Fixing math education 30 Jan 2012
I was thumbing through TED videos and came across the following talk by Conrad Wolfram that spoke to me.
I despised math in school, particularly in high school. I was always good at it, but it was always tedious. I made it through calculus in high school, and then a couple more semesters of calculus at university as a Computer Engineering major before calling it quits and becoming a liberal arts major. In retrospect, it was one of the worst decisions I've ever made, but at age 19 it seemed pretty straightforward — math was tedious, engineering at an engineering school is math piled upon math, and all I wanted was a degree in something (anything!).
It wasn't until a few years ago, about a decade after mostly abandoning math, that I realized how important it was to my life. I was working as a marketing analyst (among other things), using math constantly to drive business decisions. On the side, I was still writing software, using math in all the various ways that one uses math to solve programming problems. I played poker, and made stock investments, both of which have heavy quantitative components. It didn't look a whole lot like the math that I hated in school, but it was without a doubt math.
Math is fascinating. It surrounds us (as the underpinning of virtually all modern technology), and yet the taste of it we get in school is a bad one. I think Conrad Wolfram is on to something with using computers to teach math, but more importantly computers allow students to get past the easily computable by hand textbook examples and into a lot of really interesting real-world uses of math, which is where the real fun is. Computers aren't necessary for this to happen, but they make it a lot more straightforward.
Do we need to be able to do basic math by hand? Most likely. Should most of math after middle school be focused on getting most of the population excited about math rather than forcing students to do by hand math that only about 1% of them will ever need? Absolutely.
Math is exciting, and that fact needs to be better conveyed.
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