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Comment by ruswick | Hacker News Reader

The OP comes across as very fond of deriding the US schooling system, but proposes nothing beyond an egotistical assurance that he can teach math well even though no one else can.

Math education is not homogenous. People are not homogenous. Everyone experiences math in different ways both in school and in everyday life. Some people will simply memorize the steps necessary to solve problems. Some will actually grasp the theory behind the problem solving. Some will experience very little of what is considered "classic" high school math. (At my school, those who are not tracked into calculus or statistics as Seniors take a course that deals with things like formal logic. It actually seems really interesting.) The OP's blanket assertions are simply wrong.

Moreover, math is a massive field. The OP's claim that calculus and algebra are not math but that "pattern recognition" is is just absurd.

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Jeremy is a phd student at UIC right now and I'm pretty sure he taught a few classes there.

As someone who moved to the states at 13 I have to agree with him. Most teachers in America are forced to prep their students for exams instead of teaching them how to think critically. Instead of building an intuition, students are forced to memorize rules and equations so that they can finish their standardized exams in time. The problems done in class and for hw are of the same format as the exams, with the numbers used being the only difference. I've seen plenty of college students get offended when a professor puts a problem on an exam that requires some critical thinking.

I did my math degree at a school that had a special program for future math teachers and they were consistently the worst performing students in my classes. Abstract Algebra was a disaster for them, most couldn't put together even the simplest proofs. With exams approaching, they all begged the professor to tell them which proofs they were required to memorize. Somehow I got by with perfect scores by understanding the content while they had a tough time pulling off anything above 20%.

The problem isn't prepping for exams, the problem is that the exams cover only mechanical transformation.

Put real problem solving on the exam and this goes away. Of course, then teachers who can't problem solve (most of them) will be up in arms...

That's exactly what I was getting at.

Mathematics is a difficult subject to teach, not because it's difficult, but because people who gravitate to the field tend to have fewer people skills.

Math101 was the only paper I ever withdrew from. One lecturer was an Indian who barely spoke English, the other with a stutter who was constantly asked by fellow students to speak up. I later took a more complicated Mathematics paper, Math170, which I blazed through. It was simply because the lecturers were more engaged. They were far less 'experienced', but simply had more people skills.

> Mathematics is a difficult subject to teach, not because it's difficult, but because people who gravitate to the field tend to have fewer people skills.

Oh, you should watch CS people. Mathematicians are social butterflies in comparison. They mostly write proofs for other people, not machines.

Even if you were taught and understand the underlying theories, the end result is still applying patterns and formulas to the problem until it yields the answer. It's all good and well to able to independently derive the formula for (a + b)², but in the end the answer is still (a² + 2ab + b²), and that's all you need to apply the math.

Now, I've met my fair share of people who could not problem solve their way out of a paper bag with a pair of scissors. And I would love for generic problem solving to be a focus very early in education. But high school is likely way too late for that, and so I think all this anger with high school math is being misdirected.

He puts high-quality teaching notes online for free, and it is quite callous to call his proposal an egotistical assurance or to deride his definition of math.

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