What if I Fail 9th Grade Math? (Part 2)
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“When I look back on all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder I can think at all.”
- Paul Simon “Kodachrome”
(Continued from previous post.)
the reader replied to my answer:
Dear Professor Homunculus,
remember me my teacher sucks he doesn’t teach.But i am not a lazy sob student i am passing every class i hate math, maht is so gay what name some jobs can i get without math?
-Truman
Professor Homunculus’s reply:
Truman, I believe that your math teacher sucks if you say he does. Many do.
“Passing” every class doesn’t mean too much, though.
You sound like a “real” person, so I am going to take a chance. How much reality can you take? Let’s find out. Here’s the deal:
The reasons schools exist is that so some crooked politicians can pretend they are “Pro-education” in order to get elected and hand out some contracts to slime-bag bureaucrats to hire some unmotivated teachers to teach kids who don’t give a shit, and help parents who don’t do anything for their kids education themselves feel good about handing their kids off to glorified baby-sitters. (Yes, yes, there are exceptions. But that is why they are called “exceptions.”)
Or should I hide this truth from you?
So, basically, there is no need to respect school. Use it for what it is good for, and screw the rest.
What is it good for? To beat them at their own game to get what YOU want.
Here’s how it works (and I wish to God someone had filled me in on this when I was young):
At school they basically want you to jump through some hoops to make them feel like they did a good job. Then they get promoted, tenured, raised, awarded, etc., and you get good grades and can go on to another school (college) and repeat the same thing, except the awards are bigger.
If you jump through the hoops in college, you get to get a “good job” where some moron decides what to pay you and if you are “good enough” to work in the next best cubicle, and jump through corporate hoops.
If you get really good, you get promoted to be assistant-vice-moron, and get a better cubicle (one with a window) and help decide which little hoops the poor bastards who work in your company have to jump through.
In the meantime, you have done nothing worthwhile, have created nothing meaningful, and have helped no one become more valuable to themselves.
Sound like fun?
Here’s the upside:
Beat them at their own game, become your own person, and some day help change that stupid “hoop” system.
How? Well, there is good news and bad news:
The bad news is that you may have to actually give them what they want.
The good news is that you don’t have to do it their way.
In other words, you will have to get good grades at math. But you know you can’t get them with that loser of a math teacher you have.
So you have to go other places. You will have to start real small, right at the beginning. You will have to learn about counting, then addition, then multiplication, etc. But you will have to learn better ways than they ever taught you in school.
Learn through books. “The Realm of Numbers” by Isaac Asimov and “Playing with Infinity” by Rosza Peter are two brilliant, easy to understand, no-bullshit books. They are not boring textbooks. They are a little old fashioned, but they are written in a better way than any of the textbooks of today.
Truman, you may have noticed that you need a little help with your english. To tell you the truth, it is a little hard to even tell what you are trying to say.
I’m not asking you to write like Shakespeare, but a little correct spelling and typing would not hurt. Math is partially about details. I think you get what I am saying.
By the way, math doesn’t suck. Math isn’t gay. (To tell you the truth, that is one of the most idiotic expressions I have ever heard, and you should grow up and give it up. Not because it’s “politically incorrect”, but because it is asinine, and insulting to a lot of people who have done you no harm). Just because your math teacher sucks, don’t think math does. Bad math teachers are the enemies of math as much as they are the enemies of students.
Now, I’m not sure if you wanted to know which jobs need math, or which jobs don’t, so I’ll give you a list of jobs which most people don’t think need math, but which the people are successful at those jobs will tell you really DO need math.
Musician: Musicians who can’t read music are usually a joke. Music is just mathematical notation of sounds. The better you are at math, the more it will help you compose, and understand scales. By the way, if someone can’t do those things, the other musicians think they are idiots. And they are right. Yeah, there are exceptions, though not as many as you may think.
Artist: At the minimum an artist need to know how to measure for a frame. Of course, a real artist would have to know about symmetry, perspective, and much more. Many artists now work with computers. I do computer art, and lots of it is in 3-D programs, which involves lots of math.
