Why I Hate Math

Jason Gibson’s article “Why Learn Algebra?” is detailed and persuasive. Not many people think or believe that math is important. Many of us don’t realize how much we use math in our everyday lives. Math or algebra, which ever one you prefer to call it, is all around us. Gibson gives good reasons as to why math is important and how we use it in our everyday lives, “We can all imagine situations where basic math serves us well - calculating your change in the grocery store for instance.”

Mathematics is all around us, it is in our electronics, architecture, economics, many more, and of course in school. Everyone has to take some kind of mathematics class no matter where they went to school, regardless of their feelings toward mathematics. A great amount of students feel as if mathematics, especially advanced mathematics, is not useful for everyday life. Others feel the multiple step process to solve many mathematics questions is too difficult and time consuming. The amount of unknown words that are not used in everyday may be confusing to the students. All of this contributing to the growing negatively against mathematics. Negative feelings toward mathematics need to be changed to create more positive feelings associated with

I experienced by middle and high school math classes not truly recognizing the intrinsic value of them and arrived at AP Calculus AB my junior year of high school holding the same apathy for them. The popular culture and ideology regarding mathematics is that unless a student is going to study engineering, s/he will never use trigonometry, algebra, or geometry. The actual subject matter didn’t matter, only the numerical stamp of progress and success did. I let myself get caught in that train of thinking, and quickly considered mathematics another obstacle I had to grudgingly hurdle to continue my studies.

Math was always easy to me when I was younger, but as soon as I entered high school it became a challenge. I’ve taken gate and advanced placement classes and even though I struggled with it, I was influenced to pursue a higher level of education. Math has influenced me to pursue a higher level of education because career paths that I am interested require courses in mathematics. I learned that math opens the door to many promising careers such as becoming an engineer, physicist, or a doctor. I want to become a doctor so I will have to pursue the highest level courses in mathematics. The math classes that I have taken in high school shown me that pursuing a higher education will help me in life. Some people say that math is useless because you won't use it a day in your life after you graduate from high school, but that’s not true you can incorporate math into a daily part of your life. You can get a job that revolves around finances or

There are an abundant amount of subjects that peak my interests, but mathematics will always be the one subject that intellectually excites me. At times, it is able to both challenge me to the point of frustration, but it later gives me excessive excitement and happiness for overcoming the challenge. Similarly, it is like a wave flooding in shore because it is at first harsh and difficult, but it gradually smoothes and simplifies. It is a subject that I can fully interact and manipulate it to the best possible way of understanding it, which I fondly love because I learn better hands-on. However, it was truly benevolent instructors, who increased my love in math and enlighten a new way of

Formulas, factoring, derivatives: math topics make many people cringe and are viewed difficult to endure when learning these boring concepts. On the other hand,

Mathematics is not for one type of person: not only for the nerdy and weird outcasts, not only for the white male, not only for those who are not targeted by the stereotypes prevalent in the field. Mathematics is not dry, nor boring, nor focused on inane solutions never to be used after the discovery. Mathematics is not what people think it is; it is not one field, one theme, one subject. Mathematics is everything. Look around, with clear eyes, and you will see the art of mathematics everywhere. Dr. Diana Gu, the founder of MTY Academy, an extremely successful institute in the Austin community, and long-time, inspirational professor at the Texas State University, looks at the world and sees numbers. She sees passion and dedication and motivation. She sees intensity and zeal and excitement. Explaining that mathematics is essential for everyone, she emphasizes an idea: innate skill matters little, while practice is what defines you.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve enjoyed math classes. Although some problems are challenging, math has never been a difficult

Math used to be my favorite subject in elementary school. It used to be so simple where the equations used were clear to understand and proving your answer by showing work did not take too much time. Going into middle school things changed and became way too complicated. You had to learn equations to use for different problems and know which situation called for which equation to use. I got my first taste of Algebra in middle school. Things became more difficult in high school. I struggled in Geometry, Algebra II, Pre-Calculus, and the science classes that were based on math. Physics was the hardest class because of the equations. It didn’t help that I could not see how to apply the math in the real world while being a teenager. In

Math is all around us. Everywhere you go there is some sort of math involved consciously or subconsciously. Even though math is all around us, and everything we do involves math, I myself must say I dislike math. Research has shown there are many more people that dislike math compared to those who do like it. A survey done by a nonprofit organization named Change the Equation asked 1,000 middle school kids in 2010 whether they would prefer to eat broccoli or do one math problem, surprisingly more than half answered they would eat broccoli. Throughout the years, there have been many different strategies created on how to introduce and/or teach math to children.

Since elementary school, I have always found myself fully engaged in math classes. In third grade, I began to speed up my education by completing two courses in one year. I repeated this in fourth grade to get even further ahead of my classmates. Due to my passion for math, I continued to pursue the subject throughout middle school and ended up at the very top of my class in math upon graduation. I also continued along this path in high school and by my senior year I will have taken every math course that has ever been offered to me. I enjoy the subject because it fosters inventiveness and challenges me to find new ways to solve problems. Math has allowed me to think in a logical manner in all situations and is the reason for my success in

Since Elementary school, I’ve been in love with math and all that it offers. I get excited with the numbers, the letters, and the equations. It fascinates me how there’s so much depth and that there is always something new with math. Not until I reached high school did I realize that the reason I loved math so much was because it was Algebra. My sophomore year I discovered Geometry, and that is when the loathing began.

Math is one of the sciences created by human intellectual though to understand reality. As a result, math can be defined to be absolutely truth regardless of perceptions since it can be proved through experiments. For instance, the calculation 4+2= 87 portrayed in the cartoon, can be proven wrong by experimenting with real objects such as apples. It would be a matter of putting four apples on a table plus adding two more on the table to demonstrate real total count, which indeed would be six. In effect, math is not based on perceptions but logic. It begins logically from a set of assumptions continued by definitions that can be proven through experiments. Nevertheless, when referring to issues, the story differs because they can have two sides

Mathematics, like every creation of man, have evolved without really knowing how far you can get with them: the scope of the computer, physics, chemistry, algebra, all are evidence of this. Every aspect of our culture is based in some way or another in Mathematics: language, music, dance, art, sculpture, architecture, biology, daily life. All these areas of measurements and calculations are accurate. Even in nature, everything follows a precise pattern and a precise order: a flower, a shell, a butterfly, day and night, the seasons. All this makes mathematics essential for human life and they can not be limited only to a matter within the school curriculum; here lies the importance of teaching math in a pleasure, enjoyable and understandable way. Mathematics is an aid to the development of the child and should be seen as an aid to life and not as an obstacle in their lifes.

As a mathematics major, the concept that most people overlook is that I did not choose to study mathematics because I do well at it; I chose to study mathematics because it makes me smarter. In fact, all throughout junior high and high school I was in remedial mathematics classes and worse, I did not even place into a freshman year mathematics class in high school. I had to re-take 8th grade mathematics. However, something about mathematics excited me. Maybe it was the fact that mathematics never came easy to me and I wanted to prove to myself that not only could I pass mathematics classes, I could actually understand and excel at them. For me, mathematics is not about the arbitrary numbers, trivial solutions, meaningless formulas, or repetitive computation: it is about the progress of knowledge and human understanding.