Who Says Math Has to Be Boring?

This is sad. Very sad. The only explanation is that so many Americans are so spoiled by the nation's past success that they became so vain. I mean, kids are naturally inquisitive. Given the right nurturing, kids should love STEM. Heck, they should be obsessed with STEM because STEM subjects are full of wonders. Yet, what do kids nowadays think cool? Having access to alcohol and drugs is cool. Bullying people who take studying seriously is cool. Sports jockeys who think nothing is important other than their games with another high school are cool. When hearing people enthusiastically talk about technology, making a face as if he just ate s*&^t is cool (just like the stupid and weak Jesse did in the finale of Breaking Bad when Walt explained what "exothermal" meant). Whining about STEM are being too "hard", too "boring", too "irrelevant", too "nerdy" is cool... And tell me the parents didn't have very bad influence to the kids.

I find this phenomenon puzzling. STEM is foundation of the modern civilization. And it is Europeans and Americans, after all, who have largely advanced modern science, technology, engineering, and math in the past hundreds of years. I can tell fascinating stories about the great minds and great achievements for weeks. Yet, the great history, the great subjects, and the people who love STEM are being looked down upon by American kids? What.The.Fuck.

It was not like this in the country where I grew up, though. In our country, STEM are cool in school. Seriously cool. Teachers, kids, and especially parents take studying of STEM seriously (though to be fair, the parents took every subject seriously as they cared about grades too). Biographies of famous scientists are popular readings. Names like Archimedes, Newton, Curie, Paulin, Ernest Lawrence, and so on are household names. No one in my school got despised because he or she studied hard. That would be absurd to even think about. That's why I was initially bewildered by Paul Graham's Why Nerds Are Unpopular.

And what's the result of all these? Straight-A students couldn't pass a community college's placement math test, as reported by NYT a couple of years ago. I don't what could be worse than such drama.

It is not Math, Science that is Boring that is the problem. It's the level of effort required to be good and to become better. More than almost any other industry or skill, if you get easily frustrated or you can't focus (well) - you won't get enough experience (read: doing stuff the wrong way or failing) to get better.

It is the frustration and ambiguity that one has to deal with when solving technical problems. Remember, most technical problems aren't cut and dried - sometimes the problem is correctly finding what the problem is.

To be good in this industry - you have to want to go down the rabbit hole and spelunk. To get your hands and mind dirty.

Yet, what do kids nowadays think cool? Having access to alcohol and drugs is cool. Bullying people who take studying seriously is cool. Sports jockeys who think nothing is important other than their games with another high school are cool. When hearing people enthusiastically talk about technology, making a face as if he just ate s&^t is cool (just like the stupid and weak Jesse did in the finale of Breaking Bad when Walt explained what "exothermal" meant). Whining about STEM are being too "hard", too "boring", too "irrelevant", too "nerdy" is cool... And tell me the parents didn't have very bad influence to the kids.*

Please don't act like this is some isolated problem with today's generation. Drugs, vices, jocks and willful ignorance have always been the rage. You're having delusions of grandeur that your generation was somehow one of superior calibre, and you're regressing into idealized memories of the past as part of a reactionary mental process to the perceived decadence of today.

But it has always been decadent. In fact, if the Flynn effect and other factors are anything to show, you were probably worse.

I see you don't live in the USA, though. I come from a European country myself, and I have no idea what school you went to, but the way you describe it is rather... unrealistic? Names of famous scientists are household names? In a school environment? They always have been, honestly. Biographies of famous scientists as popular reading? They're part of the curriculum.

The way you treat your school as some sort of a society in its own right leads me to believe you went to a boarding school or something similar. Perhaps just a higher class private school, because really, yours isn't the norm.

Maybe tangential to the point of the article, but I find that one of the most frustrating things about working with recent college grads is that they don't understand the ambiguity. It's not thier fault - they have spent the last 16+ years being told[1] there is a right answer. It is ingrained in them, and a lot of effort must be put forth to teach them that most of the work worth doing in our field is by definition not "solved". If there was a right answer or known best solution, we'd just be using that library and focusing on the ambiguous bits instead.

Yes there is a lot of boilerplate and plugging existing components together, but that stuff isn't the work that really brings in the bucks - it's the part where you are solving something previously unsolved, and making headway against ambiguous problem spaces that really differentiates companies/products/teams etc.

[1] It's more than being taught, it is being rewarded and punished on the notion of "one right answer" that happens in huge amounts of education. It gets mixed up with the limbic system and becomes a default assumption for everything. It has to be un-taught in a lot of contexts. Sure, there is a best or right answer for many things, and we need to show that too, but more education on how to deal with the ambiguous stuff is much needed.

I think there are some easy gains to be made by removing most Euclidean geometry (including trigonometry) and adding probability and statistics.

While historically there is a close connection between Euclidean geometry and calculus, I think people can grok ideas like a tangent line without having done any Euclidean geometry before.

And probability and statistics are essential so people can properly participate the civic process. E.g. I used to see the following statistic a lot: "Women who are murdered are ~100 times as likely to have been murdered by their spouse, as Men who are murdered". I think a rudimentary knowledge of probability would allow people to realize this is a meaningless statistic (the meaningful version is "Women are 1.5 times as likely to be murdered by their spouse as Men".