A few days ago, I stumbled on a montage of video clips about hating math. Few things irk me more than when people brag about their inability to do math.
In scene after scene from mainstream Hollywood movies, characters talk about flunking, hating, or being bad at math. What irritates me most about this is that these attitudes appear in the world of the movies, in which scriptwriters mine human life for the bits that are most evocative, easy to connect with, or funny and true. For some reason, disliking math counts as character development.
Comments
Antoine Walker was a really good basketball player who didn't like math. Now he's a broke ex-basketball player. Our kids mastered math but it was a struggle and the "but I'm never going to need to use this" argument was made (and refuted). You can't really live in this world without math. You're going to buy a car, buy a home, invest your savings, file tax returns, eat in restaurants and calculate a tip, decide whether or not to go to Foxwoods (hint: don't.) That all involves math. You can't avoid it. BTW, the people who own casinos? They're very, very good at math.