this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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I wish I was taught about the usefulness of maths growing up. When I did A-level with differentition and integration I quickly forgot as I didn't see a point in it.
At about 35 someone mentioned diff and int are useful for loan repayment calculations, savings and mortgages.
Blew my fucking mind cos those are useful!
That's one of the big problems with maths teaching in the UK, it's almost actively hostile to giving any sort of context.
When a subject is reduced to a chore done for its own sake it's no wonder most students don't develop a passion or interest in it.
In the US it's common to give students "word problems" that describe a scenario and ask them to answer a question that requires applying whatever math they're studying at the time. Students hate them and criticize the problems for being unrealistic, but I think they really just hate word problems because because they find them difficult. To me that means they need more word problems so they can actually get used to thinking about how math relates to the real world.
I don't see it that way. Most "word problems" are just poorly posed, lack important information, or are ambiguous. Often, they are mostly fairly unrealistic.
It would be better to describe usage scenarios, talk about examples in class, and give exercises which have a clear, discernible pattern. Like, actual physics problems.
Part of what makes all the hatred for Common Core math so hilarious to me is that when I finally saw what they were teaching, it was a moment of "holy shit, this is exactly how I use and do math in real life." It's full of contextualizing with a focus on teaching mental shortcuts that allow you to quickly land on ballpark answers. I think it's absolutely wonderful.
But it's so foreign to the rote manner that a lot of parents were taught that many of them have a hard time grasping it, and get angry as a result.
There are three problems I had with word problems in school. Not every problem applied to every word problem.
"This is way too vague."
"Why would someone buy 35 apples and 23 oranges?"
"Why would the person in the problem want to try to figure this problem out? It's completely unrelated to what they were doing."
I get the point was for us to be able to convert information given in a text format into something we can actually solve, but the word problems were usually situations you'd never realistically find yourself in in real life.
I think 2 and 3 are the same problem.
No, 2 is more "why are they buying this many", and 3 is more "why would this person want to figure out some random thing that popped into their head about this".
Okay, concerning 2 I thought you meant, why count and buy exactly this number. But it's actually realistic, for a big family, or for desserts for a party, etc.
Nah, the word problems suck because they're intended to teach you how to convert word problems into math problems. They did absolutely nothing to show how math is used in real world scenarios.
Hated Algebra in high school. Then years later got into programming. It's all algebra. Variables, variables everywhere.
Ehh I wouldn't say variables in programming are all that similar to variables in algebra. In a programming language, variables typically are just a name for some data. Whereas in algebra, they are placeholders for unknown values.
Machine Learning is basically a lot of linear algebra, which is mathematically equivalent to solving simultaneous equations.
The other use is as a door-opener; Learning these maths fundamentals enables you to pursue a stem degree
You say that but they still need to teach you the "why". For example I did A-level maths which was a door to learning discrete maths in uni. Matrices, graphs, etc.
In 20yrs as a software dev I never used any of it. Only needed basic arithmetic.
To this day I've got no bloody clue what the point of matrices are.
I used them in computer graphics and game programming. As a regular software dev, not so much.
They're used for manipulating vectors.
Just like how in
a×v
the a makes the vector v longer or shorter, in
M×v
M can change the vector, for example rotate it.
Just like vectors and other mathematical objects, matrices are purely theoretical concepts. There is no direct real-life meaning to them.
However, there are a bunch of real-world problems where matrices can be put to use to calculate something meaningful.
I fucking loved maths mechanics which is like applied maths/physics. So you'd calculate the distance a ball is thrown or a cannon ball dropped from a cliff. Don't think we ever did matrices in it though. I enjoyed it so much I'd do excersizes in the book for fun!! That and politics were the only courses I was passionate about.
But I became a software dev that didn't use maths or politics. :/
So from age 5-17 I hated maths cos I saw no point in it. Until I hit 17 and someone said I can work out how fast a fucking cannon ball travels on impact?! I mean holy dog shit! If someone told me that in primary school I'd have loved maths!
It was very much taught as a means to answer questions though rather than application. So as an adult I'd have to be shown how a number could be found using algebra. But because it wasn't in an algebra question format it went over my head. It literally required someone taking numbers I'd been given and putting them in a line with letters before my brain engaged to "Oh shit - algebra! I know this!".
Another example is differentiation. I recently looked up my notes and remembered it was told to us very mechanically:
f(x) = 4x^3 => f'(x) = 4(3x^2) = 12x^2No idea why that's the case - it just is.
It's a shame cos I learnt I love maths at 17 but by that point I'd lost years of potential.
P.S. any advice on where I can re-learn real-world maths? I'd love to redo my teens maths learning for fun.
I'd like to teach math to anyone who's interested, but I lack infrastructure to do so, unfortunately.
Zoom+laptop webcam pointed at a sheet of paper?
That doesn't feel viable.
I do some 8-bit coding and only last month realized logarithms allow dirt-cheap multiplication and division. I had never used them in a context where floating-point wasn't readily available. Took a function I'd painstakingly optimized in 6502 assembly, requiring only two hundred cycles, and instantly replaced it with sixty cycles of sloppy C. More assembly got it down to about thirty-five... and more accurate than before. All from doing exp[ log[ n ] - log[ d ] ].
Still pull my hair out doing anything with tangents. I understand it conceptually. I know how it goddamn well ought to work. But it is somehow the fiddliest goddamn thing to handle, despite being basically friggin' linear for the first forty-five degrees. Which is why my code also now cheats by doing a (dirt cheap!) division and pretending that's an octant angle.