Continuing from my last post, there are fundamental issues with the nation’s mathematics education. This week’s topic will focus on what I consider “cultural” issues with math education. These issues are related to the implementation and perspectives surrounding math.
In short, people don’t like math. Or at least a considerable population doesn’t like math in some way. Some people are scared of math. They have math anxiety. Students can run into initial difficulty in the subject, and be disinterested in learning more. Or after experiencing a difficult lesson, they could ignore it and try to progress. But that’s only a strategy that will set them behind. Since almost every topic from elementary school math up to calculus is cumulative, one can’t just skip a topic. It’ll only make the future more confusing. All parties participating in a child education (the child, parents, teachers) must help the child learn. If they don’t, they’ll convince themselves that math is hard or that they are bad at math, and continue the cycle of ignoring math.
And it’s not just kids. Some adults either don’t value math or create false impressions about it. If an adult who is supposed to be a role model says “I was never good at math it was so hard,” that might be discouraging for a child to hear. They might get a false impression about the subject, and decide they don’t like it without experience. Math isn’t some esoteric wizardry. It can be hard, and some people will experience more difficulty than others, but it is far from impossible. It just takes practices and resources (which are institutional). To continue with cultural issues, adults belittle the importance of math. I agree that most people will only use a tiny amount of math in their everyday life. People will never see daily applications of every topic on their pre-calc syllabus. But these topics are vital for future learning in a subject that could require math. Engineering for example requires calculus. Businesses make use of statistics. All of our current “big data” buzz stems from computer science and statistics, which requires math. But most importantly, math is one avenue of teaching problem solving skills. And that should be important in it’s own.
This lack of appreciation for math is a symptom of bad “marketing”. University of California, Berkeley professor Edward Frenkel hypothesizes that mathematicians do a bad job selling their work. But beyond professional mathematicians, high school math teachers can make the class boring (and to many the topics are boring). We need to find better examples of why math is important and interesting, not because we want standardized test scores to go up, but because math is important to society.
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