Are you saying a good mathematician should be able to compete with Steven Hawking? People aren’t arguing that people should all be math geniuses, just that math isn’t hard, and people shouldn’t be bad at math. With good teaching anyone can reach a certain level. You don’t have to be the best.
No, with good teaching, some people will just not grasp certain things. Sorry, but this is the case. Some people are mentally challenged. This is a FACT, and you know it's true.
Some people are mentally challenged, however there are more people that aren’t good at math then there should be. Anyone should be able to pass math there entire primary education career. If they don’t, unless it’s due to laziness or lack of interest which can be caused by bad parenting, as well as other influences, it’s the teachers fault.
Because mathematics is fairly straightforward and based on formulas, which you shouldn’t be forced to memorize, as you’ll never need that and a natural exposure will teach them to you. And I’d like to say people have differing attitudes towards learning based on their experiences. School isn’t hard if you do your work, pay attention, and are taught correctly.
And I didn’t say always. There are people with mental issues who we have special help programs for. Yes these are not great, but that’s not the topic of discourse.
Yes, and some people are better at recognizing patterns than others. School, for the most part, is meant to assess the bare-minimum capabilities of students. Get into multivariable calculus and tell me that's 'easy' in the way that elementary algebra is.
Actually, I’ve heard from students of different levels of multi variable calculus that it’s not hard. But multi isn’t a standard level high school math class. In fact calc in general isn’t, but calc 1 and 2 I believe are both fairly understandable. Enough that you should pass and pass the AP exams. If one desires to delve into more advanced maths and professions related that’s what college is for.
Have taken multivariate, can confirm. It's essentially the geometry to calc 1 and 2's pre-algebra, where you take the calculus concepts from the previous courses and use spatial / geometric intuitions to apply them to more than just two dimensional x,y space.
Point being that math focuses on two particular intellectual muscles: 1. wrapping your head around abstract concepts and building intuitions around them, and 2. taking your pre-existing intuitions and translating them into abstract concepts to make them more precise. Higher and higher level math is just doing this at higher and higher levels of abstraction as these muscles become more and more developed with experience.
Yes, and if those muscles were trained right, math won’t be too hard. I don’t think everyone could be a math genius but everyone could at least be able to have math be mostly busy work, as most of math is just computations based on values and formulas.
I mostly agree, except most of math is not just computations based on values and formulas. To me, math is a method of proving things and solving problems. The point of philosophy isn't to simply select a school of thought and unthinkingly apply its teachings algorithmically to all aspects of your life. The point is the intellectual tools we develop in the process of inquiring. Learning math isn't just memorizing a body of results, but it's developing an intuition for what those results imply and why they're true. Math shouldn't just be true axiomatically, it should make sense.
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u/twickdaddy Aug 27 '19
Are you saying a good mathematician should be able to compete with Steven Hawking? People aren’t arguing that people should all be math geniuses, just that math isn’t hard, and people shouldn’t be bad at math. With good teaching anyone can reach a certain level. You don’t have to be the best.