I excelled in all subjects in high school except for math, which I detested and felt as difficult and, for the most part, uninteresting.
Fast forward to third year of Uni and I was looking at set theory, graph theory, and logical proofs. They were all difficult, yet they sucked me in. It was hard but I wasn't dissuaded from studying. And the reason why was because thinking of interesting proofs and devising ways of solving puzzles is far, far more interesting than doing arithmetic from rote memory.
It really doesn't surprise me at all that kids do badly in math when they're introduced to such boring and dry topics. Kids are taught useless trigonometric identities when they could be studying applied statistics, which is not only substantially more useful, but it opens a lot more doors for reasoning about the world. Learning statistics, graph theory and logic have literally helped to mold my thinking. I can't really say the same about trig of high-school level calculus (not that there's anything wrong with calculus, but i think that in order to get something out of it you need to dedicate much more time than what is available in high school).
via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3204605
university
math
education
statistics
reasoning
Posted on Monday, Nov 7th 2011, @ 10:12
