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by mbarq 3380 days ago
I was with you until you said "there's no reason for the average sarah...unless...homework"

I was the average Sarah, a lot of the people I went to public school with were the below than average sarah and it's the elitist math attitude that's being talked about here that turns kids off from that.

It wasn't until years later, after a career in concept art, then vfx and now programming that I realize..."hey the Fibonacci sequence isn't just some parlor trick for 'math types', it's a thing we can look at to study recursion and integrate in our code to make actual products".

Products that the average sarah uses and maybe even loves and would be supremely interested in learning about but doesn't because she's not a "math person".

I also lament the fact I didn't get into maths and see the beauty of it until years later when it was really too late to get into it at any professional level just because I was always implicitly told I was never meant to be a "math person".

Maybe I'm not, but if we could get more kids into maths, even if they're not geniuses, I think society as a whole and they themselves would greatly benefit from that.

2 comments

It's not elitist to dismiss polynomial factoring, though, just dismissive. I really can't think of any reason to care about the deeper points of polynomial factorization (anything other than repeated trial division), so maybe it's just ignorance on my part.

Stats? Now there's math you can use and is useful in understanding our world! And yet schools prefer to teach calculus in high school over however much stats you can teach without calculus. No one uses the integration bag of tricks in daily life, but everyone gets lied to with numbers.

a-fucking-men!

Same thing happened to me. I picked up math at 25 after not having done a single math related thing in almost 10 years. I picked it up after realizing that a lot of the things that I do on daily basis are heavily related to concepts such as triangular numbers and other sequences. My life would have been completely different had my teachers communicated math in better ways than simply saying here is an equation, solve!