Why do most people hate math?

I'll admit that I am not that good at math although I think my skill level is average as I managed to get to Algebra II. With that said, why do most people hate? Is it because it is abstract? IS it because people that the subject is forced down their throats? Or is it something? I know Math is an important subject as keep our society together and functioning yet most people despise as it appears to be the case of, "You cannot live it, you cannot live without it." situations.

Most often I find it's simply a skill they have no skill in, and have been forced to learn for quite some time.

It'd be much the same as learning say Drama from age 6, and being a terrible actor.

Above the level of Algebra I or II, at least, it's an esoteric skill. And in the US, at least, many schools don't seem to be trying to make it interesting or relevant. It's the same reason most people seem to have lost interest in advanced reading.

edited 1st Jan '14 4:48:23 PM by Wheezy

Most people are a bit silly, that's why.

Well, according to Barbie, "Math is hard."

I remember a teacher of mine saying that teaching kids multiplication (and especially division) in their first and second years of school made most of them averse to it, because their minds cannot comprehend (or just barely) such things in their first stage.

edited 1st Jan '14 5:10:43 PM by Quag15

For me, at least, it's a lot of hard work for very little payoff beside a good grade. Some of the thinking behind the "rules" of math courses, such as "No Calculators" are not only outdated, they also tend to make already difficult calculations even worse.

Long story short, we SUCK at teaching students how to do math.

Someone needs to make a book called "The Joy of Division".

"Why is math so important?"

"Because it's a valuable skill to have when you grow up."

And that's how Sabylas Junior grew up to hate math.

For me at least, it's because my mind just doesn't seem to work in the way complex math problems require it to. I just cannot grasp them, at all, regardless of how many times I'm told how to do it.

That, and it requires a lot of memorization, which I'm also no good at, and the majority of it has no practical use to me.

It would be very depressive. Just like the band! (PS: I'm a Joy Division fan, so I hope no one gets mad at me)

edited 1st Jan '14 6:16:00 PM by Quag15

I don't hate Math myself but I am just not into it and I don't know why the mathematicians find it exciting. Maybe it was the way I was taught or maybe it didn't catch my interest so I ignored it.

Mathematics is, in general, all about finding and exploring patterns. Mathematicians dig it for the same reason literary critics read stuff like Finnegans Wake: because they love the fact that if you look hard enough, there's always some form of order in the most seemingly chaotic and impenetrable of things. Hence fractals and all that.

Personally, I think that schools could've done a lot better by emphasising the practical (or even aesthetic) components earlier on. Throw in a project or essay once in a while, make it a focus on field trips and so on. I didn't start developing any real interest in pure mathematics until I did Y10 Physics, at which point everything started to come together.

I wish they actually implemented those then maybe a large majority of the Math averse students (myself included) wouldn't be so alienated.

Learning about the "aesthetics" of math would have probably just made me hate it more.

Many people think they hate mathematics because they've been taught, essentially, that it consists of memorizing arbitrary, meaningless formulas and doing lots of rote computations. Who wouldn't hate that?

It'd be like if everyone was forced to take "poetry class", in which they never read or wrote any actual poems, and instead had to memorize lists of rhyming words and recite them back in alphabetical order — how many people would then say they hate "poetry"?

This analogy isn't as stretched as you might first think. In truth, mathematics resembles an art in many ways, and when presented properly, doing mathematics should be a deeply creative act. Mathematics is about spotting a pattern, paring that pattern down to its most essential nature, and puzzling out whether it's just a coincidence — and if not, finding out exactly why it works that way. It's about turning the mysterious into the obvious, illuminating how concepts we take for granted fit together, and in the process, discovering new concepts and patterns, new ways of thinking.

If mathematics was presented in schools as a creative process of figuring out patterns, and not as a tedious, rote task, things would be very different. As it is now, the stuff so many people hate is unmotivated, badly contextualized memorization and computation, not mathematics (which many people never really properly see in school at all).

I recommend Paul Lockhart's essay, "A Mathematician's Lament", which is fairly well-known in mathematical circles. It's an excellent critique of the way mathematics is taught, and I agree with most (thought maybe not all) of it.

edited 1st Jan '14 8:51:40 PM by Enthryn

I don't hate math. I don't like it, but a lot of it is quite logically satisfying. Geometry/trig are the best kinds of math, because you can lay them out on the paper and see how and why they work.

On the other hand, you have to slog through a lot of stuff that seems arbitrary and/or frustratingly pedantic. Maybe I'm a bad student, or I was badly taught, or something, but the thing I love to hate about math is proofs. Everything about them seems like nitpicky make-work, especially when you can clearly lay out exactly how you solved the problem but have it rejected on the grounds that "that's not a proof."

Teacher: "Prove X."
Me: "I did. Right here."
Teacher: "No, that's just your work, that's not a proof."
Me: "Is my math wrong? My result?"
Teacher: "No."
Me: "So how is this not proof?"
Teacher: "It's not written as a proof."
So basically, I have to go back to the beginning and lay out every step, which I've already done, in an insultingly pedantic format to reach a result I've already gotten. What a waste of fucking time.

That shouldn't happen. Formalism should always aid understanding, and it should never be arbitrary. Sounds like some combination of a bad curriculum and bad teaching; actual mathematical proofs are all about making a clear, precise, irrefutable logical argument, not about wasting time on pointless technicalities of formatting.

Just wondering, by "written as a proof", does your teacher mean "written as a two-column proof"? I'm guessing that might be the case — though I hope not — since those abominations against good sense are unfortunately common in high school geometry classes (and nowhere else, seeing as actual proofs look nothing like that).

edited 1st Jan '14 9:09:52 PM by Enthryn

A lot of people are afraid of math.

Two-column proof, that's the one. (Sorry, I had to look it up. My high school days are a ways behind me, so I can't remember a lot of specifics- but oh dear god does my hate of proofs burn bright.) It could've just been me being a bad student as well. I was very directionless during my high school days.

I've found though that the biggest problem with proofs is that nobody fucking tells you how to do them an expects you to pop from the ether knowing how to do them.

I was one of the worst students in my maths classes. In fact, I failed my maths finals and the only reason why I still passed with a pretty good average is because I wrote near-perfect grades everywhere else. However, I never hated maths, I simply didn't give a rat's arse.

Yeah... two-column "proofs" are utterly ridiculous, and as far as I can tell, they do nothing but confuse people and make them say they hate "proofs". I couldn't think of a worse way to teach proofs if I tried. They do absolutely everything wrong: introduce a bunch of formalism without explanation or justification, require arbitrary and needlessly confusing formatting, and emphasize unnecessary rigor over producing something human-readable.

Geometry is a perfect opportunity to introduce proofs, because good geometric proofs are elegant, intuitive, and clarify your understanding. For example: here's a proof of the Pythagorean theorem. It uses no words at all, yet it shows exactly why the theorem is true. (By the way, the whole thread I linked to has some great examples of beautiful mathematics.)

Two-column "proofs" take all that away, turning the art of figuring out why something is true into a bunch of pointless drivel, a senseless exercise of shuffling around cryptic axioms for no discernible reason. Please don't hold anything against actual proofs on account of those vile imposters.

...sorry, went on a bit of a rant there.

edited 1st Jan '14 9:37:43 PM by Enthryn

You must've had a really terrible teacher, then, since I was taught how to do proofs in the first high school math class I had. (Then promptly never used it again for the rest of my life and forgot they even existed until I read this thread.)

edited 1st Jan '14 9:36:13 PM by Odd1

I'm curious. What kind of learning (not subject, but the style of the subject) do you prefer, and why do you think mathematics isn't like that?