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comment by Killerhurtz
Killerhurtz  ·  3368 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Mathematician's Lament

I love maths - and regularly use it during/for entertainment (such as doing some logic hardcoding for things in games like GMod's Wire and Rawbots, where they give you conditional, logical and arithmetic chips/gates to do whatever you want, even to the point of driving automation, or drawing up some data tables for stats for various experiments or roleplays, and so on). But it is only partially because of my education - unless you could autodidact knowledge as education.

Because right up until I'd say third year of high school (Canandian school system - we have kindergarten at 4 or 5, six grades of elementary, then five years of high school - so, from what I can gather when comparing it to the American system, I think it's technically Freshman year) I was way ahead because my parents gave me learning material very early (late 90's/early millenium, and we already had at least one if not two decent computers, and until 2002 the best internet connection we could have - so I learnt my native language - reading and 'writing' (which really was typing) and vocabulary with educational software, English with Dr. Seuss, mathematics with what I THINK was the French equivalent to some version of Math Blasters... in kindergarten. I really just did have a headstart in learning) to the point where I was disinterested in class (along with other reasons - that's a long story). They almost got me to take Ritalin for me to pay attention (and that was ONLY for me to pay attention in class - and completely disregarding the fact that all of my work was done, and I wasn't allowed to do other exercises in the books early because I wouldn't have anything to do in the following classes - which was a moot point). Then the end of elementary rolled around, and they convinced my parents to pay the $10 to let me take the test to be inducted into some high-school advanced program (not even a good highschool, just one owned by the school commission - it even had some cheesy name like Dynamo instead of just being AP). That year everything got even more painful - I was still a good ways ahead, but my math teacher hated me and failed me (to the point of being put in assisted classes the next year, for those who really did struggles) simply because I did not use the methodology she wanted me to use (which I would later learn was STILL me being ahead, because two years later we had similar problems as a part of another problem involved in the curriculum - think it was using some low-class algebra within a statistics class or something, and THAT teacher told me the method was perfectly fine). In the meanwhile, at home, I was roleplaying on forums (using stats and dice) and playing more games that involved forms of mathematics (honestly? 90% of my math learning past the basics was done because of Garry's Mod Wiremod). Then I simply destroyed the curriculum the following four years (95% final grade in second year, above 80% every other year - physics and natural sciences were another beast though).

So, the bottom line is - I find that the vast majority of the civilized world fails at teaching mathematics by being WAY too formal about it. If you want children to love mathematics like I do, make it a game - by giving them real possibilities of doing maths for something fun like contests, to playing actual games (Frog Fractions don't count) to, in being entirely relevant to today, programming. Math is really fun and really useful without mentioning that, when presented right and early enough, it's not particularly hard, and definitely not as hard as 90% of the people I know make it out to be.

TL;DR: Maths are fun when learned in games. School fails at this. I love maths.