What could be done to make math seem less uncool?

Life of Fred

Math U See

Matt, I am NOT a math person at all. However, since I plan to be the main educator for our home schooled son, I will be utilizing the two above curriculum.

Teachers that taught math were unable to reach me until I really got into Geometry…where I succeeded completely, until algebra was introduced in the Geometry lessons and it was back to me having a furrowed brow, and an achy-confused brain.

Some of this is unique to each student, and I’m probably a bad example, because I’m a bit of a nerd, but for me what made me hate math was that no one really showed us all the things it was good for. It seems like math teachers either don’t actually know where it all leads themselves, or don’t think they can begin to show the connections until the students know how to graph the asymptote.

This assumption is false, all mathematical knowledge should come with some indication of where this is going, why it works, and why it is important.

I think a lot of students see math in a very basic sense, in other words, they just see numbers and equations. They don’t see what those equations stand for.

If the teacher does not teach the material in a way in which you can understand how it will be applied to your life, then you’re not going to want to learn it. Or, at least that’s how I feel about math. When I can see the application of the math I’m doing, I really enjoy it. It makes sense. If I’m going to possibly use this at some point, I’ll enjoy learning about it.

But when you’re younger you don’t understand that a lot of what you’re using will help you later in life, so I think that’s why so many kids hate math. “When are we ever going to use this?” I think is a pretty popular phrase in most math classrooms. But when you get older you see that a lot of it does come in handy, and even if it didn’t, math is kind of fun. But that train of thought isn’t for everyone, hah.

math is seen in an unique way by each human the only way to make everyone think that math is cool everyone should have it’s personal math course and this is impossible.My personal opinion is that math is for special people.Ordinary people can only say about math is’‘crap’’,boring’’,’‘usefull’’ etc.

Use examples that are “cool”.

rather than, if a train leaves a station boring the kids already… why not do the same thing, by playing a video of something, pausing it and getting them to calculate the result. e.g. how far will the the explosion push the car, how fast will it push the car.

something like that, maybe mix it in with traditional lessons.

@poisonedantidote That’s a great idea. You could use real popular movies and say, OK, could this car really beat the train to the crossing? If the train is going this fast, and the car is this far away, how fast must the car go to reach the train just in time to jump through the open box car.

I think math is cool…but that’s because I’m a dork. :(

I agree with others have been saying: a lot of math seems to have no real world application or at least a very uninteresting one. I think people should find ways to apply (elementary level) math to more interesting situations. I know that you can’t really do that with calculus, but you can with earlier forms of math and that could get kids to become interested early on. I also think it’s less about how “uncool” it is and more about how boring, tedious, and pointless it seems to many kids. Math is difficult for many people. It is not an easy concept. There’s no avoiding that.

Also, if an aspect of math truly is not useful, then don’t teach it. This gets back to the issue of teaching useless impractical things in school.

@mattbrowne All the reasons listed from @everyone is why I did not apply myself in math. It bored me to tears, literally.

Personally, I prefer math you can see, touch, feel, apply, maneuver, manipulate and so on. All of the schools I attended taught the curriculum. I had a few teachers that took their job seriously and made the curriculum more interesting and applicable to real life (making recipes, creating/building objects)

Calculus can be applied to more interesting situations too, so can all sorts of higher math. Start talking about where this stuff leads, how statistics affect us, bring in media articles that state some statistic from a study and figure out what that statistic really means, talk about the more theoretical stuff like multi-dimensional objects, fractals, etc. They don’t have to know the details of how these things work in order for them to make the basics they are learning more interesting. I hated math, and was terrible at it starting with high school algebra II. They kept telling us: “the answer to this equation is to draw this curve” but never tried to explain why, or why we depict equations in a Cartesian coordinate space. Then I took statistics in college and started thinking, wow, I wouldn’t mind going back to algebra now that I get what that two dimensional space actually mean.

@SpatzieLover I agree with you about the real life examples. I remember in 7th grade to teach us algebra, we used different colored pawns to represent variables. They basically used it to show us that when you remove a white pawn from one side, that you need to remove a white pawn from the other side of the equation. It made it easy to understand and turned math into somewhat of a “game”.

