Why won’t anybody teach her math?

I remember taking a course at university where the teacher bragged the first day that half the students will fail. It struck me immediately that this professor was bragging that he sucked at his job of teaching.

If I said half my patients won't live through my treatment, or half the cars I fix will crash, I'd not be the person others would seek out.

If you are so good at your job (of teaching people a subject) that a coin toss is likely to do a better job on the exam, you suck at your job.

You are a Teacher. That is what the person sitting in the class is paying you for. To teach them. You work for the students. For all the high minded ideals, you are just staff to the people sitting in front of you.

I am a math graduate student with an undergrad degree in math. I think there is so much wrong with the original article, this response and math academia that I don't even know where to begin. I am already cringing when I get to the title. "Why won't anyone teach me math?" Really? Why don't you go to the math library and pick up a textbook? The course is only there to test your knowledge and give you a grade, you shouldn't need someone else to teach you information that can optimally be transferred through the medium of a textbook.

I don't side with the author of the response article either. I understand that math departments need to take the idea of math education seriously because it happens to be their primary source of income, but I personally don't actually believe in most of the underlying premises. I got into the subject because I wanted to be left alone to muck around with equations, books and fractals, but I ended up doing "math drills" I hated in a "math boot camp" for 3 years.

Math at the university level has become far detached from reality and deeply politicized. We need to fully embrace the "hands off" approach so that students can learn the skill of mathematical reading. Courses should be like "Here's the textbook. Here's the homework due in 1 week. I don't care if you use the internet. I won't bore you with the lecture. Exams will be the same format."

This is an unfortunate situation but one possible workaround is study groups. I had an experience where a handful of classmates formed a small study group for a difficult class with subpar professors (there were two). We did the homework together, walked through the problems, and as a group we helped each other understand the material. We all did very well both on the homework (as you would expect) and on exams and finals. The rest of the class did not.