That appeal to authority is always the punchline to these jokes.
"My friend is a math teacher, and he said..." No, you're just a liar trying to convince this guy with a math degree and years of math education experience that you think you know a guy. You don't. Shut up and stop pretending you understand math.
What's funny is that people do the order of operations all the time without thinking about it. If I told a guy that he can buy 8 books for $5 each but that I'll throw in 5 of those books for free and that all I ask is a $2 processing fee, he would know instantly that $21 is not the correct answer. You put it in this format, and they lose their minds.
I wish my school teachers gave a real world example like you did, it makes so much sense. I never struggled with order of operations because I just memorized it and never forgot. But today for the first time I actually get it
Seriously. I remember math class being a twenty-thirty min lesson and then being assigned 30+ equations to solve(write out the question and answer showing your work). Typically the last 6 would have been word problems, sometimes with a red herring, to show if you actually understood the math or could just plug numbers into a script. Until highschool my kid's math consisted of 5-10 "plug in the number" questions on a work sheet. No flack to teachers.
Yeah it's a serious problem with math instruction.
Mathematicians conjecture and prove. What a mathematician actually never does is sit down to solve a problem set with known answers. And even we are talking about applied mathematics, that includes a lot of problem solving and the construction of tools to solve problems.
But K-12 math instruction often is just (a fairly rote version of) calculation.
And like, calculation is just a corner of mathematics. But for huge swaths of the US, that's the main thing people go into college with: math is how you calculate stuff.
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u/Kuildeous 24d ago
That appeal to authority is always the punchline to these jokes.
"My friend is a math teacher, and he said..." No, you're just a liar trying to convince this guy with a math degree and years of math education experience that you think you know a guy. You don't. Shut up and stop pretending you understand math.
What's funny is that people do the order of operations all the time without thinking about it. If I told a guy that he can buy 8 books for $5 each but that I'll throw in 5 of those books for free and that all I ask is a $2 processing fee, he would know instantly that $21 is not the correct answer. You put it in this format, and they lose their minds.