

Why Kids Hate Math - blackhole
http://blackhole0173.blogspot.com/2011/11/why-kids-hate-math.html

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jessriedel
Math is taught wrong because school teachers don't understand what makes math
important and beautiful. Changing the curriculum at the administrative level
is not going to help so long as this persists, because it's always going to be
easier for teachers to grade kids based off of terminology ("scalene" v.s.
"obtuse") than actual understanding.

But currently, the only way to reliably get people who understand what makes
makes math important and beautiful is to hire those with advanced degrees in a
STEM field. But those people are expensive, and society pays them to do things
other than teach.

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TeMPOraL
It's a sad problem. I remember I hated math since the first year I went to
school, and the only reason I know anything now is that at one point I decided
that writing computer games is more interesting than doing math homework - and
somehow, magically, math became interesting and worth learning in my free
time.

(I remember that when I was 16, we took an exam between secondary and high
school. After the exam we were exchanging solutions to exam problems; I
remember people talking about how they solved one task by using Pythagorean
theorem, and me thinking "wtf? What Pythagorean theorem? I used the formula
for distance between vectors in 2D space".)

So now, many years later, I sometimes work as a tutor and I completely
understand when high school students tell me that math is useless and physics
is boring. Both subjects are so completely destroyed in school that it's sad
too look. I remember conversations about Michelson–Morley experiment, for
example. Yes, _it is useless_ and boring when taught in school, to be
memorized for upcoming test. But it's much more interesting if one sees it as
an important part of a great story - a story of our struggle to understand
what the light really is, about two competing theories that were finally
unified in a seemingly bizarre way, paving way for crazy science that gave us
Internet, iPhones and lolcats.

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garbledNonsense
The question of what Math should be taught at school is a hard one.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of thought has actually gone into curriculum design, but
unfortunately this is an area in which everyone has an opinion, and quite a
lot of politics gets mixed up in there as well.

The writer has a perspective that is probably valid for him, but I think the
problems is a little more complex than he lays out. He does seem to focus on
the areas of Maths that he has found useful in his own field. However, no
matter what field you go into, if you expect the Math you learn in school to
be actually applicable and useful, you're going to be sorely disappointed.
Most of maths education is exactly that - education. Not training. A large
section of students are totally uninterested either way, of course.

I've seen some horrors perpetrated in the name of "contextualising math". What
we currently have is definitely up for improvement, but I think if this guy
actually gone down to trying to implement his suggestions, he would find it a
whole lot messier than he thinks.

