Starving the Monkeys: Fight Back Smarter by Baugh Tom

Author:Baugh, Tom [Baugh, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Starve Monkey Press
Published: 2009-12-28T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11, Math and Science

Part of your self-study must include math and science, and to a far deeper level than you would otherwise think necessary. There is a very simple reason why you must master these fields. I will get to that simple reason in a moment. If you aren't yet a master of mathematics, you will have a very hard time understanding why it is so important. Most of us my age were taught math in a very sterile environment, with no explanation at all why we were graphing lines or finding the roots of an equation using the quadratic formula. Worse, if you are a younger reader, there is a good chance that you have been exposed to a hideous atrocity known as "guess and check".

When I found out that my son had been exposed in public school to this method of finding roots of an equation I nearly lost my mind. After closer examination of the curricula, it became clear that the unionized teaching staff had very little actual knowledge of math. And so, they were busy poisoning the little minds under their care instead of teaching them. So, as poorly as math was taught during my day, the establishment has managed to find newer lows today.

The basic crime of poor math education is a gateway act which leads to the more serious offense of failing to teach science to any useful degree. Math is the language of science, and unless you can understand math you have no hope of understanding the world around you, or even your own body, in a meaningful way. In this condition of ignorance, you then become the prey of any who wish to frighten or coerce you into submission. Just as a primitive witch doctor might withhold from you the true nature and predictability of natural phenomena such as comets or eclipses, and reserve the power of fear for himself.

There are some constants afoot today in that math and science are denigrated as subjects for the geeky kids. We have all been fed this lie. You yourself may have bought into this lie, perhaps from peer pressure from the cool kids. Or, because of abusive or humiliating treatment from ignorant teachers hoping to mask their own insufficiencies. Or even just the mistaken assumption that these subjects are hard and hardly worth knowing. If so, you have severely crippled yourself. Fortunately, you can fix this defect in your armor, but it will require some work.

I said before that you will have a hard time understanding math or science unless you know why you are asked to learn a particular skill or algorithm. This is one of those chicken-and-egg problems which plague the system. Only by the hiring of teachers who genuinely know why particular techniques are of use would it be possible to correct this. For example, I might tell you that you need to understand calculus because it will help you determine the moment of inertia for any object you might encounter.

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