Rediscovering Math and its Place

By Philip Bui

For many students, math is not a pleasant experience, myself included. To be honest, my relationship with math has been a tumultuous one since the very first days. For most of my childhood, I found math to be quite distasteful, and viewed it as hard mental labor for the mind. The dry and constant number crunching that characterizes the majority of my K-12 math education left a bitter aftertaste in my mouth. Over the years, it became a necessary evil in my life.

However, the past two years of college has abated some of this disdain. Between the ten different majors I have switched across since freshman year, I have slowly developed a greater appreciation for math. I grew to admire the elegance of math and its permeation in all fields: policy, public health, business admin, and of course, engineering. Regardless, the story of my relationship with math is far from complete, but it is a work in progress with twists and turns.

Upon entering college as a freshman, I vowed to never touch such a hideous and soulless subject ever again, unless absolutely necessary. To me, college was my salvation because I was not longer required have math as a component of my academic life. With this comfort in mind, I began to search for my own place in college and the quintessential college experience. Ironically, most of the subjects I found interesting involved some form of math, but my irrational fear of math forced me to forgo such possibilities. Over time, I made the slow realization that everything I found interesting (public policy, economics, health policy research) involved a subject I have dreaded all of my life.

With help from my academic curiosity and the University’s Registrar demanding that I need to major at the end of my sophomore year, I decided to take my first math class in two years. To be frank, my first college math class was not a pleasant experience. I was forced to engage in material which I have deplored all of my life, yet in the process, something happened. Strangely, I began to appreciate the ability to find a derivative of a function and use it model policy costs. Some where in between the late night problem sets and wanting to scream at a difficult proof, I learned to see the beauty that lies hidden behind a tangent line to a curve.

After two years of college, I finally realized why I abhor math for so long: my K-12 educational never actually taught how to solve math problems. Similar to so many other publicly educated students, the majority of my math education (6-7 years) was taught using the Discovery Math paradigm. I will not go into detail of the program’s pedagogy and its flaws, but to sum up the issue, students under the Discovery Math system are never actually taught rigorous math. They are given a very ethereal and superficial education to a complex subject; basically there is a complete lack of mathematical foundation.

As with all education policy programs, there continues to be debate about the efficacy of the Discovery Math method versus traditional rigorous math. However, for those of us who went through the process, we may have a different opinion on the effectiveness of Discovery Math. As for me, I see myself as one of the fortunate few who made the realization about their K-12 math education and finally unearthed the beauty of such an elegant subject. Sadly, I still struggle to catch up with my class peers in terms of math skills because I am in an environment where the majority of the students had rigorous multivariable calculus/linear algebra during high school.

Even though the odds may not be in my favor, I still appreciate the elegant subject that has so many applications to my dreams of working in policy. There will always be long nights for me, in which the clock tower chimes 5:00 a.m., and I am still awake and working on a problem set. The road that lies before me is an arduous one as I attempt to build a math foundation for myself. Regardless, maybe my naïve faith in coffee and irrational desire to understand the elegance of math, I will hopefully make some headway. In the words of Ben Franklin, “Try and fail, but don’t fail to try”.

In my experience, having a little bit of advance math can be the essential key that unlocks so many careers. In business, derivatives can be used to optimize supply chains. Public health uses integrals and statistics to characterize risk factors of epidemics. Education policy depends on understanding correlation coefficients between student scores and socioeconomic status. Psychology employs linear algebra and least squares to find the best-fit line to its experimental data. Even medicine is increasing its use of math and statistics, as it becomes more evidence-based.

There will always be students who are gifted at math or had plenty of preparation. For the rest of us who are not so blessed or still fear math like the plague, reconsider why you hate it so much. Was there something in your past that triggered the disdain? No one is born with an intrinsic hate for math.

For those of us who consider of rebuilding our mathematical understanding, it will not be a path without bumps or rough patches. Intrinsically, it is not an easy subject, but the pains of this journey to expand our future are worth it. To have a solid grasp of math is to understand the tools that are used to shape the 21st century’s policies.