Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

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100% agree. And the fact that you're being downvoted so heavily is pretty indicative of the biases in this community to me. Not that it's a surprise, I have personally struggled against those biases my entire adult life. But it's sad.

We (North America) filter children early in the education system on the basis of their ability to do accurate arithmetic. Most jurisdictions don't even really teach math proper until high school. By the time kids get there, they've lost their self-confidence because the sheer tedium and boredom of the curriculum in the early grades.

Personally: Because of my primary and high school math grades I was barred from entering a computer science degree. But I have a 20+ year software engineering career only because I just really loved computers and pushed my way into the industry, and ended up at Google among other places, despite the lack of degree. But it was hard, really hard, to get into these jobs. And there's always been people in those jobs who gave me the sense they didn't think I belonged there with them.

The way we're teaching math to kids is on the whole really awful. I've seen both my kids struggle with it, despite being gifted intellectually and scoring incredibly high on the WISC-V.

The whole process seems geared towards grinding kids down in repetition and struggle.

Meanwhile we have machines to automate arithmetic and most math generally. In general, my sense of the way math is taught these days: it's an insult to the human spirit.

And people who excel in it and struggled through it and "won" have an intrinsic bias in seeing it as the "right" filter and "right" gating for what they're doing today, even when it clearly is not always directly related.

Not everything is the US educational system, though. I'm not saying it is necessarily better in some parts of Europe, but I do believe that math education is a basic necessity, and while it is often done badly [1], we shouldn't make it optional.

[1]: In my not-professional experience I see that people get lost in math down the road and will struggle in later classes because they have elementary troubles understanding even the basics of what an equation is. For example, I was baffled when one of my classmates argued that the x and y in an equation can't denote the same value.. But I also experienced the same thing when I tried to teach/help math to my sister. Math is simply not a subject like every other where not remembering the previous year's material is not a problem -- it necessarily builds on itself.

Why does this argument not apply to any subject that a number of students find challenging? If the education system were based on this kind of thinking we would basically have no classes.

I certainly have NEVER used biology at work, and I didn’t do well in it in high school or college.

Biology is never touted as something that will be helpful in the workplace. But if you learn what viruses and bacteria are and internalize the fact that we are all made of cells and are immersed in a world of micro organisms, maybe when someone explains to you what a vaccine does or how your diet affects your gut bacteria you will not fall from the sky and claim it's a satanic ploy

Math explains how insurance, engineering, science, and economics work. Almost everyone needs to know that stuff to make good decisions.

All of these things can be explained to a layman in a few minutes. What are the remaining hundreds of hours for?

Washing your hands in the bathroom is an example of using biology at work. Only recently doctors would refuse to do it before surgery because nobody could explain what it did, so it wasn’t logically correct to do it.

Do you need to memorize the names of various bacteria in order to see that your hands become less dirty when you wash them? No.

But you need to know how aerosol transmission works to know why disposable towels are cleaner than hand dryers.

Because for those other subjects it's often correct, so it would be to knock in an open door.

Math has a much stronger claim to be generically useful. Related fields, such as physics may in fact be seen something worth studing more because it teaches you how to apply math, than for the likelihood that you may end up in a job that requires the physics itself.

My own experience is that math/stats is by far the most useful (non language) topic I studied in school/university, even more so that Computer Science (and I work in IT).

This is a fantastic comment. I think your analysis at the end is spot-on. It's like the K-12 math curriculum is a hazing ritual for a vast fraternity of "smart people". Without this ritual, their group identity is called into question.

I don't know a single person in this "cabal of smart people" who has a single nice thing to say about the K-12 mathematics curriculum. They largely consider it a travesty, and have vaguely apocalyptic things to say.

> I don't know a single person in this "cabal of smart people" who has a single nice thing to say about the K-12 mathematics curriculum.

You must not know many people. The problem with trying to categorize K-12 mathematics (or other common, but non-uniform experiences) as good or bad or somewhere in between is precisely that the experience is non-uniform. Even being in the same classes as my twin sister (though sometimes not), we formed some wildly different opinions on different teachers and classes and even classmates. The experience was too different even sitting 5' from each other, let alone when speaking about this with people who attended schools in different parts of the country, or even different parts of the same state or city.