The movement has already begun:
Exhibit A
Exhibit B

Eliminate the numbers.

@le_inferno There is no better way to make something uncool than to attempt to make it cool through rap.

@J0E Lurve! Maybe the math teachers with pocket protectors, too

I don’t have a good answer, but I think that part of math’s image problem is the perception that it’s a rules-bound system which doesn’t allow for individuality of expression. Cool is about flaunting the rules and being free to do things one’s own way. Until you get to higher level math, it just seems all about “coloring within the lines”, so to speak. There’s no room for dissent.

@Harp You just explained my math issues to a tee

Applying math to real-life scenarios and making it more action oriented would make it a lot more fun. Many children and teens can’t make the connection between math on paper and math in real life.

Another idea is to have math profs who love math come and guest lecture. I worked in the Math department for awhile. I had no idea how many people were so in love with math. That kind of passion is contagious.

flashy animations and glow effects

Perhaps you could point out how un-cool it is to be pig-eyed ignorant. There are probably even some useful examples nearby to help bolster your point.

1.) Have hot chicks throw their panties onto the stage whenever a prominent mathematician delivers a lecture.

2.) Provide group theorists with groupies.

3.) Constantly remind students that girls with big tits dig guys who know calculus.

Here are a few suggestions:

1. Take student questions seriously. In my experience, students aren’t born disliking math, and probably everyone is naturally interested in the subject. But once they’re taught that it has no relevance to their lives, and that there are no questions to answer, just insipid “problems” to solve, they learn to hate it. In my experience, the questions students ask are often the most interesting (and historically relevant) anyway. “Is infinity plus one the same as infinity” is actually a deep and mathematically useful question to ask. What does it mean for infinite sets to be “equal” in size? These questions take you interesting places, and if you’re a clever teacher, it’s not hard to take student questions seriously and still cover the curriculum you need to cover.

2. Mention great results and unsolved problems. So many people think that there’s nothing left to do in math. In reality, we know so little it’s shocking. We have a quadratic formula for degree 2 polynomials. We have a cubic formula for degree 3, and a quartic formula for degree 4. Quintic formula? Don’t have one. Ditto for every degree above 5. Is it even possible to find it? No. How do we know? How is it possible to prove anything is impossible without testing all the (infinite) cases?

3. Teach math along with it’s history. Isn’t math more interesting if we learn that the field of probability started with two mathematicians gambling? Or that the person who proved that there can be no quintic (or higher) formula died in a duel, after having written a letter the night before that solved the historic problem and gave birth to three new fields of mathematics?

These are all illustrations of the point which others have already mentioned: if students are invited to have a personal, relevant engagement with a living subject, they’ll find it interesting; if they’re forced to memorize a bunch of rules for no reason that have no usefulness anyway, they’ll find it boring and stupid.

(For more, check out this fluther question about the excellent essay A Mathematician’s Lament.)

Thanks for all the great suggestions.

@poisonedantidote – Yes, “cool” examples are key. Perhaps some national math teacher association could actually ask interested people to continuously submit cool real-life examples. Here’s one that comes to mind:

The 2009 Samoa earthquake’s epicenter occurred at coordinates x1,x2,x3 and y1 Joules of kinetic energy was transferred to the water molecules around the epicenter. Calculate the energy as an equivalent of y2 hiroshima bombs that hit the Samoa coast from coordinates z1,z2,z3 (alas I’m running out of letters) to a1,a2,a3 (let’s use a straight coast line as an approximation).

Every kid heard about the tsunami on the news. Big bombs might sound cool. It might also be cool to know about the true power of tsunamis (in terms of the energy they transport).

I wonder which grade this makes sense. Tenth grade?

@SpatzieLover – What do you think about this example? Curious about the results?

@ratboy while your suggestions are “cool” in the rock band sense, they’re a very male-centric vision of cool (i.e. you get loose girls if you can do math). Aside from the fact that it’s blatantly false, I think this type of suggestion, even jokingly, reinforces the already sizable barriers for women in mathematics. The graduate student body in mathematics is something like 15% women in this country. I went to a math conference in Italy once, and it was more like 50%.

