StudyBlog

“But when are we ACTUALLY going to use this?!”  As a tutor, I must hear that question at least once a week.  At some point, every student wonders why he or she is forced to study math.  They question the point of learning the esoteric topics our math classes have to offer.  The Pythagorean Theorem, Geometric Proofs, Trigonometry, and Integral Calculus – just to name a few – all raise the question, “Why should I bother with all this?”  As educators, our response usually wavers somewhere between feeble justification (“You’ll need math to… uh… you know… when you’re trying to figure out how much to tip your waiter… and stuff like that.”) and dismissal of the question altogether (“Stop wasting time and just do your work!”).  Clearly, even educators are not completely clear about why we study math.

Most of what we learn in math class – for that matter, most of what we learn in all our classes – is completely useless in real life. Take a moment to let that sink in.  The tutor – whose very livelihood depends on the importance on education – says that at least 90% of what we learned in school will never get utilized.  It’s true.  When was the last time you needed to know the exact time a train leaving Boston would pass into a train leaving Chicago?  When was the last time your were required to recite the names of the US Presidents in chronological order?  Or provide a detailed explanation of photosynthesis? Except for basic arithmetic, fractions, percents and proportions, the mathematics we learn in school has no place in real life.

What’s the point of spending so much time in a classroom if we’re never going to use any of what we learn there? The truth is that school isn’t just about learning reading, writing and ‘rithmetic.  Beyond the joy of learning for it’s own sake, the most important function of school, and therefore an educator’s biggest responsibility, is to train student’s minds.  We don’t study math to know how to determine the volume of a cone or the median age of the students in our classroom.  We study math to train our brain in logical thought and problem solving. Mathematical thought is purely logical thought; so mastering math is about mastering organized, rational thinking. Learning to count, memorizing multiplication tables, solving geometric proofs, and all the other tasks given to us by our math teachers coach our brains in how to follow a problem from its conception through it’s solution.  Math teaches us that even though we won’t always be able to see our way through an entire problem, we can still start with what we know, and go from there – and that this challenge can be rewarding, even fun.  I often compare approaching a difficult math problem to solving a jigsaw puzzle with many pieces.  What fun would the jigsaw puzzle be if, from the time we spilled the pieces out of the box, we automatically knew exactly where all the pieces should go?  What would be the fun in watching a mystery on TV if we knew whodunit from the very beginning?

So when do we use math in “real life”?   Yes, we use math to figure out how much to tip a waiter, to estimate the discount we’ll receive when buying that sweater on sale, to compute the mileage we get in our car, to figure out how to make a half recipe of cupcakes.  But we also use our math brain to figure out how to fit those last two suitcases into a car trunk that already has too much stuff in it.  We use logic (and therefore math) to figure out the best route to take home from work, given the traffic conditions.  Indeed, a training in math helps us every time we use our brains to solve a problem.