Math" as taught in most elementary schools is not taught in an interesting and engaging way. You are given a dry procedure and pre-canned problems to solve, and you are expected to do it exactly the way the teacher taught you. You are also zinged by the teacher if you apply techniques he or she did not "teach you yet", as though the teacher is some sort of dispensatory math "god".
In other words, there is no discovery or creativity, just a rote exercise.
The enthusiasm of the teachers are also usually lacking, and the students pick up on that. Students learn better from teachers that are actually passionate about what they teach.
I personally hated math up until 4th grade. Then, during the summer break, I actually saw a few advanced math courses being aired on public TV at the time and got extremely interested. By the time I started 5th-grade, I had already passed grade school, and by 6th grade I was sailing past "high school" level math. I raided the local libraries for whatever math books they had on their shelves, which was paltry.
I did come across one book that I'll never forget: Principles of Mathematics by Oakley. That covered all the basics of transcendental numbers, trigonometry, geometry, etc., all the way up to limits...
Around the same time, I came across my older adult sister's old college math books, which was a windfall. Calculus.
I opened up that book and was both amazed and stumped. Calculus was unlike anything I had encountered up till that point, and the notation was mysterious. dy/dx, the integral sign, all of it...
I worked hard at trying to understand it, with no help from anyone. Not even my sister, whom did not know I dug her old books out of the basement.
I tried to find related books on it at the public library, but could find nothing. Public libraries were piss poor in their coverage of mathematics. Usually just a single bookcase, and most of that remedial garbage...
And keep in mind this was in the early 197os. No Internet. No personal computers. Even calculators were dreadfully expensive...
But I preservered.
And then one day -- I was 13 and just before starting 8th grade -- a lightbulb went off. BOOM. It all finally made since. Integration and differentiation! Woohoo! And in those days, the odd-numbered problems had the solutions to them at the back of the textbook, and I started getting all of them correct....
I did manage to find better math books later on, and quickly progressed in my understanding of -- single variate -- Calculus. Nothing I had access to did anything with vectors and multivariate calculus, so the div, grad, and curl would have to wait for later...
And so, by the time I began high school, I had gotten pretty good, and the high school claimed they offered a calculus course. I asked to sign up for the Advance Placement course, but was told I would have to wait until I was a senior, and would have to take Algebra and Geometry first. Boring, as I already did those years before...
And by the time I did get to their so-called "calculus" course in my Senior year, it was not even real calculus. Just some pre-calculus crap. I was So disappointed.
Well, I tell this story to illustrate a point. Public schools in general are horrible at teaching, mainly because the teaching approaches rarely allow for self-exploration and discovery, and worse -- can't even keep up with you when you go it alone. And not just with mathematics, but everything. Pre-canned problems with pre-set textbook answers, and you either get it "right" by doing it exactly the way the teacher or textbook taught you, or WRONG, even if you got it right by using more advanced and simpler means...
No wonder so many are turned off to what otherwise would be wonderful subjects.
Many years later, I came across the word "Autodidact", which describes me not only perfectly, but to an extreme. Give me knowledge or I will get up and get it myself.
Written 8 Nov, 2014. 311 views.
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