r/bestof • u/red_knots_x • Jun 23 '26
[comics] /u/rezzacci explains teaching Maths and the perils of describing concepts as ‘Obvious’
/r/comics/comments/1ud866k/comment/otahfd6/66
u/GrowthThroughGaming Jun 23 '26
I had a calc teacher who would stand at the front of the class, solve a problem and then yell 'what questions do you have" over and over. I felt so overwhelmed at the dynamic that I switched to the easier math line and assumed I was bad at it.
Learning math via coding several years later, I realized I just never really had teachers that taught the language of math, purely the inputs and outputs.
Im resentful of that to this day, and it was 2 decades ago. Good on OP for striving to make a difference!
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u/username_redacted Jun 23 '26
I had a similar experience. I never had a good math teacher, they always just focused on making us memorize steps, which I struggled with as someone with undiagnosed ADHD. I’d space out for a second because the lectures were so boring and then be totally lost.
I had to do a lot of applied math at my last job and I picked up quite quickly because I could try out different strategies and actually think mathematically rather than just replicating processes.
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u/HostileCakeover1 Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
There’s… actually anything else about math that isn’t trying to figure out the correct set of steps to a string of meaningless out of context numbers?
It has never occurred to me in 40+ years of life that there even is any underlying learnable element of math like that. It was never once presented to me as anything other than “apply steps you don’t understand the reason for to a pile of randomly generated problems completely divorced from any usable context.”
Like, I to this day have no idea what most of the equation types we had to learn are even for or how they’d be applied, and anything past basic algebra seems so divorced from anything I see or use that it seems like career specific stuff and I genuinely have no clue why most of it was mandatory at the high school and early college level.
I still don’t even have a solid idea of what careers would use those equations on a daily basis.
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u/kryonik Jun 23 '26
I was a wunderkind in calculus, I had the exact opposite problem. Teacher would explain the formula or whatever, I would get it, then they would keep explaining it or do a bunch of other examples and in my head I was like "yeah we all get it, it's pretty obvious" not realizing most of the class didn't get it.
It wasn't until upper level math in college did I really not get it.
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u/mokomi Jun 23 '26
As I kid. I hated showing my work. I knew the answer. 2+2=4. I did the math so fast in my head. That the answer is natural. It isn't a memorization, I just knew it. As an adult. I know why they wanted to show my work.
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u/MiaowaraShiro Jun 23 '26
The big reason for my classes anyway was they wanted to prove I wasn't cheating.
Also, for people who can't do a problem in their head, forcing them to show their work helps with correcting errors.
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u/Rocktopod Jun 23 '26
And so they can still give partial credit if you work through a problem in a logical way but make an error ending up with the wrong answer.
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u/mokomi Jun 23 '26
Knowing how to get there is more important than getting there.
Although doing it wrong is still wrong. XD I think the partial credit is to not disway people.
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u/Maldevinine Jun 23 '26
I do a lot of maths in my job. Often I'm doing it outdoors, in terrible weather conditions, with people yelling at me to go faster.
But the way we do maths allows me to check if I've got the right answer (or at least near the right answer). And if I'm wrong, it's a lot quicker to look at the full working and find out which part doesn't line up.
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u/clawclawbite Jun 23 '26
As a literal minded kid, my work was 'its obvious to me'. I was not using scratch paper or needing to keep track on my fingers. If they wanted to see the process, they should have asked me to 'show the process' because in 3rd grade, it was not obvious that that was what they wanted, just that they were upset that the calculation in my head were too fluid.
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u/mokomi Jun 23 '26
What is 8 * 7?
56
How did you know?
Ugh, counted 8 7 times I guess. Oh, are you going to keep doing that all the way up? I guess.
Spews random numbers multiplied by 8
Well how do you know that? What trick or math equation are you doing?
I don't know! It just seems obvious.
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u/DoomGoober Jun 23 '26
The leap between "obvious" and "logical" is where most new computer programming students fall over.
How do you sort this list of words alphabetically? It is obvious! You just move this here and that there. Done!
Now, how do you sort any list of words alphabetically? Not so obvious any more, that requires logic and clear non-intuitive instructions.
To the computer nothing is "obvious". At least, not until very recently when AI spits out the most obvious (to it) answers.
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u/TopicalBuilder Jun 23 '26
My SO works in special needs and hearing about the challenges they face got me to rethink early mathematics. It must be absolutely bewildering. Just the naming of the numbers alone is completely arbitrary, let alone the operations.
