In my opinion, people hate the STEM subjects because we’re brought up under the impression that academia is the gatekeeper to a better life and that non-STEM degrees are worthless, because we’re force-fed a curated window into these subjects selected entirely based on testability on a timed schedule that limits real exploration and curiosity, and because we’re then looked upon with disappointment if we perform worse than our peers mainly due to differences in our capacity to get interested and engaged in what’s been put in front of us.
I was a math professor in a past life and hope to be again after my medical stuff clears up, and I think math is the one hit hardest here. Math is fun for me when there’s creativity involved and it’s not just being handed problems where the answer will always be found by reducing the problem to a calculation and then working through the calculation. Until I took an upper-level course in undergrad, I thought math was calculations. I started undergrad towards cs, but a math minor would have been like three extra courses so I decided adding that might help my career and it was like a completely different world opened up to me. I got a D in my first real analysis course and barely scraped by with a C on retake, but I loved it so much that I switched majors and eventually pursued a phd. A couple years after those real analysis courses I concluded analysis is one of the most boring branches of math for me, and I still feel that way, but at the time I had never experienced anything like it.
The problem is that it’s unrealistic and unfair to grade students on the kind of creative skills that are needed for the math I enjoy, at least until you get to a point where you can blame them for signing up for it voluntarily. Calculations are very easy to break into concrete steps where you can point out what a student needs to fix, then say it’s their fault if they don’t fix it. They’re gradable, and in a world where the purpose of academia is economic opportunity, no topic can be important enough to be mandatory unless it’s gradable.
When students would come to office hours for help and were really, really struggling to solve problems, what I saw was minds that were locking up from anxiety, not minds that weren’t strong enough to grasp the logic. There’s this stereotype that you have to be smart to do math, but it’s more the other way around. Doing math makes people perceive you as smart.
I genuinely believe that you can teach almost any preschooler basic arithmetic reasoning - that numbers represent how many of something there are, that we don’t have to know what that “something” is for the number to have meaning, and what adding and subtracting mean conceptually as opposed to how to add and subtract by pushing symbols on a paper around correctly. I genuinely believe that if you did this with almost any preschooler, they would perform better than their peers in their first math class, conclude they are “good at math”, and do well in their future math classes. They won’t be the ones worried about whether they end up with an asshole teacher or not.
Teachers are limited in their ability to be overly empathetic to students’ plight here because even if we gave up leisure and sleeping and literally everything else in our lives, we still wouldn’t have enough hours to give each and every student the support they deserve. Any shortcut we can take to be generous without sacrificing our own time will put our livelihood at risk - if too many students end up in someone else’s course with poor understanding of the prerequisite material from ours, we’ll lose our jobs. We’re forced to accept that some students in need will be abandoned if we have any interest in survival. Some become more hardened than others, but it’s the reality for all of us.
In my opinion, people hate the STEM subjects because we’re brought up under the impression that academia is the gatekeeper to a better life and that non-STEM degrees are worthless, because we’re force-fed a curated window into these subjects selected entirely based on testability on a timed schedule that limits real exploration and curiosity, and because we’re then looked upon with disappointment if we perform worse than our peers mainly due to differences in our capacity to get interested and engaged in what’s been put in front of us.
I was a math professor in a past life and hope to be again after my medical stuff clears up, and I think math is the one hit hardest here. Math is fun for me when there’s creativity involved and it’s not just being handed problems where the answer will always be found by reducing the problem to a calculation and then working through the calculation. Until I took an upper-level course in undergrad, I thought math was calculations. I started undergrad towards cs, but a math minor would have been like three extra courses so I decided adding that might help my career and it was like a completely different world opened up to me. I got a D in my first real analysis course and barely scraped by with a C on retake, but I loved it so much that I switched majors and eventually pursued a phd. A couple years after those real analysis courses I concluded analysis is one of the most boring branches of math for me, and I still feel that way, but at the time I had never experienced anything like it.
The problem is that it’s unrealistic and unfair to grade students on the kind of creative skills that are needed for the math I enjoy, at least until you get to a point where you can blame them for signing up for it voluntarily. Calculations are very easy to break into concrete steps where you can point out what a student needs to fix, then say it’s their fault if they don’t fix it. They’re gradable, and in a world where the purpose of academia is economic opportunity, no topic can be important enough to be mandatory unless it’s gradable.
When students would come to office hours for help and were really, really struggling to solve problems, what I saw was minds that were locking up from anxiety, not minds that weren’t strong enough to grasp the logic. There’s this stereotype that you have to be smart to do math, but it’s more the other way around. Doing math makes people perceive you as smart.
I genuinely believe that you can teach almost any preschooler basic arithmetic reasoning - that numbers represent how many of something there are, that we don’t have to know what that “something” is for the number to have meaning, and what adding and subtracting mean conceptually as opposed to how to add and subtract by pushing symbols on a paper around correctly. I genuinely believe that if you did this with almost any preschooler, they would perform better than their peers in their first math class, conclude they are “good at math”, and do well in their future math classes. They won’t be the ones worried about whether they end up with an asshole teacher or not.
Teachers are limited in their ability to be overly empathetic to students’ plight here because even if we gave up leisure and sleeping and literally everything else in our lives, we still wouldn’t have enough hours to give each and every student the support they deserve. Any shortcut we can take to be generous without sacrificing our own time will put our livelihood at risk - if too many students end up in someone else’s course with poor understanding of the prerequisite material from ours, we’ll lose our jobs. We’re forced to accept that some students in need will be abandoned if we have any interest in survival. Some become more hardened than others, but it’s the reality for all of us.