I absolutely will criticize math academia for failing to teach mathematics.
Questions like "I give you a polynomial in x and ask you to find its zeroes" in textbooks and from teachers tell me fucking nothing as regards why I should bother to spend my precious time learning any math. Inevitably I might temporarily memorize some of it for the express purposes of passing some tests, but it's getting unloaded immediately afterwards because it's not important.
Programming, as I've already said, taught me the hows and whys of why math is important long after the student phase in my life, and I sorely wish someone or something in all of math academia would have taught me all that back then.
No other academic subject faces the amount of hate math gets, because their importance are all immediately obvious. Language? Communication is important, a matter of life and death. Social studies? Becoming a functional member of society is a matter of life and death. History? Learning from our past enriches our lives. The sciences? Of course it's important to understand how the universe and everything within it is made and works.
Math academia is a resounding failure because it only ever seems concerned with teaching the results. Fuck the results. Teach me the process, the vital context illustrating why I should bother to learn math. I don't need math to know I have two hands and ten fingers, show me how to do mindblowingly amazing things with math instead.
It's this critical lack of context that leads to people hating math, because we can't relate math to our lives with the way math academia teaches it. I will criticize math academia every chance I get until this is addressed.
> I absolutely will criticize math academia for failing to teach mathematics.
It's not the job of a professor of pure mathematics to teach kids mathematics in school. That's like saying that it's Stephen King's job to teach people how to read.
> Questions like "I give you a polynomial in x and ask you to find its zeroes" in textbooks and from teachers tell me fucking nothing as regards why I should bother to spend my precious time learning any math.
The problem with mathematics is that it's so versatile as a tool that it can be used many different contexts, but no teacher can predict which contexts are going to matter or be accessible to you.
That said, it is not my experience that you're never told why certain things are useful. In my experience, most people just forget those examples, because when they're 16, things like "businesses have to solve large systems of equations to optimise their processes" or "this function models the pattern of growth of a population of animals (or of an epidemic outbreak)" don't really mean a lot to them either. But those things are far from useless in real life.
> Programming, as I've already said, taught me the hows and whys of why math is important
I feel that you try to view all of mathematics through a programming lens, but mathematics is important to a whole range of other disciplines, such as physics, economics, social sciences, etc. Programming gives you a view into mathematics, but it's usually a narrow view.
> No other academic subject faces the amount of hate math gets, because their importance are all immediately obvious.
Math does tend to stand out (at least in the West; it is my understanding, that in many Asian societies, maths is valued much more, because the societal value of it is more evident), but every subject gets that "hate" to a lesser extent. There's no lack of complaints from people not understanding why they ought to read Shakespeare in school, or why they should care about "all these people that are long dead".
> Math academia is a resounding failure
Your very own job wouldn't exist without "math academia".
I already said that I agree that there are deficiencies in mathematical teaching (especially at the school level). It's not unreasonable to want to devote more time in school to applications of maths than to its techniques. But that blanket anger you seem to have towards mathematics as a whole is wholly unjustified.
> show me how to do mindblowingly amazing things with math instead
The "mindblowing" stuff you can do with maths, such as cryptography or machine learning, can only be understood by means of studying highly abstract and, at first glance, "useless" maths.
I am angry, yes, but not at mathematics. I'm angry at math academia (and math education, if the difference means anything) for not giving mathematics the care it deserves.
Math is an amazing academic subject, not the least because it's the language the universe is written in, but none of that sheer sense of wonder is ever conveyed when it comes to teaching math to students. That's what I'm angry about, and of course I would love to not be angry eventually too.
Questions like "I give you a polynomial in x and ask you to find its zeroes" in textbooks and from teachers tell me fucking nothing as regards why I should bother to spend my precious time learning any math. Inevitably I might temporarily memorize some of it for the express purposes of passing some tests, but it's getting unloaded immediately afterwards because it's not important.
Programming, as I've already said, taught me the hows and whys of why math is important long after the student phase in my life, and I sorely wish someone or something in all of math academia would have taught me all that back then.
No other academic subject faces the amount of hate math gets, because their importance are all immediately obvious. Language? Communication is important, a matter of life and death. Social studies? Becoming a functional member of society is a matter of life and death. History? Learning from our past enriches our lives. The sciences? Of course it's important to understand how the universe and everything within it is made and works.
Math academia is a resounding failure because it only ever seems concerned with teaching the results. Fuck the results. Teach me the process, the vital context illustrating why I should bother to learn math. I don't need math to know I have two hands and ten fingers, show me how to do mindblowingly amazing things with math instead.
It's this critical lack of context that leads to people hating math, because we can't relate math to our lives with the way math academia teaches it. I will criticize math academia every chance I get until this is addressed.