Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Nikcap, from over on the Discord sever asks, your episode on statistics got me thinking why do we have to learn advanced math in school. When will I ever need to know what a sine or cosine is, or what the quadratic equation is used for. These are grips I hear from high school students and their parents, but I don’t really know what the good arguments are to support the learning of high school mathematics.

There are several things I’d say:

First, you don’t know what career you will have when you are in school. It is easy to look backward and say, “I don’t need to know that.” However, it is impossible to look forward and know what you will need to know.

If you don’t study math, or science, or history, or anything for that matter, you are basically locking yourself out of a host of possible careers before you ever get a chance even to make that choice.

If you use the “I don’t use that knowledge” as the basis for what to learn, then for most people, you don’t have to learn anything beyond basic arithmetic and literacy. We could go back to not having to get anything beyond a 6th-grade education.

The second thing is that it is worthwhile to learn some things because they teach you a system of thinking. Mathematics teaches you how to think rigorously. I’ve gotten value from almost everything I’ve ever studied, not because I use it every day but because it is a way to think about the world.

I’ve talked to many adults who feel that they are “not good at math.” This is almost entirely based on their experience in high school because. I always suggest they go back and try learning it again as an adult. Try learning it without the pressure of getting grades or taking a test. There are plenty of resources online to help you do this. There are free courses at Khan Academy, for example, which will take you from 1+1=2 all the way through college-level mathematics. If you don’t understand something, you can find other sources online to explain it in a different way.

Finally, I do think that we should change how we teach mathematics. I’m very open to the idea that we should put a higher priority on statistics, which most people do encounter every day, rather than calculus.