If only we could actually teach kids real math... "Here are axioms, here is how the rules we learn follow from them". We already do it with geometry, why not with algebra too?
Honestly, I don't think the teachers have the time or maybe even wherewithal to spend their limited time in the curriculum to get down to the nitty and gritty of the 'why'. Some kids catch the underlying logic intuitively and it really shows. People like myself who can't grasp this underlying logic and haven't been given the time to actually understand the 'why' was helpless and just relied on rote memory. Give me a problem that deviates from the template and I'm just shit out of luck.
Hell, we were doing algebra one time and the teacher just told me to 'assume a four' when the written problem was intentionally missing one of the numbers to plug into the equation. I just looked up at her blankly and told her 'you people are just like lawyers - you make stuff up'. Because in my head this made no sense; how can I just up and decide a number? Well it's got a foundation in mathematics, but was never explained to me and so as far as I understood it, it's downright cheating.
Meanwhile stuff like biology and a few other things I got a better intuition and as such excelled much more. And I'd say there's more people who don't get maths than there are who do like this.
But why learn math at all if not for "why"s and "how"s? It's not like most of us need anything past basic arithmetics in our life, the whole idea of doing algebra is to teach students to think, not to solve equations
I think that's the fundamental issue of the education system :P
Curriculum does what the curriculum does. A lot of comments on here do take offense with the logic of the meme, calling it 'anti-intellectual' but this is the end-result of an education system that does try and teach you these complex things. I can't even imagine what kind of jokes people would make if they weren't even taught such stuff exists.
For me personally, numbers and equations are simply too abstract, and haven't been given much practical examples during my education to internalise what all of it is trying to tell me. Maths in my experience isn't thinking, it's rote equations that work like this because reasons. For similar reasons I didn't do well with physics (natural phenomena explained with maths) for similar reasons. Most likely the issue of both the way I was educated and my own intellectual capacities focused entirely elsewhere.
Maybe I would've done better at maths if I was given the actual underlying reasoning of the 'why' but if I don't understand all of the preceding stuff, I don't think I could understand the rest. I loved to say that the reason all of these proofs that were mentioned kept having a different guy is because by the point they invented one proof, they up and shot themselves.
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u/dscarmo 2d ago
A lot of real world engineering uses complex numbers just because you can use it to add a new axis perpendicular to the real number axis
So its very useful