I think math suffers from a motivation problem, especially past early arithmetic education.

Reading? Now I have access to all these stories! And it's plainly useful in every single other class, pretty much constantly (even math class—go figure, this math book has more words than numbers in it!). I can read subtitles (on anime, say—it's gone pretty mainstream now, for kids). I can read video games without voice acting, and follow them (Breath of the Wild requires lots of reading, for instance). It is constantly, obviously useful, and enables access to lots of things that most kids want to do.

History? Social studies? Largely an application of reading—and hey, look, more stories! Great! Oh and now I understand that movie I watched better, or that game I'm playing.

Science? Well look at that, a ton more reading, and when it's taught halfway right it's like working through a mystery story, even. Fun!

Math? It really seems like you're just doing it for its own sake, and... that's it. The actual facts or what's intended don't matter—that is what it feels like. It's occasionally useful in other classes, but not constantly like reading is, and often that math is pretty simple compared to the stuff you're learning in math class. Kids aren't dumb and recognize quickly that word problems are contrived, pandering, and ridiculous, and meanwhile have a hard time finding applications for any of this even if they go looking for it. Their parents? They probably see them rely on reading (even just signs or directions) 1000x more often than they see them apply math beyond what's taught by 6th grade. Reading? Useful daily. Math? Only occasionally, and it's mostly the simple stuff.

To a student, it feels like math is about as useful as learning some constructed language that everyone's telling them is super important but in their actual experience sure doesn't seem to be—I mean, no adults they know even read, write, or speak it, and they seem to be getting by just fine. It feels like you're being gaslit or having some kind of practical joke played on you. Of course it's hard to care about it, unless you're the sort who just loves mathematical puzzles, like the way some people are really into crossword puzzles, but most people aren't.

I don't have any kind of solution to this, but IMO it's the fundamental problem with math education.

I feel like you glossed over a lot here though.

Reading? Yes, the intricacies of clause structure? No, no one uses that besides a few people.

Science? Almost no one I know uses chemistry or biology. I don’t even remember how to balance a chemical equation.

The same arguments against mathematics education can be used for almost anything.

If “Reading” is the example for English education, then “addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division” are the analogs in math, and they’re used by pretty much everyone in day to day life and in other classes. Hell, they’re even used when reading.

Yes, lots of the memorization-heavy math from 6th grade and earlier is often useful to most people. Nowhere near as constantly in use as reading, but at least a little is used by most people almost every day. Basic arithmetic, trivial calculations involving percentages or fractions, and (far less) simple variable substitution do see actual use by people not in fields that are extremely math-heavy. Maybe the very occasional area/volume formula or pythagorean theorem, if they're DIYers.

The next 6 years? Not so much. Meanwhile, at least the english classes have stories in them, and the kids might not hate all of them.

> Reading? Yes, the intricacies of clause structure? No, no one uses that besides a few people.

Formal grammar is barely taught at all, now. For better or worse. Drilling spelling words has also fallen out of favor.

> The same arguments against mathematics education can be used for almost anything.

They really can't, nowhere near the same degree. If we ignore that and assume more than a tiny minority of kids will give a shit about math if we just present it to them harder or more mathily, then it's not gonna get better.

Do you ever have a set of facts and reason about what you can conclude from them? That's math.

Do you ever play board games and try to come up with the best strategy? That's math.

And that's not even getting into things that involve numbers…

> Do you ever have a set of facts and reason about what you can conclude from them? That's math.

> Do you ever play board games and try to come up with the best strategy? That's math.

If zero people who aren't math majors think that's true—which is the case—then our 13 years of compulsory math education is to blame for that.

If people manage to do both well enough to get by just fine in life, without any formal math education on it, then one wonders how necessary math education is to effectively do the math that people actually do.

(personally, I'd look in the philosophy section for the former, at least, seeing as all my logic books, except the one specifically about mathematical proofs, are philosophy textbooks, including the ones full of symbols)

Sounds like an argument against the education system and not against math.

That means teaching it better. In my experience, math is taught much better than when I went to school.

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