[vundercind]

I know a couple people who are much smarter than me in many ways, but who failed a whole bunch of college math classes because they checked out way back when nobody could tell them why the fuck they were spending so much time factoring or solving quadratic equations or any number of other hated-by-most-students and largely motivation-free chunks of our k-12 math curriculum.

Hell I got a lot farther in math and for the most part I can’t tell them why we did a lot of that, either.

[cool_dude85]

People who ask this kind of question have a very narrow fixation on math specifically, I think. One learns to do these things to understand mathematical thinking, how to approach and solve math problems, etc.

When, as an adult, have you used the knowledge contained in the book Frankenstein? But nobody says "why do I have to read Frankenstein?" because they understand that it's not the specific book that matters.

[vundercind]

> But nobody says "why do I have to read Frankenstein?"

They really do. Secondary school students famously often don’t “get” good books and think they’re awful and pointless, much as people who’ve not been exposed to a given anything-but-totally-non-challenging musical genre will often think its masterpieces are boring and/or bad.

[BeFlatXIII]

IMO, that's also due to a lack of life experience. The students don't "get" it b/c it's too alien for them to relate to. They can be taught to echo the correct answers, but it's later life experience that will enrich their knowledge if it was drilled deeply enough that they remember.

[jncfhnb]

You don’t learn much generalizable wisdom from drilling integral calculus rules though

[cool_dude85]

Indeed, nor do you learn much wisdom drilling vocab or the memorization that is done in every subject.

[trueismywork]

In this particular narrow respect, math attracts and rewards people who like doing it without need for motivation. Same like people who like to play sports.

[fragmede]

for those in that industry, the answer is implementing LLMs

[google234123]

this is a bad take