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Comment by yeellow | Hacker News Reader

> If Marcie can't find a useful application on day one of the "theory" she learns in school, what is the point? It's a 19th century curriculum for a 21st century world. Basic accounting and personal finance would probably serve most students better.

Sorry, but following this logic we will end up with a conclusion that almost no school knowledge is "useful". How useful is playing volleyball? Reading poetry? Painting? Studying history? Biology would be reduced to first aid and basic medicine. I have those discussions with my daughters who learn how to do long multiplication. How is it useful if even I who know how to do it would rather use a calculator on my mobile instead? We would reduce math to basic operations on a calculators, probably nothing more would be considered useful by the majority of the population. The same apply to all other subjects.

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I think "application" is the wrong focus. The real thing to help students understand is this exact question: what is math? That remains a mystery to most students. It gets conflated with the problem of application, but I think the real problem is most educations don't make clear the idea of abstraction, symbol systems, and logic. When you don't understand something, especially why it might be useful or at least intrinsically interesting, it's hard to get motivated about it.

But this exact question has no answer or has many different, contradictory answers as this discussion shows. I doubt that such discussion would be interesting for someone who struggles with algebra. Moreover the same questions could be asked about all subjects. The point of the school is to show kids different things even if they cannot see their usefulness right away. One person will enjoy math, other poetry or history. But all will have a chance to try different things and to choose what to study deeper. Of course it's nice to give some motivation and her teachers failed if she cannot see applications of basic algebra.

I responded to the comment above with some examples of the kind of thing I'm hoping for. I don't think a deep philosophical discussion about math is necessary. Just reinforce the idea that math is a symbol system for dealing with questions of shape, quantity, and logic, and give multiple examples of applications of the same concept. Also convert between symbols and diagrams/drawings frequently (for example, I'm willing to bet an absurd number of Americans can't understand how a virus spreads exponentially; if you draw a pyramid of infected people, I bet they'd get it immediately; but instead we use curves and lines that don't connect with people).

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