Why do I have to learn math?
That's a teacher who loves math wanting help explaining to kids who ask why they need to learn math. I have ZERO advice for them.
Technically, no one has to learn math. We can just let society devolve into a worse trash heap than the cesspit we currently have if no one wants to learn math.
My understanding is the first math book involved NO numbers at all. It's a geometry book and has drawings of geometric figures and rules about relationships between angles.
I'm guessing the kids most likely to ask this question of school teachers are kids who had elementary school teachers who not only couldn't teach it but were actively math phobic.
I argued this once on Hacker News and some people backed me up: Women who go to college and have trouble with the math portion of something they want to pursue get told "Oh, it's not a big deal. Just go into early childhood education."
Men don't get told that. Men who want to teach elementary school get side eyed as "probably a child molester" and discouraged from choosing to spend time with young kids as their career.
If men struggle with the math, they are expected to man up and get it done. I know because I tutored my ex in college math.
He was a soldier and he's not good at math. At one point, he was completely misunderstanding some concept and I told him "Plug numbers into the equation. Use ten. It's easy to work with."
His version of how to solve the equation came out with one thousand equals one million. My version came out with one thousand equals one thousand.
He threw his pencil across the room in frustration. I told him to play nice or get a different tutor.
My oldest is like his father in that he's not innately good at math. But unbeknownst to me, he really really really wanted to understand it.
As a small child, he was a lying little shit who thought he was being clever to just say whatever bullshit popped into his head. I began checking his story and he came to live in fear of The Momminator or Darth Mom checking his story because I would go ASK other people questions.
I broke him of lying and he began proactively making sure his friends told me stuff ahead of time so he didn't need his story checked.
Or I thought I broke him of lying. Reality: After I thought I broke him of lying, little Mr. "I really really really WANT to understand math" spent an entire school year lying to both me and his teacher and getting away with it.
He brought home tons of "math homework" that wasn't actually homework. He was sneaking all his math class work home and getting ME to explain it to him even though we routinely argued about it for an hour and he somewhat often cried.
I bought his lying bullshit "because no kid would do this to themselves voluntarily" I guess.
The elementary school teachers couldn't explain it and he stopped asking them after he told one of them he didn't understand what the book said, so the stupid bitch picked up the book and read it aloud to him.
Like THAT was going to help.
It was later while homeschooling and participating on tagfam.org lists that I learned it was common knowledge and common practice that women would get told to not stress about the math and just go into early childhood education and teach elementary school if they couldn't hack the math, something absolutely NOT done to MEN who are presumed to be child molesters if they WANT to hang out with kids all day.
So if you teach math and students are asking you why do I have to learn it, my first assumption would be: Oh, another kid like Doreen Traylor's oldest kid with baggage from have incompetent and math phobic elementary school teachers who not only cannot teach it, they are scared of math and passing their math phobia on to future generations because someone convinced them to give up their dream career over the idea that math is hard and scary and stupid little women like you should PROMPTLY throw in the towel at the first speed bump you hit for your career, tuck tail and give up on your dreams and do something "easier."
This is a defacto scorched earth policy. If you are a woman and "not innately good at math" -- maybe because no one ever explained it because you're a girl -- they flush your future down the toilet extremely casually and call it a kindness to not make you work at it.
So we have elementary school teachers inculcating children with a dread of math because "Girls are bad at math, you don't worry your pretty little head about the math, honey. Just go raise and teach kids like women are intended to do and leave the tough mathy jobs to the men."
The tough mathy jobs being serious careers that pay well and which people only pursue if they LOVE it. If you are lazy and just looking to pay your bills, you flip burgers or something. You don't take calculus because thus and such other thing is COOL, man.
And it poisons all children, not just the ones with girl bits between their legs. I have sons, not daughters, and my ONLY math goal for my eldest for YEARS was to convince him "Math is fun. Math is your friend. It's not scary." because of his baggage about math from elementary school teachers who convinced him math is hard and scary.
It especially poisons kids who aren't innately good with numbers or who don't happen to have a family member who can explain it if what the book says doesn't work for them.
But we generally as a society have this idea that math is hard and scary instead of cool. Because the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world and we slap those hands and tell them "Math is too hard for you, stupid. Go rock a cradle, work you are suited to."
See also my previous post about my son with a math disability being FURIOUS that teachers made algebra sound hard and scary. Not because it is but because they can't explain ideas like "X is just a fancy way of saying fill in the blank."
Additionally, math and numbers aren't the same thing. Kind of like calligraphy and expressing yourself with words aren't the same thing.
So kids who have some issue crunching numbers sometimes think numbers are all math is about and it's really not.
The higher you go in science, the more math you need to understand. If you are interested in hard sciences, you need to understand math though it's okay to use tools like calculators and spread sheets to help you with number crunching if that's not your bag.
Understanding things like order of magnitude is super important. It can help to put numbers to that concept but it's not essential.
What's essential is understanding that it matters whether we are talking pebbles or boulders or mountain ranges.
It's important to understand things like "Measure weight with a scale that weighs things and not by asking if fat people can fit through this narrow door."
It's important to understand "Garbage in, garbage out." I don't care how precisely you take a tape measure to fat people who cannot fit through a narrow door, you still don't know their weight.
Lots of people are extremely invested in telling you the measurement with the tape measure to multiple decimal places when the correct answer is "Who cares? It's not actually pertinent. Crunch your numbers all you like, you aren't measuring the right thing."
You will do more good making sure kids understand the concepts even if numbers per se aren't something that thrills them. Kids need to know when to go "Holy crap! There's a mountain range sized problem in my life!" and when to go "Eh, it's an annoying pebble in my shoe and I would be more comfortable with it gone."
We were homeschooling our twice exceptional sons. Every weekend, me and my math challenged husband would agree to let me teach our oldest son math a certain way.
We agreed to do it MY way because I am the mathy parent. My way was let him read a stack of books full of words and do exactly ZERO written work crunching numbers.
Come Monday or Tuesday, the ex would reneg on the deal, probably one part he's a sexist pig and I'm a woman, so never mind that I am far better at math than him, and one part genuine fear that we were ruining his son's life rooted in the ex genuinely not understanding what I wanted to do and how that would help.
So for the first four years we homeschooled, we had this same argument once a week any week school was in session.
It was in the midst of our roughly 180th or 200th argument about teaching math to our son that I asked for a divorce. After that, magically the ex stayed out of my hair and let me teach as I saw fit.
So my son, after four years of going nowhere fast with written worksheets, began working his way through a stack of books, many of which I paid a dollar for from clearance tables because NO ONE reads math books for fun.
I periodically asked if he was still reading his stack of math books and that was the ONLY checking I did.
A few weeks go by and he starts merrily bouncing towards me with gleeful announcements like how he finally understands why you can't divide by zero. He knew it was a rule but never understood it before.
So, my oldest son, who likely has dyscalculia, understands math because his parents got divorced.
Math is important to me. I've always been mathy.
My oldest son is in some sense very much his mother's child because he put himself through hell LYING to his own mother -- successfully for once -- and making me fight with him and cause him to cry because he desperately wanted to understand math in spite of his baggage from public school teachers and his own math disability where numbers aren't really his thing.
And maybe that gives insight into why he and I seem so different but get along so well. Underneath the superficial differences, there are important similarities.
And that's actually the kind of thing math helps you talk about and quantify in a concrete fashion to make your case for how reality really works in important ways.