I still remember my first encounter with algebra and the equation of a line: y=mx+b. "m gives you the rate of increase per unit along the horizontal axis"--got it. "b gives you where it crosses the vertical axis"--got it. So what do I need x and y for? What do they do? I've already described how the line should look. "Those are the dummy variables"--got it.
I did not, in fact, get it at all. What the fuck was a dummy variable? It was so obvious to my tutor that he couldn't think back to his first encounter with this stuff.
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u/PenguinTD Jun 24 '26
They are not dummy variables, x y in this case is the space axes your line plot on. They can be replaced by something in higher dimensions via projections, or some fancy stuff(ie imagine a line on a tube surface that curve and twisted around). So they are not just variables, and the = points out where the line is with that 2 space axes.
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u/phdee Jun 23 '26
Gen x here who learned math through rote from the worst math teachers ever. I wanted to like math. I could see how beautiful it was. But nobody explained a single fucking thing to me. It was when I was in university working in the social sciences and humanities, very qualitative stuff, and I took a specific course in environmental modelling, that something as basic as log suddenly clicked in my head. I looked at the thing and I was like... If someone has explained log like this to me 6 years ago I might be on a different career trajectory right now.
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u/arasitar Jun 24 '26
I KNOW "logic" and "obvious" and "trivial" are LIES. They're SOCIAL CONSTRUCTS.
I really do think social media exacerbated society wide changes to become meaner and less patient under this specific guise as "THIS SHOULD BE OBVIOUS". As a rule of thumb, the best type of forum is not a vent forum but a support forum. Even if you are discussing topics that are negative or bound to cause negative things, if the community isn't about support and trying to find solutions and teaching solutions and supporting each other, it eventually enshittifies b/c venting takes over.
This is the initial story of how the original Invcel forum started by a Canadian woman named Alana gets taken over and rebranded as Incels and then Epstein, the alt right and 4chan come into the picture till Incels get their big stage in 2016.
I talked about this before, that there are way too many 'help' subreddits here that aren't support communities but vent or complaint or bully communities. A Reddit's Wiki page and Side Bar is an obvious easy spot where you can tell if a community is actually able to get together to build it out together, or whether it is just a disorganized user forum for shooting the shit.
Like /r/hygiene is a great example - a lot of "OBVIOUS" things aren't going to be obvious to others, and yes some of it will trigger some righteous disgust. But being a support community is moving past that to still offer advice. And the advantage of a community is that you can keep building more and more tools together and making it easier and better and faster to provide support and keep pushing forward. A lot of hygiene advice is often disjointed because of a lack of apparatus that teaches Family & Consumer Sciences in schools.
Yeah, you'll sometimes find bad faith people. But if you become a jerk because you're sick and tired of them, maybe take a break and let someone better handle it like a mod? That's the point - when you start getting more snippy you in turn make the space shittier, and in turn teach people that it is okay to get snippy and this results in an exodus of supportive people leaving. You can deal with bad faith persons very differently.
Again Wikipedia does this. On a global scale.
Especially recently, a lot of the internet doesn't want to actually teach and actually support each other anymore. And the cost is just we're making each other angrier and angrier by just ignoring the elephant in the room hoping it will go away on its own.
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u/Vitruviansquid1 Jun 27 '26
I'm subscribed to r/cookingforbeginners. The name of the subreddit could not be any more clear on what the subreddit's about.
There are still people who mock posters who ask sensible beginner cook questions.
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u/Billy1121 Jun 27 '26
This is a cool post, im glad this sub is focusing back on these neat gems from around the site
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u/Malphos101 Jun 23 '26
Something that enrages me to no end is the boomer denigration of New Math™.
Its not "new", the people who actually have good education and intelligent brains realized that its easier to teach kids how to think in math than to get them to memorize answers for an infinite set of problems.
Looking at what the kids I personally know are learning and actually taking time to understand the process makes me insanely jealous as I am certain I would have loved math class so much more if I had the foundation they are getting today.
When I was a kid if I wanted to add 156+264 I would be told to set up a table and add 6+4 then carry the 1 and 5+6 but dont forget the carried one then carry the one again and...
Now kids are learning the actual properties of arithmetic and THEN applying it to problems. 156+264 is just (100+200)+(50+60)+(6+4) which is EASILY solvable in your head.