unjurios

I think "application" is the wrong focus. The real thing to help students understand is this exact question: what is math? That remains a mystery to most students. It gets conflated with the problem of application, but I think the real problem is most educations don't make clear the idea of abstraction, symbol systems, and logic. When you don't understand something, especially why it might be useful or at least intrinsically interesting, it's hard to get motivated about it.

Personal anecdote: I never understood what math "was," and this totally demotivated me to study it. I got A's all the way through high school mathematics because I was a systematic and logical thinker who had no problem following rules or algorithms, but I never once saw the point. When I reached college, I had already tested out of Calculus and never took a formal math course again.

Fast-forward ten years. I am a self-taught programmer and now find mathematics absolutely fascinating and beautiful, and I see its applications. So I'm taking math classes on Udemy, buying hundreds of dollars of textbooks, and trying to teach myself.

I can't help feeling like I got a little robbed. I understand that teaching is hard, and some kids just don't care to learn certain things and it's best for them and society to force some absolute fundamentals down their throats. But at a certain point around middle or high school, I think there needs to be a hard pivot to focusing on motivating students. If you do that well, they will have the ability to teach themselves and learn for the rest of their lives. If you don't they either end up like me, playing catch up a decade too late, or they just leave entire fields of knowledge untapped forever. With some subjects that's inevitable and probably ok, but math doesn't seem like it should be one of those subjects.