprehensible to the American public.
True. However, by my reading of the book he also understood that math intimidates people, didn’t use it unnecessarily, and took some pains to explain not only the equations but why the use of math was necessary to understanding.
You could be right. I was thinking of doing the example concretely with a sheet of paper and scissors, or a checkers board. If you want a real-world application, it could be put in terms of how many square feet of carpet are needed for an L-shaped room.
Because we are tlking about hi school Maths, not university. I don’t know about you but I didn’t do any proofs in secondary school. At university it was all I did.
Regarding language, the point was you need a basic understanding to get to ‘sounds nice’. Without that all poetry is is words on a page that you may or may not be able tom read. Or sounds that you may or may not understand. I could read Swedish poetry - or post it here - and non-Swedish speakers would struggle to get anything from it. This isn’t true with music. Anyone can walk up to a piano and see which keys sound nice to them when they play them I succession or together. It requires no knowledge beyond the basic motor skill of being able to press a key.
That is how music is different. The utter lack of knowledge required to get something that ‘sounds nice’.
I don’t like most math for the reason I don’t care for most philosophy. It’s too abstract. I’m never going to have to find out what X means in an equation like (X-Y) (Y-Z) = N^2 in real life or in MY profession. So, that part is useless to me and a good deal of people. People who know I dislike math are surprised I’m very good at basic math (things like tipping and sales tax). That I don’t mind and find everyone needs. Also, people are either left brained or right brained. If you’re more left (I think it’s left) you’re more into the artistic and emotional. Where are right brained people are into logic and science. So, non right brained people wouldn’t enjoy math. I’m also not good at long math problems (and problems that require plugging and rechecking) because I often invert numbers.
I also want to say, in MY experience math teachers are very bad teachers. They’re not hands on. Every math teacher I’ve had who noticed I couldn’t do something or a classmate couldn’t, acted like the problem was us. I know they are good math teachers, I never had one. I think since it’s one educational field where demand out numbers supply, some schools are willing to take any warm body for the spot.
I think what makes cryptograms not (entirely) a math puzzle is the extent to which they involve one’s sense for the extramathematical judgement “What strings of letters might be considered to comprise a reasonable English-language quotation?”.
But Sudoku is not like that; its rules are simple and clear-cut and do not call upon any extramathematical intuitions or cultural knowledge. So, I think it is fair to say, Sudoku is just a math problem. [Ironically, as a mathematician, this is what I dislike about Sudoku as opposed to crosswords, since Sudoku seems a fairly trivial math problem, repeated over and over with little fundamentally new after you’ve done a few, while solving each new crossword at least hopefully provides some new wit and cleverness in the experience]
It’s perfectly possible to enjoy both mathematics and art/literature
Now that’s a shame - teachers who treat students like that are not doing a good job teaching, no matter how well they teach students who happen to pick up concepts more quickly (or happen to have heard the idea before)
A few observations, based upon part time teaching math.
-US math textbooks are poorly written and badly structured (British textbooks and older US texts are much better)
-poorly taught by education majors, who themselves are uncomfortable in mathematics
-the courses are repetitious and boring…they turn off the bright and bore the average students
Plus, there is a general anti-intellectual atmosphere in many US highschools, that makes it cool to avoid learning.
Except that it makes my law degree an a mathematics degree… which it isn’t. Your definition is void for overbreadth, counsellor.
“This is easy” gets my goat too. Teachers, whatever you teach stop saying that. I don’t care if its math or how to play the kazoo. When a student is struggling, telling them how wrong they are to not have the skills they need is not helping.
Tangent: My bullshit-sense always tingles at this whole meme of “left brained” vs. “right brained” people (i.e., the alleged scientific observation that people divide into two discrete camps, as determined by having a particular brain lobe which is much more active than the other, or whatever physiological differences these phrases are supposed to impute as responsible for different people having different personalities and interests); I suspect it’s just one of those runaway pop science canards that actually has very little basis in fact. Am I correct in harboring this skepticism? What’s the straight dope?
This false dichotomy poisoned my attitude toward anything quantitative. I didn’t unlearn that malarky until grad school. Once I realized that I just need to think about math as a language to communicate arguments in, my life changed.
Thankfully someone rather smarter than me worked out the nice piece of math you refer to above, since I’m a game theorist.
I can only say, I only got out of high school because they let me take business math (adding, subtracting, multiplication, division) twice. And to this very day I still have to use my fingers in counting, and it takes me three tries for multiplication. I tried. I TRIED. Do not say it was laziness, or maths-iz-hard-for-gurlz. I didn’t get it. When I got to algebra in 9th grade, I stayed after school for “extra help” every day, every day, and all I got was more algebra problems to “work on”, and I got further and further behind and I failed abysmally. I got a final grade of 46. Went to summer school, got a 42…I can only surmise my math disabilty + truly disinterested, suck ass teachers = failure…My daughter came home from school in her freshman year, all agog, told me her teacher flipped out in class, started screaming, and yanked the telephone out of the wall and stomped it to bits, and I was inordinately pleased and not at all surprised the freaked out bitch was her math teacher. The only thing worse than trying to teach math to the math impaired, I guess, is being the teacher. Yes, I hated math then, I hate math now, and I will hate math when they put me in the grave. Because I just. didn’t. get. it. (everything else - A’s, B’s, and a C in gym.)
You are correct and I agree. I’m a software engineer who loves literature and history and film and music. In my classes I found that people studying STEM subjects tended to do better at humanities classes than the humanities majors.
In elementary school I breezed through arithmetic with straight A’s. To this day, my (adult) children are still amazed that I can look at a restaurant bill and figure a proper tip to the cent in less time than it takes them to get a calculator out of their pocket. However, I started to fall behind when I was introduced to basic algebra and geometry, and by the time I got through high school, I was in danger of not graduating because I was perilously close to failing math.
I don’t blame my teachers, who were very patient in trying to explain things to me even when I was the worst student in class. And I completely confused them when I could look at a problem and know the answer was somewhere around 4x+y without having the slightest idea of how to show it.
Life being full of odd jokes, when I took my college placement tests, the math section was 100% multiple choice, and “knowing” that the answer was somewhere around 4x+y was close enough to allow me to test out of my entire college math requirement. I have no doubt that if I had actually taken a college math course I would have failed it and ended up in the infantry serving in Vietnam.
I like math, I appreciate it and I suppose on some level, I “get” it. But anything past basic addition, subtraction, multiplcation and addition is a complete mystery to me.
