Imagine that your only contact with "English" as a subject was through classes in school. Suppose that those classes, from elementary school right through to high school, amounted to nothing more than reading dictionaries, getting drilled in spelling and formal grammatical construction, and memorizing vast vocabulary lists -- you never read a novel, nor a poem; never had contact with anything beyond the pedantic complexity of English spelling and formal grammar, and precise definitions for an endless array of words. You would probably hate the subject.
What if We Taught English the Way We Teach Math?
An excerpt from the article If We Taught English the Way We Teach Mathematics...:
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There must be a better way.. hmm, come to think of it....
The Better Way
Where is this alternate universe where people are not using math skills every day outside of the classroom environment?
Have kids never had to glance at a clock and figure out 1) what the numbers mean 2) what time it is and 3) how many more minutes they have to waste time before they need to leave for school / turn off the TV and actually work on homework before the parents stroll in / etc?
Nobody's ever bought gum from a neighborhood convenience store (or ice cream off a truck) with their allowance and had to figure out how much change was due back?
Never played street hockey and had to figure out where to place your stick to block the curb pass or make the one-timer?
I'll grant that the number of us that have to compute equations in differential calculus every day is relatively small, but there's plenty of math involved in everyday life. If a teacher can't relate some of their material to examples from life, that's not a fault of the curriculum -- it's a failure of imagination in the educator.
Is that the fault of the subject, or the fault of the guy/girl teaching it?
I'm thinking it's nothing unique to those teachers and professors that specialise in mathematics. There are plenty of boring educators teaching English, French, calculus, biology, history and so on that aren't particularly good at relating how all of this stuff ends up impacting you once you're outside academia.
Is math an especially egregious case? Dunno.
My senior year, the year after trig, I chickened out and didn't take Calculus; I took the other senior math class - with the geometry teacher - and did fine, but spent most of the class being amused at Emily's assignment notebook. Long story. But at the same time, I was taking Honors Physics, and doing really well, which any math chicken shouldn't have done. But the teacher cracked me up.
If I'd had a fabulous trig teacher, I imagine I would have taken math at least once at Wellesley. As it was, I laughed at people doing problem sets while I was building sets in the theatre program.
Hmmmmmmm.