Sometimes you wonder: does what I’m studying really matter in life? What is the point of all the class hours, the countless homework sets, and all the days spent sitting in class wearing out my seat?
Elementary school math, okay, that makes sense. It’s useful to know how to count; anyone can see that. Being able to add, subtract, multiply and divide makes one a member of productive, knowledgeable society, and takes you out of the ranks of the illiterate. You can do your shopping without being cheated; you can measure and convert measurements and figure out how to double your mac and cheese recipe or how far you’ve still got to drive on the freeway to reach your destination.
But by fourth grade, you’ve got all that under your belt. Why go on in math after that? Is it worth it, really? No normal grownup does fancy algebra and integrals and parabolic curves—or do they?
Well, they do, but even if they didn’t—it wouldn’t matter. Because here’s something to think about: learning math teaches you much more than just how to run the operations.
By studying math you train yourself to think, to solve problems, and to make sense of puzzles, and those are skills that will stand you in good stead no matter what you decide to do with your life. For instance, your knowledge of math can be the tool that allows you to distinguish fact from fallacy in the news articles you read. It can save you thousands of dollars in basic expenses like health insurance or house mortgages, and it may be the tool that ends up helping you solve a major forensic mystery if life takes you that direction.
Whether you end up as an astronomer, calculating, or a cobbler, making shoes, the things you learn in your classroom now will stand you in good stead.
But math is much more than just a brain bender, or a way to exercise your mind and create ‘brain muscle.’
Learning math is like learning a new language. It’s hard at first, and you learn how to speak in poor little sentences, memorizing phrases like “My hobby is listening to music” or “I want to see the Eiffel tower’. How many times do you think you’ll use these sentences in your future life? Never, right!
But you’re not learning those sentences for the sake of those sentences. You’re training your mind to understand and speak on a completely different plane than you’ve spoken before, and you’re learning a language that, when mastered, will open doors and give you fluency in a sphere you could never otherwise walk in.
Math is the secret language of the cosmos. Learning math helps us to tune our minds, in a way, so we can hear in a different harmonic; a harmonic that underlies the whole skeleton of our universe and our very being.
It’s not about the drills, it’s not about the long calculations, and it’s not even about any single problem in your textbook. But all of them—every single math problem you conquer, ever single math lecture you sit through—initiates you just a little bit further into this magic that is behind everything, and gives you new power; a power that will make your future life that much more fun, that much more rewarding, and that much more powerful—no matter where you go.