Movie producer: Has to know about finance. Finance is almost pure math.
Gambler: Winners have a word for gamblers who don’t understand odds or percentages. The word is “Loser.”
Computers: Let’s face it, it’s almost all math at the interesting levels.
Author: How are you going to figure out your taxes, bank accounts, how much your agent is ripping you off, how high (or low) your royalties are from those cheating, low-life publishers without math?
Skateboard builder: You need engineering skills if you any good at all. If you are some little nobody putting together parts which someone else invented and built, that is one thing, but if you are inventing ,testing, manufacturing, you need to know stress-levels, proportions, physics, etc.
Now, this is a small list, and anyone with an imagination could go on with it forever.
Here’s a challenge for you:
Name three ways to make a living which DON’T need math, and I will prove that they do. Or post the question to the board. List three that you think don’t need math, and ask the experts if they can show that they do.
And please, don’t mention silly jobs just to be clever. To get a real answer, ask a real question. Like your original question.
My last words for this entry are:
To beat them at their own game, you must rebel by excelling. Don’t hurt yourself by being a loser. Hurt them by being a winner. Then stick it to them.
I think you must be a smart kid, but no one has awakened your imagination yet. I hope I could be of some service, here.
Did I answer your question?
I hope so,
Professor Homunculus
(To be continued.)
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Comment by kevin
What about those of us who just cant do math? I had to cheat throughout all of highschool just to pass my math classes, but in English, Chem, Bio, and all my other classes I was an A student. I was part of the “Gifted” program even. I’m in college now and I dont dare cheat to pass my classes, now that the semmesters over I failed math, I bet I fail a million more times too. Being forced to take college maths is just a constant reminder that mathmaticly I’m the equivelent to the fat kid in gym class who cant climb up the rope. You can try to send me one of those “you can do it if you try” speaches, but Im content not being got at math it seems to be everyone elses problem that I cant add or do multiplication without my fingers.
Comment by Brian
Kevin,
Interesting comment.
The world is full of people who “can’t do” something. I was probably at least as bad as you at math at some time, and felt the same way. I was also the fat kid who couldn’t get up the rope. I still can’t get up the rope. I couldn’t get up the rope when I was slim and fit, either. Just one of those things, I guess.
But I can say this - if I really wanted to get up that rope, even though I am still scared of heights - I’d get up the freakin’ rope, and not make excuses about how I don’t like “you-can-do-it speeches”. I don’t care what anyone can do or not, but I think one of the worst things in life is that “excuse” mentality.
To be fair, I feel your pain about those stupid speeches, too. You didn’t read any of those useless, pap, feel-good speeches here, pal. Do I look like freakin’ Wayne Dyer? I don’t tell anyone what they could, should, or shouldn’t do. I just show them how they can do it if they want to. You either learn it or you don’t, that’s all.
I was “gifted” in Humanities subjects, too - if you can believe my parents and some of my teachers. But I can’t. “Gifted” is one of the most moronic terms I can think of, and it is strictly a subjective term.
You “can’t do” math, yet you got an A in Bio? Which teacher was playing you? Bio without math? I got plenty of A’s in Mickey-Mouse courses in college without being good at math. Didn’t mean they meant anything, though.
In case you didn’t read anything else at MathMojo.com or these Chronicles, if you are failing math constantly, and you “bet you’ll keep failing maths,” could it have anything to do with the fact that the way they teach and the way you learn are just a bad match? There are millions of kids suffering from this, who think they suck at math. The stigma is a hard one to break.
But if you follow MathMojo at all, you know the answer does not lie in schools. Read books about math that are not “normal.” Once you get turned on to what math really is (it has nothing to do with the crap you are learning in school - especially the “remedial” nonsense. Remedial is generally just more of the same that didn’t work before, but at a slower pace, with more blame on the student. It’s like Robinson Crusoe and Friday - since Friday didn’t speak English, Crusoe just spoke slower and louder, somehow thinking that made sense. It doesn’t. But I digress, again…) you will enter a world that your teachers don’t even suspect is there.
