“When are we ever going to use this?” asks a beleaguered middle schooler as she stares morosely at her algebra homework drowning in a sea of red ink. There are any number of canned responses to give to this question, an inevitability in the classroom.
I sigh as I look over her sheet. We’ve covered the material before, but it’s never been explained thoroughly. She’s supposed to look at the examples and figure it out on her own, but really, how many people learn that way? She’s still not getting distributing the negative sign amongst numbers in parentheses, so even if she gets equation balancing, that mistake will throw everything off. There’s an inexplicable negative sign on the left side of the equation, indicating she doesn’t understand why or when she’s subtracting numbers from a side, just that you tend to do it for these problems. They’re all like this in various ways. I’ll be the first to opine that the college-calculus route of math is completely useless for the vast majority of people. But basic algebra? I mean, that’ll still come up even if you aren’t an engineer. But… as a giant field of equations, one after another after another?
“Honestly… like this? It’s probably not–” “Like if you’re a doctor”, she interrupts. “Well, doctors are required to take a lot of math. It’s not that they need to do it as much as you need to do a ton of it for school. But understanding a lot of math is necessary.” She let out an audible, grunting sigh. “You want to be a doctor?” Adults ask this as if kids know. We ask as if it’s not a crazy amount of psychological pressure to put on a kid, to know their life’s profession by the time they hit double digits. “Yeah…. What about a nurse?” Fuck me, did I just shoot this kid’s career aspirations down a peg? She’s in middle school and I’m making her re-evaluate career trajectory. “Again, it’s not that the math they do looks like this, but they have to understand it; they use concepts in algebra all the time.” “How so?” I realise in that instant that I don’t actually know. From what I gather, nurses spend most of their time getting shit on both figuratively and literally. I assume somewhere in their job they probably have to figure out some unknown quantity by the logic you practice in algebra, but it’s not like I can name an instance. I fumble for an example. I put my pen to a scrap paper. “Let’s say they have a supply of blood–a certain amount of it– and they have to distribute it to a certain number of patients.” I try and make a math problem off the top of my head. But I ignore the advice I already thought I gave her: that the math they do doesn’t look like the homework. I instinctively try to make some cheap word problem that is just a lazily veiled arithmetic equation to solve.
Thankfully, before I can impart my mixed messages, the kid ignores me and continues on. “I don’t like math…. I like history. But not American history”, she says with assertiveness. I smile, and she looks down at the scrap paper on the desk. It was my latest effort to slow down and go over a problem step by step. Start with something really simple, show the principles. Increase the complexity one notch at a time. “You mean I gotta do all those steps on each problem!?” “No, I was just showing you why you’re solving the problems like this.” The lesson obviously didn’t sink in. And until it does, her redoing the problems over isn’t going to help her get it. I let her go for the night. The program’s brilliant solution is backing her up to work a little earlier in the problem set and trying again. Will it help? Probably a little. She’ll get it eventually. But is that what’s best for her? I doubt it.
There’s a visceral instinct in adults, particularly in teachers, to defend school work. Tyson lays out such a defense eloquently in the above video. I saw this video either the morning after I had this conversation with my student. Prima facie, Tyson came off as something in between pompous and naive. “Has he just had great teachers his entire life? How do you go through school and never have that thought? How can you not sympathize at least a little with that sentiment?” I Googled Tyson, and he attended a science specialty school for high school, so maybe he did just never have a terrible teacher who made him question his assignments. I can’t stay mad at him, though. He’s a science advocate, and he’s pretty damn good at it. Regardless of criticisms that can be levied at his politics or philosophies, his work as an advocate is important, and he’s a force for good in this universe. It’s his job to say, “math is important; study hard kids.” Maybe he does have concerns about how children are educated. But he had a minute and a half to talk on the subject of kids not liking math, and like it or not, his job is to tell them to study because it’s important. I may roll my eyes at the over-simplicity, but I can’t bear a grudge for him. But other people are fair game.
Adults, and again, in particular teachers, get down-right offended when kids ask “when are we ever going to use this?” It’s a question of competence of the teaching skills of the adult in the room at the time. It’s a challenge to the necessity of the teacher’s existence. People get insulted when people 10, 20, 30… years younger than them ask, in effect, “what do you know?” Adults always have answers to furnish. Well [subject] is useful for X, Y, Z, you petulant little bastard! That last part is rarely audible, but it’s always in there.
