For most of my life, I feared math with such a passion that I spent more energy staying away from it than I did actually trying to learn it. It's funny how life works out, considering I'm working on a career that is immersed in math. It took me until my mid twenties to realize that it was not as bad as I had always thought, and here is where it really gets me, I now LIKE math. I'm still not all that good at it, it's far more subjective than anything I've ever studied with effort. You're either right or you're wrong and there are very clear rules to follow. It's very much like a dance where you either know the consecutive steps to follow, or you trip. And with math, tripping is hard and painful.
I think this is where most people falter with math. In a world where grades can make or break your entire career path and trial and error are not a celebrated part of learning, math is a big scary failure waiting to destroy your life. For this reason I gave it minimal contact in order to keep my grades up and push ahead. However, once I reached a point in my life where I had everything in place, I realized that I had missed out on so many more intellectually stimulating and satisfying careers, and all of them included math.
Math uses a very different part of your brain, one that is rarely consciously utilized in day to day life. And just like anything else, you need to exercise and use it in order to strengthen it. Math is also something you need to stumble through in order to fully understand it. Here's where I feel our educational system promotes mathphobia. If you don't automatically get it, our system teaches you that you never will. That's what I felt for years, I just wasn't a "math" person. However, math is more like learning a foreign language than any other subject I can think of. It involves both the build up of skills from one step to the next and thinking in a way that we don't normally do in daily tasks of life. It is very possible for anyone to get if they try hard to learn the rules, immerse themselves inside it's world, and stumble through problems they don't get but don't quit. All of which are particularly what you do when learning a new language.
I feel math anxiety is one of the biggest things our educational system perpetuates. To begin, it suppresses the importance of trial and error, it teaches us that we either can already do or won't ever. This is so sad since in reality anyone can learn almost anything (aside from things that are physically impossible like telekinesis) if you work hard for long enough. In others words, you can learn things you're not born good at just by giving it enough of your time and energy. That may be a heck of a lot of both, but it's still possible.
Moreover, our education system just throws you at math without a continuous build up. They try to, but you can easily move from geometry to trigonometry without mastering any of the skills needed. This is just dumb, as it sets you up for failure. It wasn't until Calculus II that I had a devoted professor who worried about our background knowledge in math before plowing ahead into the world of integrals. I actually LEARNED more about math in those few short months than I did in most of my high school career just because he showed the importance of knowing one thing to another.
Tom Lehrer in the 1950's clearly sums up how we learn math. It seems even back then we weren't very good at teaching it.
All in all, I think my main purpose of this post is to kind of hash out how interesting it is that math is so awesome and I never knew it. That and I wish other people could see how awesome it is as well. Now that I am an aficionado of math, I am slowly beginning to feel it to be the most artistic and human subject of all the others (including art), particularly because of how abstract it is.
Thanks Escher. I now agree!
