I Never Use Advanced Math

I’ll admit, I’m a science nerd and love logic problems. However, numbers and calculations don’t sing for me like they do for some people. I’m a word person. And my adult life has not required me to do calculus unless I’m helping a student to do calculus. But, it drives me nuts when I hear adults tell students you won’t use this in the real world. 

First, attitude shapes learning. If a student thinks that they are being required to learn something hard and useless, they will put in the minimum effort not to fail and avoid steps that put the ideas into their long term memory. This leads to students who struggle in math continuing to struggle because they don’t retain learning year to year.  Don’t handicap students like that. 

Second, you use math more than you realize. But, at some point the math you use became easy and you no longer think of it as math. In fact, you may have learned it integrated into another skill, so you missed you were learning math (I can write a lot more on why teaching math in a silo causes problems and makes it harder to learn). 

One of my favorite stories about this involves my incredibly intelligent and educated sister-in-law. As an archaeologist, she loves fieldwork, but specializes in writing reports that summarize surveys and provide the maps to clients of what was and was not found. She saw me provide a quick text answer for a trigonometry student once and commented on how much she hated algebra and trigonometry and was happy her job didn’t require her to do advanced math. I looked at her dumbfounded and inquired if she didn’t have to map the surveys and do the placement calculations from field measurements for her reports. She casually replied, “I have to do survey stuff for all the reports, but that’s archaeology, not math.” My brother couldn’t stop laughing. Because she learned to do these calculations in an archaeology class and no one called it trigonometry she was honestly convinced it was not math. 

Third, students who take this to heart will miss out on a lot of career opportunities, because as technology proliferates, so does the need to understand math to use machines. Very few jobs will require a firm grasp of all the math covered in school, but many require people who can understand that math ideas exist to answer questions that come up in their lives and jobs. If you cannot ask a computer the correct question, you cannot get the answers you need.  Even if the student may not need to do all the calculations themselves in the future, they will need to understand the concepts well enough to know what information they can get to help them make good choices. 

So, whether your student studies at home or in person, when they bring you math questions, please never express that you hate math or think they won’t need to learn this because you don’t need it for your adulting. Realize that beyond what you say about that problem that an adult’s attitude and frustrations can make math harder for children. Next, I’ll give specific tips for how to help your child with their math questions, even if you don’t understand what they are doing.