A Tragedy of Education

In school, I was always a straight A student. I was gifted with an IQ that I didn’t deserve and I don’t remember ever having to try in my classes until I began to take AP classes.

In my sophomore year of high school, I took Algebra II and it permanently turned me off of mathematics. I understood everything that was being taught, but I had no drive to learn it. Doing math felt like I was trudging through mental molasses, completing endless example problems which carried with them no purpose other than to be something to practice with.

But English class was different. I was given articles written by real humans and given the instructions to discern the meaning behind it. Each of these articles had a purpose, and taught me something as well as being tools of practice. It wasn’t always easy, but I enjoyed doing things which felt like real brain exercise.

Why did this contrast exist? Why did I feel as if English class was more mentally stimulating, thought provoking, and genuinely more challenging than math class? As I took more math and English classes throughout the course of my educational career, I underwent various ideologies to these questions.

When I was younger, I attempted to express to my elders that the math was becoming more abstract and less applicable. While I still believe this to be true to a certain extent (what I learned in Algebra II was altogether less useful than what I learned in Algebra I), it took me several years until I discovered the tragedy of education in math, and other related disciplines like physics, chemistry, etc.

English class is about unlocking the true meaning behind various texts, analyzing the author’s biases, intents, and reasonings. Thus, the authors of English textbooks take literary examples written by real people. Moreover, they do it because it’s easier. It’s easier for them to find an article about a subject than it is to write an article about a subject. And so, by the end of my English assignment, I knew something about rhetorical strategies and something about the Spanish economy.

Math class is very different, however. There is no unlocking in math class; there is only the application of rules. Thus, the authors of math textbooks write an endless stream of examples with which students can practice this set of rules. But there was never any reward to this. After having discovered the mean of a set of data of grocery shoppers in a fictional supermarket, I learned nothing. It was simple, but unrewarding. I demonstrated that I can logically follow a set of rules given an example of data, but the data didn’t mean anything, and it didn’t teach me anything. And yet, I still had to complete forty more similar problems before I adequately demonstrated that I can read a formula.

And so, I went about my high school career avoiding math whenever possible. Not because I was dumb or incompetent, but because of the abhorrent way in which it was taught. I had to trust my math teachers that, “Someday [I] will use these principles,” without ever having been given a reasonable example in which the principles were demonstrated. Then in college, I took only the required number of math courses and bolted out the door at the end of every lecture.

In contrast, English class only became more interesting. I was using new skills to comprehend increasingly nuanced pieces of work, and the applications were endless. Eventually, I couldn’t look at any piece of text without identifying the author’s purpose or pointing out logical fallacies. It was always rewarding, even outside of class. Furthermore, it was an exercise in free expression; the answer with which I concluded was always different from the conclusion of the person sitting next to me, and the diversity of opinions only led to a better understanding of the text by all parties. It was truly beautiful.

Even if mathematics had been taught to me in a more interesting, applicable, fluid manner, I don’t believe that I would have favored it over English. But at the same time, it’s such a tragedy that mathematics was taught to me in such a boring, inapplicable, sequential manner. If mathematics was based upon real world examples as much as English, instead of theoretical principles for which the individual has to divine their own application, I’m certain that math would not turn off so many bright individuals. And that might mean a more thoughtful, knowledgeable populace with a better respect for logic and statistics.

But when math is successfully taught only to people who don’t mind that they’re discerning useless conclusions from data of fictional supermarkets, that is a tragedy.