So, in future jokes, make sure you mention how women who know calculus get followed home by vacuous, blue-eyed, male models.

@mattbrowne Great example. I’d say that’s around 10th grade level, also.

I tried looking for it on a home school site, but no luck yet. There is a yearly competition and a book published with word problems written by kids for kids. Many home schoolers use it as a comparison guide to see how their children are retaining and utilizing their math knowledge. When I find it, I’ll post it here.

@SpatzieLover – Maybe the issue is something for the

http://www.sciencedebate2008.com

http://www.unscientificamerica.com

organizations to look at. I just read the book by journalist and author Chris Mooney and scientist Sheril Kirshenbaum. What they describe also applies to Europe (perhaps on a somewhat smaller scale).

to look at. I just read the book

@mattbrowne I had read an article on “Unscientific America”...I think it’s time for me to read this one on my Kindle.

Part of the reasoning behind home schooling our son is the fact that most of the curriculum in our schools does not address the need for the logic behind teaching students “facts”. They’re given so much information without a concept of how to effectively use them in real life.

@SpatzieLover And naturally you assume that you know more than people who trained their whole lives to create those curriculum and teach those classes?

Sorry, I’m not a fan of homeschooling.

@J0E Please, all home schoolers hear this all the time. Wanna ask me how I “socialize” my child next? We buy curriculum that is better than the school districts can afford, we read actual literature on math and science and teach history from the beginning of time (not out of order as American public schools do).

You have no children. Before I had a child I had the polar opposite opinion of schooling. Then, I witnessed how my son gained knowledge and began broadening my view point. Not all home schoolers are created equal. We are not making this choice for religious purposes.

Maybe you’d like to read up on how people learned prior to arriving in America or even how many early Presidents were educated (my own grandfathers were taught in a home schooled method from 8th grade on).

sorry for hijacking @mattbrowne

Are you actually suggesting that we were better off before formal education became the norm? Tell me, do those curriculums you buy come with six years of college and a major in education?

@J0E I hat to hijack @mattbrowne‘s question. Here are some statistics on home school households and thefact that most of us have higher education and above middle income households

Formal education and public education are not the same thing. Once the Dept. of Education was developed children were (are) being taught how to gain employment, not gain knowledge.

BTW many teaching certificates are given out at colleges to many unqualified to actually teach (football players & BB players are given them at many “big” sport colleges)

I’ve wrote a few papers on homeschool vs. public school, believe me, you don’t want to get in a statistical battle. You won’t like what you see.

</hijack>

@J0E Papers are not your own flesh and blood

@J0E Much as we are told not to talk about politics and religion in polite conversation, I find that the two things you should really never argue with anyone about is how they care for their children and how they care for their dogs. One can debate home schooling’s merits, but what’s going on here is only going to lead to anger. And anger leads to hate and hate leads to the dark side.

Is it totally geeky to automatically read </hijack> as “end hijack”?

Math shouldn’t be taught with numbers and formulas, except for the few students who are good at that and want that.

Instead it should be taught lecture-style, demonstration style, and experiment style.

Teaching kids formulas only works on 1 out of 100 of them.

Take the quantum physicist Michio Kaku for example. He teaches physics on his radio show in a way that draws in listeners. If he were doing equations, none of those listeners would be there.

I’ve learned more from Michio Kaku on the radio, than in all my years of high school and college.

Real-life applications should be encouraged, and the study of formulas and numbers should be highly discouraged.

Except for multiplication tables and pre-algebra, all the years I spent on math in school were a waste, due to the focus on formulas and numbers

@Kraigmo

It’s not as few as you think. I don’t think real life applications can ever be bad for students, but I did well with numbers/formulas and so did plenty of other people in my classes. Math is numbers and formulas. It’s hard to avoid that entirely. The key is teaching how numbers and formulas apply to real life, because they do. In many ways.

I know that I’m not like everyone; I have a natural curiosity about math and I find numbers and formulas fascinating. But I also find real life fascinating. There are ways to connect the two. It shouldn’t be a war between the two.

