r/SubredditDrama • u/PhysicsIsMyMistress boko harambe • Oct 14 '16
Royal Rumble Complex Drama on "Real Math" in a thread about the sins of K-12 math education when one karma scalar defends formula memorization, making the situation tensor. Can current math teaching function rationally, or does a sim totally need to rebuild it from the ground up?
/r/TrueReddit/comments/57etuu/a_mathematicians_lament_paul_lockhart_presents_a/d8rffjj37
Oct 14 '16
I read a couple of pages of the article before I had to stop. I stopped because this article made me think of how stupid and boring my math classes all were, and I was wondering how you could possibly improve them.
Don't despair! Here's some great examples of ways to look at math and improve your skills
lol nah I hate math
From my perspective this is the actual problem with math education: people just deciding that they don't give a shit. Math is like any other skill, if you put in the work you get better at it. But a significant portion of the population has decided that they're "not math people" and as a society we've allowed them to take pride in their inability to do the most basic of calculations.
I'm working on an actuarial science degree and it pisses me off whenever I hear someone say "oh wow, I could never do that because I'm not a numbers person lol". Oh yeah, the only reason I passed Calc was because I was born a numbers person. Just ignore those hundreds of hours of studying, I'm sure that's a complete coincidence.
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u/Declan_McManus Oct 15 '16
This was my experience, as well. Plus, it was incredibly uncool in middle/high school to admit that you studied to do well in school. My friends would get As and brag about how they didn't study, so I would say I didn't either, even though I absolutely studied for hours to get As. I was just trying to fit in, but looking back I wish I had more of a backbone about it, because I'm sure we all came across as massive tools to everyone else who worked hard
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u/Khaelgor Oct 15 '16
I get where you're coming from, but then you've got people who study for hours and still don't get good grades because they're not suited for math/science/etc.
the most basic of calculations.
That's a bit of an exageration imo.
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u/tdogg8 Oct 15 '16
I find that the problem there is how they study/how they're taught, not that they can't so the math.
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Oct 15 '16
I was talking to a lady on r/askreddit 5 days ago who couldn't multiply 4 by 6 without counting all the way to 24.
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u/su5 Oct 15 '16 edited Oct 15 '16
Side note: I find it funny when people bash the us education system and include us universities. The one thing we are undeniably "the best" in is having amazing colleges (even if they are stupid expensive). Any world rating system will show a majority of the top 20 or top 50 schools are in the US. MIT, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, Berkley, Cal Tech, etc
Other countries stand out as doing great as well, but that's one thing it's hard to deny we do well on education from any practical metric
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u/tdogg8 Oct 15 '16
Just because we have a high number of esteemed schools doesn't mean we don't have a broken education system. For one thing we have a fucking massive population so off the bat it'd make sense to have a lot of great schools compared to say England which has a fraction of our population.
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u/PUBLIQclopAccountant Oct 16 '16
…but the brokeness of our system is almost all before you get to universities: it's the elementary, middle, and high schools where the major problems lie.
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u/manbearkat Oct 16 '16
Yeah, we may have universities where student score well and accomplish amazing things later on, but we still have a culture of education that promotes high levels of anxiety and depression.
Students in South Korea do amazing but they also are slowly killing themselves due to the high standards placed on them through standardized testing. Similar problems happen in Western universities too.
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u/su5 Oct 15 '16
We certainly have a broken system prior to higher education. Even dividing it between "us and everyone else" rather than "us and a specific country" the us has great higher education system (except for the cost to students). About half the top ten schools in the world are in the US, but we have something like 5% of the population
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Oct 16 '16
The US has like basically half the population of the entire developed world living in it, though. So it's not very surprising that half the top schools would be based here.
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u/su5 Oct 16 '16
Europe has twice as many people, but only 40% of the top 10 schools.
And even if it were on par it would still indicate the US college system isn't broken like the rest of its system.
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Oct 15 '16
I don't really what he's saying. I mean yeah you just learn formulas at first, but thats helpful. Learning formulas at school let me solve problems. I just went home and if I felt like like searched up why something worked. And anyway now that I'm in Calc BC, we learn why a lot of the formulas worked plus new things which is honestly extremely fun. And for the quadratic formula example, come on... it's literally just moving around variables to prove the quadratic formula. Once you learn ax2 + bx + c is the definition of a quadratic, it's extremely simple proving the quadratic formula since you already have the end result.
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u/Othernamewentmissing Oct 15 '16
Im so flattered to make this subreddit! I hate that fucking article though, pure math is gross, i regret nothing.
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u/tick_tock_clock Oct 15 '16
Math puns on point!
I knew drama like this would surface eventually: r/TrueReddit doesn't mod anything out, and it's nice to see it get back to its roots. (But maybe that's an unfaithful representation of the sub. Just because there are some irrational characters doesn't mean the whole space is dense.)
Anyways, this is some prime drama, differentiated from the norm. There's a spectrum of different schemes to fix math-ed, and none of them are too out of bounds, which is why it's odd to see such violent oscillations and unstable tangents. Some things in math are constants, I guess.