Here’s the thing though, aside from about maybe 5% of kids, past middle school level educational material, those answers are complete bullshit. Most adults don’t know the when you’ll need to learn something, or why, or what, or how. You think parents who don’t know the difference between a sine and a sign know why it’s good to learn pre-calculus? “Well, obviously, that will help with calculus, so when they go to college…” (If you have not yet read it: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2008/10/the_dumbest_generation_is_only.html ). And yeah, the pre-calculus teacher uses pre-calculus, but how do they know if a kid’s going to need it in their life when the kids don’t even have a clue what they’re going to do with their life (not that this is a knock on the kid)! They don’t. But as long as we have something to tell kids to learn, we don’t have to confront that fact that we’re idiots, and have no idea what kids need to actually be learning.
The question “when are we going to use this?” shows us what kids have been raised to think the purpose of education is: utility, usefulness, practical application. Those things are all fine and dandy. But there’s more to life than pragmatism. And the fact that kids are asking this question means we have failed as adults at teaching them that there’s more to life than usefulness. A child is never going to ask “when am I ever going to use this?” when they pick up a video game controller or pop in headphones and turn on their music. Because that would be daft. The purpose of listening to music is to listen to music. Ars gratia artis–art for the sake of art. Nobody listens to music because it’ll be useful a decade down the line, and no one on Earth would ever pitch sharing their favorite music with a line like that. The following conversation has never occurred, ever: “Hey, you should listen to this band!”
“Idk man, I’ve heard a couple of their songs, and I wasn’t a fan.”
“Well, you’ll need it for the career you’ll have in 10-20 years.”
No sane person would tolerate such a riposte. But kids tell us the exact same thing, and we throw this same answer at their face and act indignant when they don’t roll over. (Read this if you haven’t already: https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf )
That’s not to argue that schoolwork should never have a practical application. There’s room for both. But even looking at schoolwork from a standpoint of practicality, don’t the kids have a right to make sure what they’re learning is actually useful? If we’re teaching them something ostensibly because they’ll “need” to know it, how is it unfair that they ask for reassurance we are fulfilling our end of the job? What if it turns out they don’t need to know something? And then there’s the urgency, and the logistics. Sure, they’ll need to know something, but right now? And is there another way to impart this knowledge?
My student probably should learn algebra. It’s a useful skill. Solving for x may not come up per se, but the logic skills can transfer. But by my own admission, a sheet of a bunch of equations isn’t the only way to teach that then. And she’s only in middle school. She has time. Why cram a bunch of worksheets down her throat? I’m one of the outliers in the data because I have used pretty much all the niche math they covered in school. I lost any ability to gripe personally when utilizing the alternate interior angles theorem inexplicably popped up on a computer program I was using in my biomechanics “thesis” project. In my day job, I use a fair amount of math. Most of it is by way of measuring, data, and analysis. But even in the form of word problems, I do a fair amount of “solving for x” in proportions. I need x many total microliters of some fluid, the ratio of fluid A to fluid B should be y, how much of A/B do I use. In fairness to the system, it’s pretty much a math homework problem. Again, I’m on the extreme end of the bell curve in how much math I use on a regular basis, but still, it’s not like my supervisor ever hands me a sheet of math problems every day and tells me to fill it out. And I understand that worksheets are meant to reinforce a concept so that it becomes unnecessary to require continual practice of the root skill in the “adult” world, but in fairness to my kid, even someone in a math-intense job like myself isn’t going to ever use a packet of math questions.
We owe our kids that admission, at least. We may balk at their incredulity and operate with the understanding that there’s clearly more to schoolwork than something looking absolutely identical coming up in the future, but it’s not the world’s stupidest question on the kids’ part. That frustration is fair, and we tend to do a terrible job of explaining the “adult” side of the argument to the kids. Part of that is a communication barrier between people with no “real-world” experience and those jaded to the work-a-day world, but that’s no excuse for not trying to make sure that our children’s concerns are allayed. If their work is supposed to be practical, and it’s not, they have a right to call for an audit. If it’s supposed to teach some more ineffable lesson, we need to make sure they can at least appreciate that that’s what we’re trying to do. And far more importantly than explaining this all is actually teaching effectively, for whichever reason. We can say that the logic skills of math or whatever are useful as much as we want, but unless we are actually imparting these skills at the end of the day, it’s a failure on our part in the roll of educators. A lot of what we make kids do in school is a waste of their time. Not admitting this not just to the kids, but to ourselves, is hubris.