Why Math Sucks

Hello and welcome to my blog. I'd like to start off with a topic to which I've given some thought and introspection. Namely, why do people seem to hate math? Almost daily, I am approached by individuals who lament about having to do math. This includes both kids in high school as well as university students who struggle to get through a mandatory math class or two. So why the distain for mathematics? After some thought and deliberation, here is why I believe this might be the case.

Math is hard. At its core, math is about solving problems. Perhaps someone has solved the problem at which you are currently looking, but if you have no experience with this problem before, solving it for yourself may be just as difficult as it was for the person whom originally discovered the solution. To solve any problem, we engage in logical thinking and reasoning. We ponder different ways in which to tackle the problem. We consider different theorems, try different proof techniques and attempt different computations. Perhaps the problem is trivial, and we end up being able to quickly see a solution. However, more often than not, we will be wrong. Forced to backtrack and try again. In this way, mathematics is akin to finding your way through a dark room. Perhaps you hit a chair on the way, or bump into a wall, but eventually, you find the light switch and solace in the fact that you have illuminated the room.

Is it this innate hardness that appears in math the reason so many people turn away from it? Perhaps, but I argue that this is not the case. We as humans do many things that are difficult, but enjoy doing so (perhaps because we're borderline psychotic, but also because we enjoy the reward). So why then do so many shun math? I believe that it is because we are almost set up this way by math education. In a standard math education, the fundamental insight of math being used to solve problems isn't present unless the student continues beyond high school and some early university math. Up until that point, most classes simply emphasize computation. Can you factor this? Simplify that? Solve this equation? These things absolutely have a place in math, but asking a student to do countless variations of the same problem again and again and again undermines the purpose of mathematics itself. We are given the algorithm to solve the problem, and are judged on our ability to apply it again and again to slightly different problems. Math isn't about repeated applications of algorithms, its about devising the algorithms themselves. By forcing students to compute a derivative or evaluate a limit countless times, we are turning our students into machines, killing the creativity that is essential to do actual math. Instead of fostering their abilities to actually problem solve, we are simply turning them into computers. Math becomes about repeated calculation, numbers, abstract symbols, theorems and algorithms and this is exactly how many students view it. They become turned off of the whole idea of math without even knowing what it truly was.