Math is mind. If you are “no good” at math, you are “no good” at mind, and clearly that isn’t the case.
Kevin, the goons are training an entire generation not to even be able to add or subtract on their fingers. A lot of kids are trained to be dependent on calculators. Most of them will grow up to be idiots (then again, that’s not so different from any other generation, is it?) So what makes you feel you are so especially incompetent?
Look, in your entire comment, you didn’t once mention anything you actually did (besides throw yourself to the mercy of the system that never helped you in the first place) to improve your math. Have you read any of the books mentioned in these posts? Have you even been to the library or a good bookstore and looked in the math, or games section (where they have recreational math books?)
Before you throw in the towel and say you are content to be intellectually handicapped for the rest of your life because you don’t get maths, and before you actually think you can convince anyone that it is “everyone else’s problem”, at least face up to it and see that the only one it is a problem to is you. You may not care about it much, and of course that’s your right. But people who don’t care about something don’t usually write in to a blog about it, eh? I respect you for actually looking for help. Now you can decide if you want to take it or not.
If I sound harsh, it’s because I hear the same thing over and over from a lot of smart kids. I think too many adults give them the “you-can-do-it” speech, or make them feel intellectually inferior, or coddle them, or give them the wrong solutions and then blame the kid. But sometimes young people can take more reality if they hear it from someone who won’t sugar-coat it and won’t lie to them. Then they begin to “get” it.
Kevin, I have nothing to lose if you don’t learn math. I won’t feel like a “failure” if some kid doesn’t “get” it. And I don’t want to convince you that the world will end if you don’t get math. That’s what this whole series of posts is about. Keep reading them, because the next two parts in this series may have some help for you. They will at least let you know that I could care less what kind of grades a kid ever got at anything.
As far as not being able to add without your fingers. So what? But if you want to be able to conceptualize numbers in your head, may I suggest that you start with the lessons on the abax at MathMojo.com.
I wish you all the success in the world, Kevin.
Yours truly,
Brian Foley (a.k.a. Professor Homunculus)
Comment by kevin
It’s not that I hate math, it’s that the best I can do in it is unacceptable to my college. They think that I should be able to do much better but it’s just not the way I learn. The important thing in school below the college level that I learned was this, the different subjects are used as different catalysts to inspire creative thought and learning, and that the simple memorization of facts is utterly unimportant. I was never concerned with what I got on tests because I knew that test grades didn’t reflect what I learned, it wasn’t the memorization of facts that made me smart, and even the valedictorian of our school who I still keep in touch with will admit, she’s forgotten most of the “facts” that she learned in school. Math was a style of learning that I don’t apply so deeply in my thoughts, it’s just not, I apply the method of learning that I got from my other courses and not from my math courses to life, and so, because of that I was never proficient in math. I’m not trying to make excuses, I did that when I was younger and I’m past that. Now I just accept that it’s just not how I think and I understand that I am just as smart using other methods of problem solving. I far from hate math, its like a sudoku puzzle, just because you cant solve level 5 puzzles doesn’t mean that you hate the game, perhaps your content to just solve the level 3 puzzles and your fine with that because that’s what you enjoy. Except in my case everyone tells me that I have to reach the level 5 difficulty otherwise I’m not smart. to them it makes no difference that I can whip them in scrabble, its only important that I get to level 5 in sudoku. They don’t understand that my mind works only at that level but compensates by getting better elsewhere.
And thought the year I’ve been seeing tutors, doing practice problems and trying my hardest to pass because I knew how hard the class was, but it wasn’t enough. Now I strive only to finish my classes, after that I can go back to enjoying playing my 3rd level sudoku problems; but for now I have to strain myself, to do just one of the hardest problems to appease them. It’s not that I don’t try, believe me on that one. It’s just that people have an expectation that I can do something better then what my hardest provides them. And because of that they think I’m either lazy or dumb.