Stop teaching calculating; Start teaching math

  > how one year a variable would mean one thing and the next
  > year it would mean something else

There is so much more to mathematics than calculation. Proofs, number theory, and simulations can all be understood by children and are much more important to their education than long division.

How many other students did you know who did the same? There are some people (you, in this instance) who like Math in the current form it is taught. But the sad truth is a large majority of the world's student population (that includes Asia) find Math a boring, dry subject that forces too many drills upon you for not much practical application later.

> The problem is no so much that they dump down math. The problem is that they alienate the students from math. When you do math, all of it, the result is made of your sweat.

Wolfram advocates using programming to drive the concepts better by making students write programs to solve the problem. You can't do that without really understanding the concepts behind it.

> I hope you see my point: there is no elevator to interest in math. Math lovers must have toiled and slaved over stupid calculation over and over, until a point that they could actually produce the trace of math working, just like the zone in programming or any other art. That trace, that focus, that absorption builds the love for math.

Again, that definitely has worked for some percentage of the population. But it in no way is a guarantee that there aren't ways to better it. The 'elevator' to interest in Math might just exist.

The point of the talk was that Math the way it is being taught only teaches students to do hand-calculation, but doesn't give enough importance to other crucial aspects (asking right question, modeling and math formulation). It also brings in Computers as a great tool to help students understand Maths better: by procedurizing learning and using programming to help students understand concepts better than just handsolving problems repeatedly.

> You know where self esteem is from? It's from holding a piece of paper on which a problem has been solved and solution has been neatly presented; it's from the overcoming of frustration and challenges that the problem presents.

It's also from running the program you wrote which solves a challenge well. That is an important idea that Wolfram presents in the talk (it is by no means new, but nothing much has come of it yet). How is understanding 'how' to solve a Mathematical problem and translating it into executable code less 'frustrating/challenging' than learning by rote a specific method to attack a specific pattern of mathematical problems and using that technique mindlessly to solve them?

I find that the comment fails to address those actual points in the talk, but instead raises rote learning and hand-calculation drills as something worth aspiring for, and something that separates the chaff from the grain. I disagree. There are many students out there who find Math (the way it is being taught now) boring and worthless, but would have loved the subject if it (the teaching style) appealed to their intelligence better.

(also, please don't overwork the students any bit more. its hard enough already for most)

Um, no, this has nothing to do with hard work, and everything to do with the way mathematic is taught. I am a programmer and I would love to understand mathematics the way I understand programming. There got to be far more to mathematics than simply learning how to follow steps.

As a programmer, I write, debug, fix and improve code. With math, I don't understand why am I merely following steps when computers can do it at far higher reliability than I could.

So, when anyone talks about relieving kids of the burden of calculation, they aren't talking about people such as yourself who have learned beyond the point of diminishing returns. They're talking about the kids who still struggle to do the calculations correctly. They want to give up and move on with the kids' education before the kids have learned. This is linked to a perennial fantasy in elementary math education: that intuition is valuable and easy, while computation is hard and unimportant. I think this fantasy is wrong on both counts. Intuition is acquired only through hard work and practice, and intuition is only valuable if you are competent to subject your intuition to scrutiny. Intuition and calculation have to be yoked together like a pair of oxen, each pulling the other along when it falters. But as long as teachers believe that intuition is easy, there will be people willing to exploit the fantasy by promising to deliver easy, intuitive learning experiences without the useless drudgery of calculation.