I'm a diagnosed autist.
High school made me develop what I thought was a "hatred" of mathematics. I think it was around 4th grade when I started developing a hatred of mathematics and SCEM in general. That hatred deepened significantly under cram school for mathematics. What this then caused was that I was driven to literature and history. Then ultimately, I was driven away from literature and then I found my only solace in history. For roughly the last five years, my mind dwelled on history and my own past. My worldview started to frame everything in terms of history - to truly know something, I had to know its history.
I began reconciling with mathematics around a couple of weeks or so ago, when I read and finished "Mathematics in Historical Context" by Jeff Suzuki. With my historicist worldview, I received an outline of mathematics and re/familiarised myself with names such as Newton, Leibniz, Euler and most of all Euclid. This framing of mathematics in terms of history let me saw the etymology of mathematics - "learning" and how it wasn't so much a singular monolith as much as it was a group of related things like algebra, trigonometry, calculus, vectors etc each in their own separate categories.
I just arrived today at the thought that I actually never really hated mathematics as a discipline, but only "mathematics" the high school subject. I remembered that I loved linear algebra and equations when I was in primary school. I reviled a whole tradition because it was grouped together in the public education system - yet when I learned of the struggles that Euclid, how there is "no royal road to geometry", of Pythagoras and the story of Greek mathematicians expelling students with a silver coin, I finally arrived at some level of peace with mathematics. Yet it troubled me why high schools don't teach Euclid and Newton's original texts.
So, from this /his/fag, the question from all of this - how can high school maths education be made less awful?
High school made me develop what I thought was a "hatred" of mathematics. I think it was around 4th grade when I started developing a hatred of mathematics and SCEM in general. That hatred deepened significantly under cram school for mathematics. What this then caused was that I was driven to literature and history. Then ultimately, I was driven away from literature and then I found my only solace in history. For roughly the last five years, my mind dwelled on history and my own past. My worldview started to frame everything in terms of history - to truly know something, I had to know its history.
I began reconciling with mathematics around a couple of weeks or so ago, when I read and finished "Mathematics in Historical Context" by Jeff Suzuki. With my historicist worldview, I received an outline of mathematics and re/familiarised myself with names such as Newton, Leibniz, Euler and most of all Euclid. This framing of mathematics in terms of history let me saw the etymology of mathematics - "learning" and how it wasn't so much a singular monolith as much as it was a group of related things like algebra, trigonometry, calculus, vectors etc each in their own separate categories.
I just arrived today at the thought that I actually never really hated mathematics as a discipline, but only "mathematics" the high school subject. I remembered that I loved linear algebra and equations when I was in primary school. I reviled a whole tradition because it was grouped together in the public education system - yet when I learned of the struggles that Euclid, how there is "no royal road to geometry", of Pythagoras and the story of Greek mathematicians expelling students with a silver coin, I finally arrived at some level of peace with mathematics. Yet it troubled me why high schools don't teach Euclid and Newton's original texts.
So, from this /his/fag, the question from all of this - how can high school maths education be made less awful?
