Why does everyone hate math instead of English? - >not science or math

[Tad Loaf]

At the risk of sounding like a retard, it's because math appears more arbitrary than English. Sure addition/multiplication/ratios/percentages/etc all have their daily life applications and needs but once you get the more "advanced" math that doesn't really have any application to 98% of the population, it starts to come off random and obtuse.

 

[The Fifth Waltz]

You also have to memorize steps to solve a problem in math or else you're just fucked. I'm so bad at math I started my downward spiral when multiplication was introduced. Throughout school I had a math tutor all the way up until we were completely done math at 16. At least I'm good at bullshitting essays and science.

 

[Jetpack Himmler]

Highschool teachers are usually pretty bad at teaching. English should be easy since it is literally just understanding what the author was saying by learning about people and historical events. Most English majors don't study any history so It's weird how they're even able to understand what they end up teaching.

I actually minored in History when working on my Bachelor's in English. Personally, I was pretty lousy at math in High School due to lack of interest and didn't have a great love of English either because wanted to something more creative. My best subject was Social Studies because history was always something that interested me. Studying literature supposedly helps develop critical thinking skills, but I have to wonder if that is really the case as a whole generation of SJWs have thought processes that can be boiled down to buzzwords and stock phrases. Hell, this talk of "decolonizing literature" and cancel culture sounds dangerously close to book burning.

Fuck. The humanities are truly a blight on the human intellect the more I think about it.

 

[FuckedUp]

You might get the date wrong or who was involved but you can still have an opinion on that event that isn't wrong or right. I can get into an actual story. I don't care when Bob and Joe are going to pass each other because Bob is driving at 40 mph and Joe is driving at 20 mph.

Because English is typically easier if you know how to bullshit. Most questions that aren’t about rules or mechanics can answer themselves. That, and essays are easy enough to write if you have enough to work with.

Except when entire paragraphs are crossed out in pen and get 20% deducted because it focused on something only nearly the same as the guidelines, or the examples given don't perfectly fit, or the examples don't have enough explanation, or there aren't enough examples. I still have no idea how the fuck my classmates managed to consistently get higher than F's on English essays, let alone ace them.

 

[TFT-A9]

I'm not GREAT at math, but up to, say, high-school-senior levels I'm fairly competent at it. I start slowing down when I encounter college-level math, but can still get through most of it (short of calc, I suppose).

English? I fucking OBLITERATE English classes. If I don't end up at the top of the class in any given English or tangentially related course, something along the line went REALLY wrong.

Regarding sciences: Most entry-level college chem math is honestly fairly easy, feels like a retread of high school sometimes. It's when you get into Physics and related math that I start scratching my head. Some of the other sciences like biology and ecology and so on will have math involved, and it ranges from pretty easy to "I have no idea what I'm doing lol".

 

[Kosher Dill]

What makes math different from English is abstraction. Let's take the first thing math students learn to hate: word problems. Why do people hate analyzing a paragraph to solve a math problem, but have no problem analyzing a paragraph to write a response for English class?
To solve that word problem, you need to read the little story about Amy and Bob Aisha and Daquon buying stuff at the store, and transform that into a mathematical structure that captures all the mathematical details and ignores the rest. That's kind of a weird and specialized skill, even though it's probably second nature by now. How do you tell what the "mathematical" parts of a story are? When do you combine parts of the story separated by time into one equation and when do you split them up? And so on.

In English class, you can just say "Hamlet was a dick" if you think he was a dick.

 

[FuckedUp]

In English class, you can just say "Hamlet was a dick" if you think he was a dick.

What high schools did you all go to where you could
a. make declarations like that without providing absolutely perfect, unequivocal evidence by providing tons of unambiguous quotes and other citations that cannot be interpreted in any other way, and
b. just read the Cliff Notes
and get more than a 0?

 

[Kosher Dill]

providing absolutely perfect, unequivocal evidence by providing tons of unambiguous quotes and other citations that cannot be interpreted in any other way

I never heard of anyone demanding that kind of "proof" in an English class - in fact most teachers would probably deny that such a thing is even possible in any work sophisticated enough to have literary merit. Typically what they'll ask is just that you make some sort of coherent argument supported with quotations and sources and structured in some reasonable way.

 

[Elaine Benes]

I was an A/high B student in all my English and history classes (I ended up majoring in the latter) but I was terrible in math until I realized that taking honors-level classes in that subject wasn't doing me any favors. I eventually starting taking regular-level math and science and I was much more comfortable with the slower pace.

 

[Syaoran Li]

I always loved History and English but hated math

Math was my weakest subject and it was also the most boring to me as a kid.

I think that's why so many kids don't like math is because it's entirely cold logic and everything is objective. With English and History, there's a lot more stuff to appeal to the "creative" mind and a narrative story is naturally appealing to the human brain. While history itself is not a narrative, it does have a lot of cool elements that do overlap with pop culture and culture in general.