@Kraigmo
you can do that to make them understand the general concept.
but if you want them to be able to actually do math, this approach is utterly useless. to do math, you need to master numbers and formulae.
the approach of michio might be good enough to explain the concept of quantum physics to laymen, but it does not even begin to enable the audience to actually do it. for that they would need to master numbers and formulae.

@ragingloli, if the teaching of formulas actually worked, how come almost all adults never retain the information? The reason is that the information is useless to most people, and that’s why it should be taught in a way that is useful… which is basically just an understanding of how all that stuff works. Being able to do the formulas by oneself doesn’t even matter really.

(and yeah I know there’s a certain “magic” or “beauty” that’s revealed when the numbers or formulas are understood and comprehended… but that’s not going to happen with the traditional ways of teaching math)

@Kraigmo the “Life of Fred” books I mentioned in my first post teach exactly as you are describing. I wish I had been taught in this method, as I didn’t get math at all in school until it came to geometry or econ, where I could see the numbers in action

”how come almost all adults never retain the information?”
Because they do not apply it. This is true for ALL information, not just mathematics.
Sure, if you intend to become a dishwasher at Mcd, you don’t need calculus and all the pesky formulae. But if you want to be something more, like, a mathematician, a physicist, a biologist, a chemist, an architect, an engineer, etc, then you need to know equations, formulae, etc, because otherwise you can never do anything more than scratch the surface of those fields at the level of bees and flowers.
And I for one am of the opinion that ALL children should have the opportunity to become one of the list, and that requires, like it or not, teaching the tedious and dry stuff.
If you want to create a skillless labour force then your method is adequate, But then you don’t need an education system for that when the topics are so dumbed down that Glenn Beck (who raped and killed a little girl in 1990) could explain that in his show.
Kids need to be taught the complicated parts both to give them a basic skillset on which they can build their future lives and also to give them a more accurate picture about what the fields they may want to go into are all about.
If you teach children just superficial summaries about physics for example, they might think “Hey cool, this sounds pretty exciting and cool, I want to study that later.”, but then when they get into University they suddenly are confronted that the oh-so-cool on the front physics is actually filled to the brim with highly complex mathematics, which they coincidentally only know superficial summarisations about as well, because they didn’t find the field interesting enough before to actually learn calculus (And let’s be honest, how many kids aren’t put off immediately by the complex stuff they teach at school and rather would not do it at all? When you give children the choice whether they want to learn the easy version or the real version, most will choose the easy version, out of pure laziness)
What you then hear is “Oh my god, how am I supposed to learn all that, that’s too much.” and you get a lot of university dropouts and a lot of mediocre at best graduates because they have to spend a huge amount of time to get the math down ( and when I say that, I don’t mean a little refresher course one would have to take anyway, but the whole thing, number systems, equations calculus, in short, the entirety of over a decade of mathematical education they would have received in normal math classes) and have to put the actual field, like engineering or physics to a lower priority.

@Kraigmo – Math goes far beyond numbers and formulas. It’s about concepts. Take the concept of infinity. There’s an infinite amount of natural numbers. Same for real numbers. There’s an infinite amount of real numbers. Yet there are more real numbers than natural numbers. Stunning fact and people’s reaction often is: bullshit. | IR | > | IN | ? Are you kidding? How can there be anything more than infinite? Ah, well, there are countable and uncountable sets. Interesting. But understanding Cantor’s diagonal argument isn’t about numbers and formulas? It’s about the deep understanding of abstract concepts. And it’s about relating the concepts to the real physical world.

Now here’s a cool question. You got a large square building in the physical world. Each side is exactly a 1 mile long. What’s the exact length of this square’s diagonal? In the physical world? Well, sqrt(2) miles isn’t really the correct answer. Why? Well, what about Planck length? Our universe is digital, so aren’t we dealing with countable sets? What does this mean?

Real-life applications need formulas and abstract concepts. You can’t avoid explaining about square roots.

I hate math, we should keep it at the 9th grade lvl, where I comfortable at the moment, and everyone get a cool, funny teacher.. that makes math cool.