Who Says Math Has to Be Boring?

Let's act as if a solid understanding of math and science is the norm. Let's see more shows where being smart about math and science isn't some Lisa Simpson or Sheldon Cooper-like deviation from the norm, something that only comes along with social ostracism and other anti-normal traits. Let's see more news programs that regularly discuss scientific topics more deeply than "Stars. Sure they're beautiful to see at night, but are they causing your kids to get CANCER?"

Kids need role models. Basketball is no more inherently interesting than math and science. It's just putting an orange ball through a hoop. Over and over. And over. And over. But Lebron James is on my TV every other night, being celebrated on the court, in Samsung ads, on the news, etc. And if you say, well, that's because watching someone poke at a calculator isn't as exciting as watching slam dunks, well, you're buying into that shitty media representation of mathematicians and scientists as being exclusively pocket-protector-wearing geeks who never leave their windowless broom-closet offices...

Anyway. This is one reason I think Neil Degrasse Tyson is so important right now. He's an awesome role model. I'm 36 and I want to be him when I grow up.

It is the frustration and ambiguity that one has to deal with when solving technical problems. Remember, most technical problems aren't cut and dried - sometimes the problem is correctly finding what the problem is.

To be good in this industry - you have to want to go down the rabbit hole and spelunk. To get your hands and mind dirty.

I find this phenomenon puzzling. STEM is foundation of the modern civilization. And it is Europeans and Americans, after all, who have largely advanced modern science, technology, engineering, and math in the past hundreds of years. I can tell fascinating stories about the great minds and great achievements for weeks. Yet, the great history, the great subjects, and the people who love STEM are being looked down upon by American kids? What.The.Fuck.

It was not like this in the country where I grew up, though. In our country, STEM are cool in school. Seriously cool. Teachers, kids, and especially parents take studying of STEM seriously (though to be fair, the parents took every subject seriously as they cared about grades too). Biographies of famous scientists are popular readings. Names like Archimedes, Newton, Curie, Paulin, Ernest Lawrence, and so on are household names. No one in my school got despised because he or she studied hard. That would be absurd to even think about. That's why I was initially bewildered by Paul Graham's Why Nerds Are Unpopular.

And what's the result of all these? Straight-A students couldn't pass a community college's placement math test, as reported by NYT a couple of years ago. I don't what could be worse than such drama.

Nature is the most beautiful thing around and they help me appreciate that beauty more deeply.

While historically there is a close connection between Euclidean geometry and calculus, I think people can grok ideas like a tangent line without having done any Euclidean geometry before.

And probability and statistics are essential so people can properly participate the civic process. E.g. I used to see the following statistic a lot: "Women who are murdered are ~100 times as likely to have been murdered by their spouse, as Men who are murdered". I think a rudimentary knowledge of probability would allow people to realize this is a meaningless statistic (the meaningful version is "Women are 1.5 times as likely to be murdered by their spouse as Men".

I see a great problem in a society that shifts its focus from value-adding activities like research and development towards zero-sum activities like law and management. We clearly need both, but in the long run, innovation is what ensures future.

I read somewhere that this is accompanied by a demographics shift, where middle class, white Americans are shifting even more strongly away from science, technology and math and towards business and law. As a culture, this is troubling.

"How many people actually use any of this “practical math” they supposedly learn in school? Do you think carpenters are out there using trigonometry? How many adults remember how to divide fractions, or solve a quadratic equation? Obviously the current practical training program isn’t working, and for good reason: it is excruciatingly boring, and nobody ever uses it anyway. So why do people think it’s so important? I don’t see how it’s doing society any good to have its members walking around with vague memories of algebraic formulas and geometric diagrams, and clear memories of hating them. It might do some good, though, to show them something beautiful and give them an opportunity to enjoy being creative, flexible, open-minded thinkers— the kind of thing a real mathematical education might provide."

For some reason, the math curriculum is completely about learning techniques, which roughly correspond to formulaic manipulation of symbols. We basically learn to apply algorithms for manipulating symbols, and we do it over and over again. And of course, this is easy to test.

But it's also the absolute least important aspect we need to know! It's the part that doesn't involve thinking. And so we end up with some farce of an education where we learn the procedures without the context why people created them in the first place!