Math is just numbers and logic, and it's always objective.

History has so many different eras and different parts of the world, and English has so many things to read and write about it.

Even if the stuff they teach in public school is boring to you, you can easily branch off outside the standard curriculum and read up on whatever subject on your spare time and it's a lot more accessible.

Math has different fields but they differ mainly in how complex they are.

So, what makes math appealing to some is the exact same thing that makes it unappealing to others.

Again, this is mostly speaking from the public school point of view.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Always had trouble with it in school despite liking it due to being a hands-on learner. Was doing great in 5th grade when the teacher allowed small blocks to be used as aids. Come next year, my precious blocks are gone.

 

[Tour of Italy]

The middle class is dying because students hate math and they’re cracking jokes about it as they wither.

“Oh my god who would ever need to use algebra or understand word problems”

Anyone who wants even the barest fucking chance of managing their finances and not spending the rest of their lives in debt.

Never mind anything beyond that like helping choose intelligent public policy or understanding a tech based service economy.

Learn math you morons. Even if you hate it.

 

[Slimy Time]

Because math always has a correct answer, but English has a lot more leeway.

I mean you can't write an essay on how oppressed you are as a trans woman in math.

Lol remember Common Core mathematics making the news in Obama's reign? You can get two different answers based on the order of operations, and BOTH are correct. They tried to English literature mathematics.

Wasn't very good at it during school, and don't use it enough now to be competent in any manner, but I see its use. At least know a few applied mathematical points if you don't do a job that requires mathematics- arithmetic, percentages, calculating interest etc. Never know when you need it. Without those, expect to get raped on taxes, financial management, loans and interest rates.

In terms of why people hate mathematics in school, I think it's the snowball effect that Maths has combined with poor teaching. If you don't have a good foundation, or lack in certain areas, then you are fucked when you go up another level. Don't understand algebra? Have fun with differentiation when you get up to High School mathematics or something similar and you have to do it. With English, you can bullshit, there is more leeway so even if you don't do well, you won't necessarily bomb the paper. Combine this with shit teaching at a young age, and you end up with kids with weak fundamentals who don't get maths and they are forced to do it, so they end up going "fuck it, I hate it".

Now that I'm older, I see it more as a machine. You have x formula, so long as you can recognise what to look for and how to apply it and do the correct, logical steps, you can always, ALWAYS get the correct answer.

 

[Brain.exe]

For math, you can use rules to eventually find one concrete solution and it's essentially just playing around with numbers and rules. There's pretty much a set path to find each solution, while in English, things are A LOT more subjective, where you have to analyze some minor part of a boring text and find out how that impacts the whole story or whatever. I think that's the reason why math comes easily to me but English doesn't.

 

[BarberFerdinand]

Because seven eight nine.

 

[The best and greatest]

The middle class is dying because students hate math and they’re cracking jokes about it as they wither.

“Oh my god who would ever need to use algebra or understand word problems”

Anyone who wants even the barest fucking chance of managing their finances and not spending the rest of their lives in debt.

Never mind anything beyond that like helping choose intelligent public policy or understanding a tech based service economy.

Learn math you morons. Even if you hate it.

I wouldn't think managing personal finances would take anything more than an Algebra level understanding of mathematics. If you know how to project data on a chart and budget your income you're pretty much good no?

 

[Tour of Italy]

I wouldn't think managing personal finances would take anything more than an Algebra level understanding of mathematics. If you know how to project data on a chart and budget your income you're pretty much good no?

Statistics help, and the confidence to apply abstract mathematical concepts to real world data, which comes with mastery of the fundamentals.

Hell, even higher math has a lot value in terms of critical thinking and the ability to break complex problems into component parts, valuable life skills that apply to finances as well.

I only bring it up because every time I see complaints about high school math in the wild, I find myself ready to agree partially (not everyone needs to know calculus or until they specifically reference basic shit like algebra and my sympathy dries up.

 

[Slap47]

The middle class is dying because students hate math and they’re cracking jokes about it as they wither.

“Oh my god who would ever need to use algebra or understand word problems”

Anyone who wants even the barest fucking chance of managing their finances and not spending the rest of their lives in debt.

Never mind anything beyond that like helping choose intelligent public policy or understanding a tech based service economy.

Learn math you morons. Even if you hate it.

The middle class is dying because people are skipping out on the trades. You do not need a mastery of algebra to be a tradesmen.

 

[ShortBusDriver]

Because you can't fake math

Next time some hotep with a degree is flapping their gums on CNN look them up

Their degree is never in a hard science.

 

[not william stenchever]

I am one of those rare individuals who has always been okay at math (my main problems with it always came from "I know the procedure I can stop practicing now") and above average at writing. I was reading Dune in the 4th grade and would use cliff notes to avoid reading assigned books I knew would be an unenjoyable slog. I decided, in essence, to read a better book.