Graduation!

Congrats to everyone who’s graduating this week! A couple of my students worked really hard and got where they needed to go, and getting to contribute to that in even a tiny way really makes me smile.

Our relationship math changes is many ways when we graduate high school. For those of us tending toward add’l math study — math, sciences, engineering — we come to find that while we’re reasonably well-prepped in terms of the core mathematical ideas that we’ll need, we are far less-prepared for the manner in which we’ll approach them. As a math major, I was surprised and (eventually) thrilled to find that the entire major wasn’t about getting ‘an answer’ but rather reasoning through and proving out conclusions from base principles. To that point, the only place I’d seen proof as a notion was for a short period in geometry, and the fact that it’s most of what mathematicians actually do never really came up.

Most of us, though, bid good riddance to math after we graduate, and do as little structured study of math as possible after that. I don’t count this as a strike against learners; in fact, it’s why I’m here: most HS math instruction does a bad job helping people understand why they’d care about any of it — when’s the last time you had to numerically figure out when two trains were going to meet, or understand sand falling on a conical pile?

This is obviously a shame, and it’s also a feature: people who do know math well suffered through this, and now keeping it boring serves two emotional needs. First, it serves the ridiculous notion that ‘I suffered through it, you should too.’ This is dumb, but human. And second, it serves as a gate-keeping measure: if it’s difficult for you to get good at what I’m good at, then my skills are more in-demand, and my position more-secure.

Like I said, I get it. But I wish it were different, and I hope that some of the people I’ve taught have been able to find a path to engaging with math beyond high school that is both useful and gratifying.