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Alternative anecdote. I was a students physics TA which involved lecturing and labs and lots of homeworks and in class work. I had a student who really never seemed to understand algebra and he came and said he couldn't really understand how to do the physics problems very well. I said well its going to be hard without really getting your algebra issues figured out and so he just went and did that. I think having a solid understanding of where it is deeply useful (and math and physics have evolved together forever) can be the spark that lights the fire to build the missing understanding. I can say math was very rote for me until I got into physics and I would never have gotten into hairy math without a physics motivation.

Having learned math a lot in university, it is mostly useless knowledge outside of academia. Some basic calculus and logic is useful for sure, but overall, 98% of the math is needed just to be able to learn other math topics later.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-i-couldn39t-be-a-math-...

As someone who loves math, I do think math education would benefit from making the primary focus be probability and statistics for high school. In addition, financial math instead of algebra. I would replace trigonometry and geometry with discrete math as electives. And have calculus as another elective but taught without a focus on calculation.

As someone who went to economics school and had roundabout the math curriculum you suggested, I think it was a terrible idea. It leaves one with the wrong idea that math is mostly about handling money. Only later, when I got to study math for the computer science degree, I realized that financial math is only a small part of this marvelous huge pie of knowledge.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I do think it’s more important for most students to understand money than most of what is currently taught with algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus. My main point though was to focus on probability and statistics. Right now, most students barely understand and remember what is currently taught and also lack knowledge to understand important matters that directly affect them.

The anecdote I heard was a grade-school teacher admitting they had never used the Pythagorean formula IRL.

Well, no fucking shit, Sherlock! You aren't the sort of person to turn to math to solve problems. You're the sort of homesy chuckle-cluck who puts up inspirational posters on your bedroom wall.

OTOH, I've been on my back in an attic with a house builder, and calculated the 3-dimensional length of the bizarre edges of a skylight (where the ceiling opening was completely skew to the roof opening). We absolutely used math to solve the problem.

That grade school teacher? They wouldn't have been asked to check the calculations. The carpenter? Used math IRL.

Are there degrees in “airline engineering?”

A degree from Ryanair university with major in how to screw your customers while keeping flights fully booked.

there are definitely accountants with a lot of number skills working hard on screwing flights up -- unironically lots of math in those fields. mostly excel-based tho.

To be fair no one ever takes a moment to show you what the math is useful for. You're just expected to learn it because it's said to be important.

Word. I got taught matrix multiplication in high school without any context. "Here's a grid of numbers kid. Go do some elementary school arithmetic on all of them. No it's not Sudoku I promise".

If only I'd know how important matrix multiplication would turn out to be...

Funny thing is you can use Linear Algebra to solve Sudoku puzzles.

I'm not sure why this is down-voted. Nearly every single teacher I had from elementary though high school, when asked what was the usefulness of the math lesson, said that we would need it when we got to the next level of education. Elementary teachers said we would need it in middle school. Middle school teachers said we would need it in high school. High school teachers said we would need it in college. By college you learned to stop asking questions.

I'm lucky I enjoyed math and science, but I'm not surprised that people who don't enjoy it think it isn't going to be useful to them. It's very much one of the things that if you don't know how to apply it, you won't find the places to apply it, so you end up thinking it has no use.

I think the GP post might have been downvoted because "what the math is useful for" frames it in the wrong way, making it sound like every lesson needs to be immediately applicable to your everyday life. An honest answer might be "this lesson in fractions is one step on a difficult 15-year journey that culminates in a junior developer position at OpenAI," but most 10-year-olds aren't ready for that conversation, so "just trust me, bro" might be the best we can do at that point.

That doesn't sound like it's framed in the wrong way. It sounds like people don't have a good answer for it, get frustrated, and fall back on a "because I said so" answer.

The math I was taught had a lot of practical applications. Fractions for cooking, calculating tips, finance, taxes, etc. Not even that was justified to us, let alone the more advanced stuff.

My recollections of finding math & physics interesting were simply a reflection of finding the world as a whole interesting - it (the world) was obviously full of stuff, stuff that had dimensions & mass & quantities and it seemed very clear that being able to relate such figures to each other would be always be very useful.

Percentages and arithmetic in daily life, programming, financial bookkeeping...to be fair, the math I use often is pretty basic, but even so, the report from UCSD seems to be saying that a significant fraction of the remedial math students can't even perform at that level.

Other math I use rarely, but I'm still glad I learned, say, geometry or calculus when a situation pops up.

Completely fair point. If I knew the importance of buying a house and how in reach it's always been for me with FHA loans, perhaps I would have taken budgeting classes more seriously. If I knew about the option of putting in some sweat equity for a new DIY kitchen countertop in that house I'd eventually come to buy, perhaps I would have paid more attention to the Pythagorean theorem to know how to cut the corner-piece. So on, and so forth.

>They seem to earnestly believe that it isn't an actual tool but a gatekeeping mechanism devised by autistic persons to humiliate normies.

it should be that, though.

A learned language is often lost without regular repetitive practice. People often either become overly specialized in some area, or end up teaching basic-theory while regretting their life choices.

In time, most figure out people create pet mathematical fictions regardless of background, and while authoritative confident liars often allow people to feel better about uncertainty... it adds little value in the long-term. =3