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Comment by mquander | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I think that given an intellectually stimulating home environment, passionate teachers, and a great curriculum, (almost) every kid will be interested in both poetry and physics, because they are both fundamentally interesting and beautiful things.

That's what we should be aiming for.

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I can confirm this. In high school I hated math, planned on getting an English major, because the English teachers were so good. Previously, in middle school I hated critical analysis of books, but because my math teacher was so good I was an absolute math geek.

I remember my high school Algebra II teacher was asked, "Why should we care about what you're saying?" His answer: "You shouldn't care. You're here to get a grade. You'll never use this and it's not fun." This while my English teacher was staying an hour after class to debate Lolita, Ulysses, A Space Odyssey, and a whole ton of other stuff with basically every student willing to talk to him. There were a lot.

Your second paragraph struck a chord with me - through middle and high school, nearly all my math teachers would preface various topics with "You'll never use this in real life..." With that kind of sentiment, its no wonder why a lot of students did not want, or develop, an understanding for math :/

But the teachers are right, you know. Professional mathematicians doing research will practically jump at the chance to tell you that their work is meant to be beautiful, not practical. I think that's the message we should be imparting to students: math doesn't have to be useful for you to study it, just as poetry doesn't have to be useful for you to read it.

I agree completely, but they rarely get around to demonstrating why it is beautiful, so all the students learn is why it's not practical.

Note that the public school approach doesn't work much better for poetry or literature. Precious few high schoolers graduate with a love of reading.

Just to be certain, have all of you read Lockhart's Lament? Because it argues the case for teaching math more beautifully than I can.

http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

I remember my year-12 math teacher being the first true teacher I had for the subject in a very long time who actually cared, A student who came up with a varied or creative solution to a normal problem was praised with an overwhelmingly happy and teary exclamation.

I tried harder that year than ever before, Not just because of the importance of my results, But because I wanted to understand her euphoria at really giving yourself over to the problem.

Unfortunately Teachers who inspire such enthusiasm are a desperately rare breed.

I got in trouble for using modulus(%)...

It should delight them that writing proofs help you think about thinking logically, monads help you write abstract code, prime numbers (and the difficulty of factoring them) helps you think about encryption; it's just that explaining that "doing this proof is like doing stretches before you work out" leaves some unfulfilled.

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