Midweek Insights 2.
The average person doesn't understand that "dumb" sounding questions often lead to great adventures.
I’ve been intrigued by Math twitter’s response to the questions a young girl called Gracie asks on her TikTok.
While the general public admonished her for what they perceived to be basic questions, she showed a general curiosity of the field that many found commendable.
Vast swaths of professors and practitioners in STEM wrote responses to the girl’s TikTok and subsequently the more structured follow-up questions.
The response has provoked some thoughts, primarily on the nature of education.
I, on the other hand, am left asking myself why many professors were left understanding of her. Something tells me it relates strongly to why these people manage to end up at the top of their positions in the first place.
Gracie’s questions about the nature and history of science are entirely valid.
Personally, I had mixed feelings about math when I was in high-school. The general emphasis on rote memorization and computation had left a lot to be desired. I hadn’t felt or seen the general utility in math unless it was paired with physics. And even then, my physics teacher was so detached from the rest of his students, a lot of us found it difficult to approach the subject.
I only came to understand the power of Math, when I finally began digging into those very questions Gracie asked. It would be my love for technology that eventually lead me to understand how powerful Math is as a construct.
It’s difficult seeing the utility of something when you have no examples to make the abstract… real.
Imagine someone telling you about a show in which the main protagonist ventures into the wild to find their father. Unless you’re already familiar with Hunter X Hunter you might have yourself contemplating a lot of answers that would veer far from anime.
I found it difficult to comprehend Data Structures and Recursion until I saw them exemplified in code. Even now, I find myself thinking about those concepts in terms of code.
A lot of the way teaching is structured is to get people through exams and to perform monotonous tasks for a bunch of people, who’s sole roles it is not to do boring monotonous tasks.
In his book “How Not To Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical thinking” Jordan Ellenberg depicts a setting in which a student asks her teacher about the utility of doing a bunch of integrals she feels she’ll never use in her day-to-day existence.
He goes on to mention that:
Mathematics is not just a sequence of computations to be carried out by rote until your patience or stamina runs out—although it might seem that way from what you’ve been taught in courses called mathematics. Those integrals are to mathematics as weight training and calisthenics are to soccer. If you want to play soccer—I mean, really play, at a competitive level—you’ve got to do a lot of boring, repetitive, apparently pointless drills. Do professional players ever use those drills? Well, you won’t see anybody on the field curling a weight or zigzagging between traffic cones. But you do see players using the strength, speed, insight, and flexibility they built up by doing those drills, week after tedious week. Learning those drills is part of learning soccer.
But interest is rarely developed in practice.
This sort of teaching makes it very difficult for students to see the meaning and intent behind what they’re studying. It makes it difficult to get invested. Motivation stems not from constantly brute-forcing yourself into liking something… although that can work as well. It does stem however from an unconscious, yet strong desire to do something. It’s inertia. A forward-thrusting force that propels you into doing something with very little being capable of dissuading you. This force is primal. It can be fear and the desire to succeed. It can be an ego and the desire to not see it bruised.
To expand on his previous point, he mentions that:
Mathematics is pretty much the same. You may not be aiming for a mathematically oriented career. That’s fine—most people aren’t. But you can still do math. You probably already are doing math, even if you don’t call it that. Math is woven into the way we reason. And math makes you better at things. Knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X-ray specs that reveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world. Math is a science of not being wrong about things, its techniques and habits hammered out by centuries of hard work and argument. With the tools of mathematics in hand, you can understand the world in a deeper, sounder, and more meaningful way. All you need is a coach, or even just a book, to teach you the rules and some basic tactics. I will be your coach. I will show you how.
The world would be so much better if we were all Gracie. Showing and admitting our curiosities shamelessly. But the world would also be far better if we had more people guiding us. Who knows how many mistakes we would have avoided if we all had proper guidance.