this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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I don't understand, out of all of the things that we teach students in schools, out of all of the things that people don't demand justification for learning, why Maths gets all of the flak. It's the foundation on which the universe exists. If people don't understand that they're not just learning trigonometry "just cuz" then they probably don't have much of a career in STEM planned for themselves. Which is fine, but western society's blindspot for STEM is 100% attributed to the intentional undermining and dumbing-down of the education system.
We regularly don't give students justification for why they learn grammar, biology, chemistry, physics, visual art, and music. But as soon as you show someone a standard polynomial, they lose their fucking minds.
For me, my "education" with math was "when you see this: 5/73¥π7^t then you use 5-8(25&6)_9gh8/6 not 5&6(9!4_89) ok memorize it for the test.
Oh you want to know why or what it does or what it even is? No that's college work. You're in highschool, memorize it because reasons.
Yeah... That's not how my brain works no matter how badly I wish I did. I need to UNDERSTAND not memorize! I can't memorize seemingly arbitrary bullshit that has no explained meaning. My brain instantly tosses it as irrelevant information.
Same but "you're in middle school, that's high school stuff"
I find that the best way for me to learn is to learn the use of something first , then find that something . Exploring a problem and finding the solution is way more engaging than repeating a basic task over and over again . And unfortunately schools , at least in western countries don't have space for those things . Its all cramming cramming cramming , which sucks , both for the students who are weaker in a subject and those who are better at it .
Students often reach for tools to bypass problems , not realising how useful that tool would be at understanding the problem . Learning becomes a chore , not something that one does for self improvement .
In the US this is enforced even more by imperial units , which put one more roadblock when students try to use what they learned in a way which has any connection to the real world .
It hurts , both being a student which has large voids in knowledge that is expected , being a student which is ahead of material by a large margin and seeing other students struggle with tasks , to me , simple . It hurts knowing how complex of a problem this is , especially as one notes its connections to the wider world , both how failures of the education system hurt our society and how society is not able to help our schools .
I dunno, I see people complain about "why do we have to read books that are hundreds of years old?" too pretty frequently. Some people are just hostile to education. Honestly, cost aside, I'm a little disappointed in the number of people who complain about college as if the only thing you get out of college is a piece of paper.
It's a valid complaint. Why is Shakespeare more legitimate than, say, Stephen King for high school classes? Reading is reading, and asking students to read boring books because "they are classics" is the best way to discourage them.
In high school, I had to read Phèdre, a story told in verses about some incestuous rednecks from Greek mythology or whatever, written in the 1600's. It was painful.
For that matter, why do we read Shakespeare? They're plays. Watch them as plays or movies. If kids first exposure to Star Wars was by reading the script, they'd hate that, too, and they should.
I had to read Shakespeare, then read another book about how witty and clever it was to the people of the time, then write a report about how witty and clever it was, once I understood the historical context. My conclusion that having to explain jokes is the death of humor got me a C-.
There are a lot more authors who took inspiration from shakespeare than Steven King. Shakespeare is just objectively more influential, tropes he invented are used all the time in many places and there is value to understanding where the source comes from.
I think there's something to be said about shared cultural experiences, and so reading some older books is probably a good thing.
To clarify what I mean though: that means that we should be reading stuff that was written/popular when our grandparents were our age. Going back 200+ years should be saved for a history class cause that's the real value in reading that material. In my opinion, Great Gatsby should be about the oldest book kids need to be reading for a literature class these days, and even that's pushing it.
I feel like similar issues are also present in humanities , but they are less visible .
I enjoy doing recreational linguistics , writhing poems , stories and argumentative texts , yet I always sucked at humanities at school . I learned a lot of what school tried to teach me on my own , often after failing to fully grasp it at school . On the flip side , a lot of time was spent learning about things I still do not know the use of , that I , with some difficulty , crammed for tests and forgotten .
Even with maths which I am quite good at , I often entered new topics with some knowledge of them from doing maths recreationally , which was not that great for me , both as I did not have enough resources to find the gaps in my knowledge and as I spent time not building on the knowledge I already had .
I think this is an issue of how little we focus on individuals in our schools , though this is not something I blame teachers for , to be clear , they have no option to do so , especially as being a teacher not rewarded enough , ignoring both the extra workload outside of school and with generally shitty pay .
I often find that the best way for me to learn is via exploration , trying to do something and researching ways how to do things needed to reach the goal . This is unfortunately something school doesn't have space for and I suspect it is one of the factors behind this misunderstanding .
The reason I feel like maths gets more heat for not having a use is because its harder to convey meaning of abstract equations , as someone else in this thread put better then I can , many students , I feel like , miss a deeper understanding , being left with only what is needed to pass the test , forgetting even that soon after ...