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Comment by GaussBonnet | Hacker News Reader

The problem isn't that grade school teachers are sitting on a secret stash of cool theorems, and instead diabolically choose to have students solve quadratic equations year after year. It's that no one in the grade school pipeline has any experience with actual, modern, proof based mathematics. They've never even heard of analysis or group theory. Their knowledge does not extend beyond the latest meme textbook with MULTICOLORED (whoa!) text. There is no communication between modern mathematicians and grade school teachers in America; they may as well live on separate planets. Math classes in American grade school are little more than busy work meant to weed out people who hate busy work. Infer from that what you will.

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So the way to get kids to like Math is by forcing them to learn... proofs? Not learning how it applies to the world and solves problems, but how it can be used to impress professors who care about rigor/pedantics?

Math is dirty. Math was created by businessmen who wanted to be monopolists. By gamblers who wanted to win, or at least to postpone the day when they would go broke. By scammers, and those who wanted defense against scammers. By people who wanted to blow up their enemies in war and who were moved by hatred and revenge. A recent mathematical construct born out of academia wants to destroy the US dollar and turn the world economy upside down. There are people trying to take over another planet with Mathematics. Others are trying to achieve geopolitical supremacy building artificial intelligence and robots armies.

Mathematics is blood. Mathematics is power.

There's a disconnect between academics and how real humans think if the modern solution to Math education is proofs.

Did you get this from somewhere?

> So the way to get kids to like Math is by forcing them to learn... proofs?

I mean, there are definitely issues with the whole "forcing them to learn" part, but assuming we're given the option to change the content of the math curriculum but not to fundamentally change the education system, then yes, absolutely. You don't need a crazy level of rigor, of course, but I think learning simple proof techniques could make students experience mathematics more like solving puzzles than just completing calculations.

Proofs are only an example of what grade school teachers don't know. They are obviously missing all of the modern applications as well. Whether you want to call those applications "math" or something more specific ("engineering", "cryptography", etc) is a matter of taste I guess. The point still stands that kids are learning hardly anything of theory OR practice in their grade schools, and this is due to the teachers not knowing those things either.

We can talk about why the teachers don't know these things, but I think the real issue is American culture still sees math and science as something for pitiful, nerd-virgin dorks. You can try to sell math as this sexy, dangerous thing you use to win wars, but ultimately you will have to reckon with the image that most Americans have of mathematicians and scientists, which is illustrated in shows like the Big Bang Theory: they're ridiculous laughing stocks who use science as a kind of cope for not being socially successful.

I mean, that's mostly a nonsense sentiment, but I really enjoyed the allegory so I will not hold it against you. The widest ranging theorem in mathematics was created by a bunch of greek cultists who believed that the natural numbers were at the heart of existence. The most important mathematical textbook, one that was taught almost exclusively for over a millenia in the west, was steeped in the traditions of said cult. That tradition is still there and has, for the most part, always been there (although, as an extremely applied mathematician, I find it's practioners to be alien).

Plus, tell me: how do you learn proofs? They aren't statements in a textbook that you just learn and recite like poetry. You have to learn to see them, to understand how all those moving parts fit together. When done right, teaching proofs is an exercise in illumination. I find it is more enjoyable all around when performed as a creative, exploratory exercise: give the students the axioms, set them lose on a conjecture.

Of course, for that you need a) Teachers who can serve as guides in the mathematical worlds and b) Students who aren't culturally predisposed to dislike mathematics.

That's not what history of mathematics tells us.

Yes, yes, and absolutely yes! I'm a high school math and physics teacher (who majored in physics, not education, and is now doing self-study in more proof-based mathematics), and so much the issue is in grade school, in my opinion. The teachers there don't appreciate math. And, more than that, they don't understand math. Lots of them don't have a good well-developed number sense, so it's no wonder our kids don't either!

Then the problems compound when they just give kids calculators without the kids understanding why the calculator works, and by the time they get to high school hope is lost because they have no number sense and we're trying to explain variables and such...often divorced from real life. I've found my kids get a much more intuitive sense of slope when I explain it as the rate of change rather than "rise over run" that they're so often taught in middle school. Give them examples, like amusement park tickets (it cost $50 to get there, then $70 per person) and have them incorporate that into a slope-intercept form. It just makes things so much clearer that they often don't get because they don't have the number sense and because many teachers don't understand/appreciate math.

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