An Answer I Can Live With

If you fall in the majority of college students, you will have taken at least one math class before you graduate or transfer to another college. Did you ever stop to think about why we're required to take so many math classes in high school and college? Think back to your high school math classes. The emphasis was on test scores, right? In my math classes someone would always ask why we needed to know how to solve systems of equations or linear equations, and my teacher would usually tell us that problems like those would be on the SAT or ACT tests and if we wanted to get into a four-year college and pursue a degree we would have to know how to perform these operations.

When I graduated and moved on to math classes in my first quarter at a community college, we were given another reason to learn math. On day one of my Elementary Algebra class my instructor marched into the room, set up her CD player on the desk, and began playing the Willie Nelson song "Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys". When the song had ended, we looked around at each other, bewildered, and listened to my instructor announce that the reason we needed to learn math is so that we won't grow up to be an uneducated cowboy. We were presented with a list of the most lucrative professions, ordered from the highest-paying to the least profitable. Needless to say, cowboys ranked near the bottom or the list.

OK, if you really want to be a lawyer, a surgeon, a CEO, or an engineer I understand that there will be a lot of math involved. But when I was younger, I really wanted to be a cowboy. Since then I've been interested in jewelry-making, writing, and working with children. Show me where I need to know about imaginary numbers and simplifying expressions involving rational exponents in those professions.

When a young, outspoken student in my Elementary Algebra class asked our instructor when in everyday life we would need these skills, she began telling us a story of a time she had to convert a shed in the woods into a chicken coop, which required her to find the angle of the roof. I highly doubt I will be doing that in my lifetime, so I guess I don't need higher math after all.

After barely passing the Elementary class, I enrolled in Intermediate Algebra, where another student asked why we needed this kind of math. My new instructor leveled with us and said if we were planning on majoring in math or science, we probably would need it. For the rest of us, it's just mental exercises, like learning a new language. So the work we do in math classes is not so much for practical, everyday use, but for practice in memorization, understanding, logic, and problem-solving.

I think I can live with that answer.

One you adopt that mindset, math becomes the same as when we were kids and we used to make up little picture codes to write notes to our friends. It's just memorization.

I'm pretty sure that I won't be doing quadratic equations every time I make a trip to the grocery store to buy a gallon of milk, but as long as I'm not brainwashed into thinking that every single thing we learn in college will be used in our daily life, I can accept it. All I want is an honest answer, and an honest education.