The Math Class That Forgot to Learn

 Dear students of the group 505 in NS mathematics,

As the great philosopher and mathematician Galileo once said, “Nature is written in mathematical language.” Indeed, whether we like it or not, mathematics constantly surrounds us. From the cellphones we use to text our friends to our houses that cover our heads at night, we can’t escape the dominance of mathematics. Therefore, it’d seem logical to try to fully understand the great presence. But no! According to the vast majority of the class, what really matters is doing the least work possible so you can waste your time doing something else and having the easiest exams possible so you can simultaneously be lazy and get good grades. That philosophy is absolutely shameful! With all my being, I believe it’s time for us to wake up and to bring back some honour to this class!

Firstly, maybe right now, this all doesn’t seem like a big deal. After all, according to most of you, the most important thing right now is getting good grades in all the subjects so you can get accepted into the college you want. Most of you probably don’t care how you get them; you just want them. However, have any of you actually stopped to think about how it will be like once you are in college? Based off what I see from you guys, probably not. According to a study conducted by the Mathematical Association of America, which studied 218 colleges and universities from 2010 to 2015, 38 percent of students that did Calculus 1 failed. That’s a lot! Some blame it on the material being too hard. Others blame the teachers for not doing a good job teaching the material. But frankly, these excuses are starting to get old. I firmly believe it’s the student’s responsibility to do whatever it takes to pass with a good grade, and the only way to achieve that goal is through hard work. However, right now, most of you are doing the bare minimum, which currently works well because you put the teacher in a position where he must give easy exams or face suspension. However, what will you do when you are in college and the teacher gives harder exams? None of you will be used to actually working on math at home, which will eventually cost you dearly! To put it simply, right now, the class is easy and good grades with no work is possible, but once in college, that philosophy will fail. Just ask the 38% that didn’t pass calculus 1.

Secondly, so far I’ve been talking mainly about how this problem affects your experience in college, but I didn’t cover how it affects the way you learn. Let’s stop and think for one moment. If you are given a super easy exam, why is it easy? It’s easy because the harder aspects of the subject weren’t included in the exam. But who says that since it’s difficult, it won’t be useful later? Maybe in the future you’ll have to use the tough stuff, but since you didn’t really learn it when you were supposed to, you won’t know what to do. How does that help you? Frankly, it doesn’t. And I’m not the only one who is saying this. In 1994, the psychologist Robert Bjork and his partner Elizabeth Bjork published a paper in which they describe an interesting concept called desirable difficulty. Basically, desirable difficulty is based off the idea that it’s not by reading notes and learning stuff by heart that you’ll actually learn something. Instead, to actually learn by exposing yourself to problems of varying levels of difficulty. By solving it on your own, without looking at the answer, once you finally get the answer, even if it took a while, you’ll remember it for much longer than if the answer was handed to you on a silver plater. At this moment, in our math class, we don’t expose ourselves to desirable difficulty, which while in the short term would make our lives harder, would help us on the long term. Instead, we are only exposing ourselves to easy situations, which in the short term seems preferable, will only hurt us in the long run. Briefly said, having harder exams would reinforce the concepts we learned in class, which would help us in the long run.

To conclude, my fellow classmates, we are at a crossroads! We can either continue down our current path of trying to minimize our workload and making our exams easier, or we can actually give ourselves a challenge and learn for real. I don’t know about you, but to me, the choice is clear! We must wake up and get some common sense back!

Signed,

Noah Homsi Gagnacci