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Comment by chancho | Hacker News Reader

I'm just as upset with the state of math education in the US as anybody, but if UW is anything like my alma mater, then "Atmospheric Science 101" is a class that liberal arts majors take to satisfy their math & science general education requirements. A lot of these students (my wife, for example) have serious math anxiety. She could probably get a 70% on this test, even today, so many years after school, but throw it at her without warning on the first day of a non-math class and she'd literally cry.

Now there's a case to be made that a good high school math curriculum should not leave anyone anxious about math, but I still think it's a bit of a leap to take this test and extrapolate to all students.

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Same experience with my girlfriend. She has a good analytical mind (she graduated near the top of her law class) but she's just terrified of math.

The weirdest aspects of this phenomenon are that: a) there's a very real fear of math unlike any other subject and b) there's no stigma against being mathematically illiterate as there is for other subjects (most likely because so many people just accept that "math is hard" and not for them).

Is it any surprise, though? Math is taught in a manner that focuses very much on the how but rarely ever the why. And while Discovery Math/Reform Math/etc are lambasted for not teaching kids to memorize certain algorithms, they do something else that's very important: encourage students to use creative problem solving skills to develop their own solution algorithms.

I'm not going to advocate reform math in its current form, but I have to question traditional "drill and kill" teaching methods in today's modern world. If I can't remember how to find the area of a triangle, I just Google it. Drilling it into my brain would have made sense in the 1920's when there was no internet, no assurances my peers had the appropriate level of education to know such a thing, and possibly no ability to reach an "expert" via telephone to tell me the algorithm. I'd be completely reliant on my memory and (possibly) a math book if I was fortunate enough to have one with me. For all practical purposes, memorizing one half times base time height would have been the way to go in a pre-Internet era. Today, it seems like it's far more worthwhile to develop students who are solid problem solvers with strong information retrieval skills, as opposed to wasting precious time memorizing trivial algorithms that are readily available.

Also with a triangle it can be easily shown how you arrive at 1/2 bh, and I agree teaching this is much more valuable than formula memorization. Throwing in some practical use cases school kids can actually relate to wouldn't hurt either. I mean, when you're in 4th grade, who gives a fuck how tall a light pole is.

Is it any surprise, though? Math is taught in a manner that focuses very much on the how but rarely ever the why. And while Discovery Math/Reform Math/etc are lambasted for not teaching kids to memorize certain algorithms, they do something else that's very important: encourage students to use creative problem solving skills to develop their own solution algorithms.

The idea sounds really great, but everything i've ever seen is that the students just end up terrible at everything. I even tried to teach it some, and the material seemed great to me as a teacher, but the students just never got it. I feel like the discovery idea makes a lot more sense in hindsight, but when learning that way, doesn't work out like hoped.

However, I study applied math and I would say i learn in a more discovery way... But thats at the graduate level.

If students are ending up terrible at everything, then the problem is deeper than just tradition vs reform. What's likely occurring is we are much better at teaching plug-and-chug than we are at developing problem solving. That's to be expected, as it's significantly harder to develop problem solving skills than it is to simply memorize steps, grade, correct, and repeat until perfect. This is especially true when you consider most math teachers really aren't trained in the art of problem solving, and were likely taught in a traditional manner themselves. As such they have no real frame of reference to go off of when attempting to foster problem solving skills in their students.

I know the same story. I'm not sure what it is, but people do have a real fear of math. I graduated from the UW's ACMS ( Applied Computational Mathematical Sciences ) department which mainly focuses on scientific computing, as is obvious from the name, so I do know something about Math at the UW.

First off, let me say that UW students are not the cream of the crop. They're not daft, but the UW admits a very wide array of people. Many of them absolutely terrified of math. I don't know why this is, I looked at the test and it took me roughly one minute to complete the test in my head. However, I do know some very, very bright people who wouldn't touch math with a 10 foot pole.

Mainly, it is my liberal arts friends who have this attitude ( and I really do think it is an attitude problem ) and freeze when they encounter problems such as these.

I suppose that my point, is really that just because these kids scored low on your test, doesn't mean that they are stupid. I think they are just scared.

On a separate but related note: Until I was 14 I was in public school in Utah, and when I came to Washington in the 8th grade I was 2 to 3 years ahead of my peers in math ( this was the most advanced level offered to my grade at my school ). There really is something very wrong with math education in WA.

Incidentally, here's a link to the description in the UW Time Schedule http://www.washington.edu/students/crscat/atmos.html#atms101

I have had a few friends take your class ( I don't know if it really was your class )and they've all said that it was a very hard class and they learned a lot. Unfortunately, I didn't actually have any friends take it because they were generally interested in it, they actually took it because they needed the credit. I think it's a 'Natural World' credit.

I actually wish that I had taken a few years of atmos. Given what I chose to study, I think I would have liked it. There are lots of numbers to be crunched in the weather. :-)

If you're interested in reading anecdotes from dozens of genuinely smart people who were or are scared of math, you can visit this fascinating Metafilter thread in which posters address the issue.

http://ask.metafilter.com/135720/Does-math-have-big-scary-te...

"Why do elementary school teachers teach multiplication tables for 6 years and call that math?"

Recently my mother told me a story of when I was in elementary, a teacher told my mother that while I was quite good in English in the like, I was bad at math. My mother (who likes math and is pretty good at it) got pissed off at the teacher and told her that she couldn't possibly know if I was good at math or not, because we weren't doing math.

I actually did not ever learn my full multiplication tables, but I did learn techniques to get around not knowing them, and can know consequently multiply much larger numbers in my head than most other people. So I don't regret my hatred of memorization.

And that might be behind it. The only thing I hated more than memorizing multiplication tables was memorizing poems, but there was very little of the latter in my education; much more of the former.

I'm sorry but there is no excuse for not being able to write down the equation for finding the area of a circle. Even if you completely suck in geometry and can't remember a damn thing pi*r^2 should roll of the tongue without a second thought.

I'm almost a decade out of university and it only took me a second to spool up my basic math part of the brain. (Scientific notation took me a second to remember what it meant) But a freshman with only a 3 month break between schools should get 100% on this exam.

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