The USA Public School System Failed Me: A Maths Misadventure

Disclosure: No AI was used in the writing of this article.

I am a nearly 30-year old SWE working in the industry for over a decade.

I've had the privilege of working with some extraordinarily intelligent and well-educated peers during my career.

Something I've often asked them about, as an "outside-looking-in" sort of thing, is how much they feel their maths backgrounds have contributed to their success.

Answers vary widely, but at the end of the day, I can't help but feel like I was cheated out of an essential life skill due to general apathy and incompetence.

The story goes something like this:

My Educational History

I am what most would consider, for the industry, "woefully uneducated".

I dropped out of American public highschools at 16 to earn my GED.

This was under the misguided notion that doing so would allow me to get a jump-start on my education, begin working a real job, and finish college sooner than my peers.

In theory all of the above is possible, but it is not what happened.

I attended a local community college while working fulltime as a manual laborer, but eventually dropped out after flunking pre-requisite maths courses.

The issue with American Maths Education

As a personal principle, I don't believe that victim-mentalities are conducive to success and personal growth.

That is to say, I am sure that had I been sufficiently motivated and "just tried hard enough", there is a world in which I could have passed those classes.

My goal here is not to place all of the blame and onus on the teachers and education system of the American state.

Students are not (or rather, shouldn't be) passive observers in their education, and should advocate for themselves when the system fails. But how many of us can say we did such a thing?

Let me paint you a journey, for those who were not educated in this Great Country of Ours, or perhaps educated in a different era, what The System was like during my schooling:

It Begins in Primary School

Maths in the early years, for the most part, are no issue.

Basic additional, multiplication, division, fractions.

These are intuitive concepts, explained in word problems easily related to the real world, that any layperson could thoroughly describe to a child.

Save for one incident, which proved to be the rumblings of something worse to come:

Two Apples Less than Zero

I can vividly recollect it to this day.

It would have been in the 1st or 2nd grade. We were studying the "Number Line", and basic addition and subtraction.

The event went something like follows:

Class, if I have 3 apples, and I eat 2 apples, how many do I have left?"

"One apple, miss!"

"And if I eat one more, how many?"

"Zero apples, miss!"

And then, my raised hand:

"Miss, what happens if you eat 2 more apples now?"

"...

Silence for a moment, and then:

Nothing. You can't eat 2 more apples if you have no apples to eat. You still have 0 apples.

Panic and confusion begin to set in.

I had devised that when doing addition and subtraction, the resulting number is always different. No operation can possibly result in the same starting number.

This statement handed down to me by The All-Knowing broke all understanding and reason I had formed about numbers and their operations.

I was deeply unsettled and left with the feeling that something Wasn't Quite Right, but I shoved it down for the time being.

In hindsight, it's perfectly clear that the material was not meant to cover the concept of negative numbers until a much later grade.

But you can't tell a child a lie like that out of convenience, especially when they are beginning to form their fundamental models of the mathematical world.

The Twin-Headed Hydra: Lattice Multiplication & Long Division

Towards the end of primary (Elementary) school, the dragon begins to rear its head:

This two-headed Hydra is named Lattice Multiplication & Long Division.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_multiplication
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_division

At this point, to my young brain, my education veers off a cliff into someplace dark and filled with sheer madness.

The teachers tell us that when working with large, multi-digit multiplication and division problems, we should use these methods.

"You see, you draw some boxes, and then you connect this number with this number, and you..."

WHAT? Magic shapes you draw and a series of incantations that somehow allow you to arrive a correct answer?! This is heresy -- pure and unadulterated lunacy.

Science and maths were my favorite subjects, they were the study of "Why?", the fundamental question and logic of the world.

When I asked my teachers to explain, "Why?", "How does this work?", I was told to Be Quiet and that "It just does."

Eventually, apathy set in. I gave up asking for explanations. I realized that the people instructing me didn't know.

They were just parroting something they themselves had been told. The incantation gives the correct answer, and that was "good enough" for them, No Further Questions Needed.

To this day, I never did learn how to do the above.

I had come up with a simple system for handling larger number division and multiplication -- break the numbers down into groups of 10's, 5's, and 1's.

For example:

237 * 128

Would be:

237 * 100 + (237 * 10) * 2 + (237 * 10) / 2 + (237 * 1) * 3

For small numbers I could do it in my head, and for +4 digits I would do it on paper.

Good Enough for Me.

My Fate is Sealed in Middle School

This pattern continues into my Middle School education (grades 6-8 here).

Algebra is described in abstract terms.

• "Y = MX + B"
• "Slope-intercept formula"
• "The origin point"

It would have been so easy to teach algebra in terms of equations of real-world systems or events.

In basic geometry, I am fed half-lies like: "The sum of all the angles (interior) of a triangle is 180 degrees".

This is not incorrect, but in my mid-20's I would discover that Euclidean Geometry is only one of many possible geometries, and students are never even told that "Geometry" in school really means "Euclidean Geometry."

I am checked out. I stop doing schoolwork. I barely scrape by and graduate to Highschool.

The only thing that makes any sense to me intuitively is Statistics.

I Give up in Highschool and try Community College

I physically attend Highschool, but don't do any regular classwork or homework.

I only do the tests, which in my school were weighted for 70% of your grade. That seems like the optimal effort-to-reward ratio.

In classes I find interesting, I sometimes engage with the content, in other classes I just sit at the back of the class and fall asleep on my desk.

At this time in my life, I thought I wanted to be an Organic Chemist. More than half of my courses seem woefully irrelevant and a waste of my time.

So I do what seems to be the logical thing, and I get my GED, get a job, and off to College I go.

The first Algebra course in Community College is much harder than the ones in middle and high school.

None of it makes any sense to me, and I'm severely lacking fundamentals from other domains.

I struggle for 6 weeks before I withdraw from the course, and decide that college isn't for me.

I'm exhausted from working 8 hours a day out in the sun and then going to class at night. I'll just figure something else out.

Conclusion

I don't know exactly why I wrote this.

I think partly, it might have been carthatic for me.

Maybe there are other people on the internet who had similar experiences, and will read this and go: "Hey, I'm not the only one!"

I'm sure there are excellent educators out there who manage to teach and relate maths in a way that truly connects with their students.

Unfortunately, I had no such luck to encounter one.

If maths education continues this way in the USA, I don't have high hopes for our future.

Post-script

In hindsight, I would've done things differently.

I didn't realize how expensive education was in America.

I would've done the bare minimum to pass the Humanities courses, and tried to get the most out of my STEM courses.

I would've participated in extra-curriculars.

But, making Stupid Mistakes like this are the hallmark of youth. And who can tell where I would be today had I taken a different path.

Regarding youth and that painful, gained-via-mistakes experience of wisdom, I often think about a quote from Mark Twain:

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.