this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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Formally teaching pure mathematics is a bit beyond the abilities of most children or even highschoolers.
It's like how they don't teach inductive reasoning and proofing in statistics class, 99 percent of the people that will use it either won't understand or care.
"It needs to have a practical application"
This is what word problems are. Describing real situations mathematically and deriving more information from them.
I feel like everyone who blames the way mathematics was taught, simply wasn't paying attention at the time.
I blame untreated ADHD and human nature.
I didnt care. There was no drama. When confronted with the idea that math wasn't important, my math teacher would just play into it! Now I'm an adult and understand how important and interesting math can be, I wish we spent 5 minutes talking about that during my years in school.
Things may have changed since my graduation in 1974, but my experience was that word problems were contrived scenarios with little or no relevance to my life. I was pretty good at math and had very good reading comprehension, so I never actually struggled with any of it.
But not once was I ever asked to calculate the storage requirements for a collection of toys, where on the teeter-totter to sit to balance it, how long a ladder needed to be to safely used to get on top of a given roof, or safe maximum driving speed given standard reaction times under various conditions of low visibility.
Instead, it was all stuff that sounded like a surrealist riddle. (If a chicken-and-a-half can lay an egg-and-a-half in a day-and-a-half, how long will it take for a frog with a wooden leg to kick through a pickle?)
And besides being pretty good at it, I actually enjoyed math once other interests and working with my dad in the shop showed me just how useful it can be.