Thread by @MrAlanCooper

When I was 14 I fucking hated the way they taught math in school. 1

I fucking hated the way it was taught from that point on. It was always taught in the exact same way: for math geeks. 2

Math geeks love math for its tactical beauty, the way beachcombers love beaches because they love every single grain of sand with an identical passion. 3

So math was taught pebble by pebble, with an abiding, transcendent love for every tiny stone, in and of itself. If you—like me—didn’t love the mechanics of math, it was torture. 4

But—and here’s the big but—you could not advance to the next pebble of mathness until you had fully absorbed the mathness of the previous pebble. Each pebble built on the one that came before it. 5

Once you accepted the hand of Liebniz (or Newton or whomever) on your heart, you could walk the hallowed path to higher math. It all worked fine IF YOU LOVED MATH! 6

But I’m a practical guy, not a theorist and not a scientist and certainly not a math geek. So I needed something to motivate me. I needed to know WHY that trivial characteristic of mathiness behavior behaved the way it did. 7

I’m a reasonably smart guy, and I am willing to work hard for something that I want, but I never wanted to learn about math. I never saw any reason why and not one single teacher ever addressed the topic of why I might want to learn math. 8

They never showed me the love, either. They never wowed me with the miraculous properties of math, they never juggled or made things disappear or any of the kind of magic that @vihartvihart is so good at. 9

@vihartvihart But most damning of all, no math teacher ever showed me what you could do with math. They never offered me any reason to be motivated to learn it. 10

@vihartvihart Now, I understand that complex intellectual constructs like math (or programming, or design, or making things) are pyramids of knowledge, built from the ground up. But that isn’t how people come to love them. They love them from the top down. 11

@vihartvihart Normal people, not math geeks, come to love math from what math can do for them. They want to launch a rocket, or program a computer, or understand the weather, so they have some motivation to learn the pebbles one by one. 12

@vihartvihart I strongly suspect that this lack of rationale, lack of motivation in the way math is taught is one of the main reasons why women are so turned off by it. They tend to be more practical about things. The same goes for programming and other things technical. 13

@vihartvihart As I’ve grown, I realize that many of the things in this world that transfix me with their beauty and elegance are clearly explained by higher mathematics. I mourn my lack of knowledge, but I blame the way math is taught. 14

@vihartvihart You’re probably wondering why I’m whinging on about math. It’s because of Autodesk. 15

@vihartvihart All of Autodesk's training materials, written and video, are exactly like fucking freshman algebra. Start with the tiniest pebble, understand every single pebble, then you can move to the next higher level of pebble. 16

@vihartvihart Once you have mastered all 27 levels of pebble, you can go on to 19 levels of rocks. All of the examples are perfect little in vitro demonstrations isolated from the real world. Believe me, if I’m encountering problems, it’s not because I’m doing it the easy way. 17

@vihartvihart You can faithfully read (or view) all of their training materials in order and still not come away with any understanding of what that crap is for or why they did it that way or why I would even give a rat’s ass to know. 18

@vihartvihart Pretty much the same reason why I flunked algebra seven times in both high school and college. Why? Tell me why I have to wrap my head around this crap. I’ll do it, just give me a reason. 19

@vihartvihart Many years ago I was writing some graphics software. Understand that I know little about the topic, and even less then. Also, the tools were basically nonexistent. 20

@vihartvihart I needed to hit test a display. Did the mouse just click inside the polygon, or outside? I couldn’t figure it out, but I was sure there was some simple mathematical solution. 21

@vihartvihart But I lived in Menlo Park, about 2 miles from Stanford University. So, I drove over and dropped in on the math department. 22

@vihartvihart I asked everybody I could find, and was bounced from TA to TA for hours without ever getting an answer to my question. But the look in the faces of those math geeks when I asked them a practical question was priceless. Deer in headlights. 23

@vihartvihart My bottom line is this:

Rockets might get a kid interested in math, but math will never get a kid interested in rockets.