I am convinced that math is the most important subject in school but yet almost all math teachers fail to do it justice. What I mean by that statement is that our education system, especially when it comes to math is all about memorizing rules and speed and very little emphasis is placed on actually understanding the material thoroughly.
I believe this is partly why I’ve struggled with math, because I have to fully understand something or I get very stumped on seemingly small details because I’m busy wondering why something works this or that way. Anyone who knows me can testify that memorization is not at all my problem because when I was a teen I literally memorized over 6000 verses and I am still able to memorize things very easily. But when it comes to math memorizing rules and useful acronyms is the easiest part but understanding all the details of why we have those rules is the complicated part. A very basic example of this deals with fractions and squares. Most of us understand that when you multiply both the numerator and denominator by the same number it is essentially multiplying the entire thing by 1 and does not change the fractional value. However when my teachers began explaining how to work with and reduce something like x^m/x^n they would simply tell us to memorize a rule like if (m < n) then 1/x^n-m. I memorized that easily but I didn’t understand initially why that rule worked correctly and so I would become frustrated because they were moving on to other rules while I still didn’t understand why that rule worked. Finally I realized that x^2/x^5 is the same as multiplying the numerator and denominator by of 1/x^3 by x^2. This is when I realized that it was simply reducing a fraction like any other and I understood the rule.
I find it annoying the way math is taught because I actually love math but I rarely get the chance to take my time so that I can fully understand everything. This is precisely why I love taking programming classes from my CS professor because he recognizes how important it is to understand concepts rather than just memorizing and thus he takes his time and goes it to almost every detail you could imagine. I don’t really know what the point of this post is other than to rant about my frustration with the way math is taught because I’m convinced that most people would not hate math so much if it was taught differently.
