Transcription
You know, as a kid, I used to like math a lot. I liked it so much that I used to do it during my free time, and I was on my way to becoming the Jimmy Neutron, the Phineas and Ferb, you know, the smart characters in TV shows. And for consecutive years, like a dog sticks by its owner, I was loyal to math. My answer to the question asked most during school, "What's your favorite subject?" has always been, without fail, math.
But after a while, after the honeymoon phase had worn off, we stopped calling each other cute nicknames, and Mathematics and I experienced some minor hurdles. And just like McDonald's fries that had gone cold, mathematics for me had just gotten stale, going from delicious to inedible in what felt like mere moments. So, I'm going to be going through the levels of mathematics I've gone through and why I've gone to dislike it more and more throughout the years.
Level 1: Counting. We all did it. Some of us still do. Counting with your fingers. Jimmy has four apples, and Eve gave him an extra two. How many apples does Jimmy have? You'd look at your fingers, start with four, and raise two extra, and then you count. Easy. And you might think that this will only work up to ten because we have 10 fingers, but no. I had a way to count up to 30. If you look at your fingers, there's three sections for each finger. So, if you count each section instead of a full finger, you can count up to 15 numbers on each hand, and if you use both hands, it's now 30. At this level of math, I remember the teacher used to ask questions at school, and after a few seconds of fiddling around with our fingers, or what looked like lasting a spell, our arms would take off to get picked to answer the question, marking the start of the relationship with math for the most of us.
Level 2: Mental Math. So, the finger counting is only good when you're adding and subtracting things less than 10 or 30 with the technique I showed. But when you get questions with bigger numbers, like 32 + 12, we're forced to use our brains a little bit more. This was the first big hurdle in math, where the kids who got it, got it, and the kids who didn't, just needed more time. Now, I was one of those kids who didn't get it when a teacher taught us, but I had a genius idea. When I got home from school that evening, I grabbed the marker and drew 50 dots on my arm. Why, you might ask? I figured I couldn't add extra fingers on myself, and even if I could, I didn't want my hands to look like a star-nosed mole. So, to bypass this physical limitation, I thought about the idea of drawing dots on myself. 32 + 12. Not a problem. I'll count 32 dots and I'll shift my finger across my arm until I finish counting a further 12. The only bad thing about this is that the teacher told me to wash off the dots the next day because, I guess, the topic was mental math and not counting. Honestly, I think she was just jealous. But eventually, I learned how you were supposed to solve questions that didn't or couldn't have physical representations for further climbing up the mountain of mathematics.
Level 3: Speedy Math. This was my favorite. Remember those math sheets we used to get with maybe 15 questions? I remember zooming through these questions, and after I'd finished, the graphite from the pencil had stained the side of my hand from scribbling on the pencil markings on the paper. No more mental math, no more drawing dots on myself. I remember the teacher would give us a sheet of questions and test this every morning, and the top five people to finish first with no mistakes. Now, let's stick it. I had four stickers on my pencil case, and if someone was bothering me during class, all I had to do was ask a simple question: "How many stickers do you have?" Completely soul-crushing. I was responsible for that annoying kid's childhood trauma.
Level 4: Adding Letters. For me, my positive experience with math ends here. Level 4 marks the start of my turbulent relationship with math. My understanding was, we have numbers for math and letters for English. That's how it was. But then they started adding random letters in with the numbers. It started off with a couple of letters, X's and Y's, but then math started bringing in more letters, N's, Z's, and then E, which apparently represents a number. Sometimes I'd think I was in an English class because there'd be so many letters, and I'd mistakenly answer "vowel" for E. But a line was crossed when they added Greek letters: Alpha, Beta, Gamma. It was now apparently a language class as well. What happened to good old numbers? And I know I shouldn't compare since comparison is often the thief of joy, but all I'm saying is that in English, we didn't have to count the number of vowels and multiply it by the consonants.
Level 5: Triangles. I remember in the final stages of secondary school, if you miss a class, it's game over. Just like tripping over at the start of a 100-meter sprint, you aren't catching up. There was one time I was sick with a fever, my head was so hot, you could probably cook your breakfast on there. I had to take a week off, and when I came back to school, I saw this. You know what? My fault. I should have just stayed at home. There seems to be an obsession with triangles, sine, cosine, tangent. Now, I get it. You can find the length of this side using these two, or you can find the angle of this using these two, right? So, don't get me wrong, I can appreciate the look and the taste of a Dorito, or the appetizing allure of a slice of pizza. I can even appreciate the aerodynamic efficiency of that yellow Angry Bird that goes fast. And listen, if I'm trying to be the next Mr. Beast making a bigger slice of pizza, or if I was in ancient Egypt making pyramids, I'm all ears. But we're not in ancient Egypt, we're not making pyramids, and I need to cut down my consumption of pizza, not increase it.
Level 6: Calculus and Above. To anyone who was unfortunate enough to undergo the insufferable topic that is calculus, first of all, I am sorry for your loss. The loss of time, sanity, and self-confidence is something that you will never get back. Calculus is seen as a final boss in math, and for a topic that is meant to derive, I feel that I derived nothing but a slight loathing for math as a whole. And the only integration it had achieved was that of collective resentment for math. Calculus taught us to find our limits as we approached a breakdown, and also it taught us to never trust titles on YouTube videos. But after reading the comments phrasing how it helped them with their grades, you start questioning if it's a "me" problem. After countless hours of studying with classical music playing, thinking it will make you smarter, something clicks in your brain, making you feel like a genius, forgetting a question right. But for the harder questions, you write random letters and numbers, hoping it's right. But if it's one of those extended questions where a question is based on a previous question, you sit there and accept the fate of a bad grade. Eventually, after many repetitions of what seems like the worst human experience possible, you move on to Level 7.
Level 7: Quit or Finish. After a long journey exploring a glimpse of what mathematics has to offer, Level 7 is the end of learning math, at least from an academic standpoint. The highs and the lows, the late nights and early mornings, what was it all for? We started off deciding how many apples we should share and quickly descended to cooking an unsavory mix of simple soup. Something I noticed I was asking myself often when learning math was, "Why?" Yes, the instinctive answer is to get good grades, but it often felt like the topics in math had no utility in our immediate lives. New words learned in English can be applied in the world outside of exams, and even things that can't be applied physically, such as the concepts learned in science, give us some sort of understanding of the world. In the case with mathematics, excluding the fundamental skills discussed in the earlier levels, the ability to apply what we've learned in a meaningful way seems to be limited. We were taught to solve for Y, but didn't know how to solve the "why." But with a subject with so many problems and depending on us to solve them, it was a red flag from the beginning. And with most of the world requiring students to study mathematics, it seems like a toxic relationship forced upon us.