Take the quadratic formula: something wholly useless in real life, but taught to every middle-schooler in the US. Somehow, even though the name has "quad" in it, we learn it without learning the context of the ancient Greek concept of quadrature, and problems relating to whether it is possible to find a rectangle with a certain area and perimeter. In the derivation, we "complete the square", but nobody draws the said square!

And then we do a hundred problems involving applying the quadratic formula, which is neither enlightening nor useful.

[1] http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsL...

I must have missed this part when I was a post graduate. The only thing I saw physicists getting paid was peanuts you had to move three states over to get.

In 2006, when I left things looked largely like this[1]:

age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college

age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month

age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year

age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year

age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s

Sadly from what I hear of people from my class who stayed on things are worse now. So why doesn't the article talk about the elephant in the room? That when you add student debt to the picture you need to work until you're 40 to beat someone who has worked at McDonald's that whole time. And just at that point you enter the most uncertain part of your career which will make or break the rest of your life.

Students aren't leaving the STEM fields in droves because they are stupid and unmotivated, they are leaving because the prospects for a career are terrible.

[1] http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

That’s because the American system of teaching these subjects is broken. For all the reform campaigns over the years, most schools continue to teach math and science in an off-putting way that appeals only to the most fervent students. The mathematical sequence has changed little since the Sputnik era: arithmetic, pre-algebra, algebra, geometry, trigonometry and, for only 17 percent of students, calculus. Science is generally limited to the familiar trinity of biology, chemistry, physics and, occasionally, earth science.

These two paragraphs capture the essence of the issue.

In fact, forgive me for bringing up the topic of compulsory schooling and deliberately defective education again, but I think I might have an interesting tidbit to share on this, which paints a rather ugly picture of the whole situation.

An excerpt from Charlotte Iserbyt's the deliberate dumbing down of america (Revised and Abridged Edition [2011], Ch 2: The Turning of the Tides, p. 31, c. 1928):

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"1928: A deliberate math "dumb down" was seriously discussed in 1928. A teacher named O.A. Nelson, John Dewey, Edward Thorndike (who conducted early behavioral psychology experiments on chickens), and other Council on Foreign Relations members attended a Progressive Education Association meeting in 1928 at which O. A. Nelson was informed that the purpose of "new math" was to dumb down students. Nelson revealed in a later interview with Young Parents Alert that the Progressive Education Association was a communist front. According to the National Educator (July 1979):

Mr. O. A. Nelson, retired educator, has supplied the vitally important documentation needed to support the link-up between the textbooks and the Council on Foreign Relations. His letter was first printed in "Young Parents Alert" (Lake Elmo, Minnesota). His story is self-explanatory.

I know from personal experience what I am talking about. In December 1928, I was asked to talk to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. On December 27th, naïve and inexperienced, I agreed. I had done some special work in teaching functional physics in high school. That was to be my topic. The next day, the 28th, a Dr. Ziegler asked me if I would attend a special educational meeting in his room after the AAAS meeting. We met from 10 o'clock [p.m.] until after 2:30 a.m.

We were 13 at the meeting. Two things caused Dr. Ziegler, who was chairman of the Educational Committee of the Council of Foreign Relations, to ask me to attend… my talk on the teaching of functional physics in high school, and the fact that I was a member of a group known as the Progressive Educators of America, which was nothing but a Communist front. I thought the word "progressive" meant progress for better schools.

Eleven of those attending the meeting were leaders in education. Drs. John Dewey and Edward Thorndike, from Columbia University, were there, and the others were of equal rank. I checked later and found that ALL were paid members of the Communist Party of Russia. I was classified as a member of the Party, but I did not know it at the time.

The sole work of the group was to destroy our schools! We spent one hour and forty-five minutes discussing the so-called "Modern Math." At one point I objected because there was too much memory work, and math is reasoning; not memory. Dr. Ziegler turned to me and said,

"Nelson, wake up! That is what we want… a math that the pupils cannot apply to life situations when they get out of school!"

That math was not introduced until much later, as those present thought it was too radical a change. A milder course by Dr. Beckner was substituted but it was also worthless, as far as understanding math was concerned. The radical change was introduced in 1952. It was the one we are using now. So, if pupils come out of high school now, not knowing any math, don't blame them. The results are supposed to be worthless."

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