Gary Rubinstein teaches at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. In this post, he questions whether the math taught in school is “useful” and concludes that it is not. This is the beginning of a series of posts in which he explains why he is disappointed in the usual school math and what he thinks should take its place.

Gary writes:

I’ve dedicated my life to teaching a subject I love and have loved since I was a small child.

This country, and throughout the world really, a lot of resources are dedicated to teaching students math. From Kindergarten to 12th grade almost every student takes math and in many elementary schools math is taught for ninety minutes a day. And then in college students often have to take some math, sometimes a Calculus class, as part of their degree, even when the degree is in something like business. And for all the time and money that are put into math in this country, when it is all done very few adults remember anything about math. Maybe they know a little about percentages and vaguely something about how the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees.

Yes, the same could be said about some of the other subjects, like how much Chemistry or Physics do most adults remember from high school, but the difference is that math is done for 13 years so you would think that more of it would be retained. Fo all that we invest into math in this country, we are not getting the ‘bang for our buck.’ I think I know why this is. I think about this on a daily basis since it is my life’s work and I’m so bothered by it. I’ve written about this before but I want to go deeper into this and explain what the issues are, what it would take to fix the problem, what the obstacles would be in improving math instruction, and whether or not it might be better to diminish the obsession that we have in this country with math instruction.

Part of my evolution in thinking about these ideas comes from watching my own kids who are now 15 and 12 go through the standard math curriculum. They have had decent teachers throughout the years and have always gotten 4s on the New York State tests so you would think that I’m thrilled but when I look at the things that they learned (because they were part of the curriculum) and the things that they have not learned (because they were not part of the curriculum) it frustrates me. Many parents who are not math teachers might feel the same way when they look at what their children are learning in math but they don’t dare question it. It reminds me of The Emperor’s New Clothes, nobody wants to seem like they aren’t smart enough to know why we have to learn how to multiply mixed numbers with different denominators. But as a math teacher who thinks about things like ‘what is the goal in learning this concept?’, ‘Is this concept needed to learn a more difficult concept?’, ‘Does this topic provide opportunity for the students to have ‘aha’ insights for themselves?’, I am constantly critiquing what I see my children learning about. And within my own teaching I am always trying to teach whatever topics are in the curriculum in a way that gives my own students an experience where they get to use their reasoning skills and not just blindly follow an algorithm.

The title of this series is: Is most school math useless? Depending on what you think ‘useless’ means, you will have different answers to this question. There are different ways to define ‘useless’ but the most straight forward way is to say that something is ‘useful’ if you will one day have an opportunity to ‘use’ it for something in your life or your job. We hear all the time that if you don’t know math you won’t be able to compare two competing cell phone plans or you won’t know how big of a ladder to buy so that when you put it at an angle it still reaches the height you need it to. We are told that math is ‘useful’ in this way and while it is true that some math is useful in this way (like knowing the difference between a loan that has a 2% interest rate vs a 20% interest rate, for example), the vast majority of the math that is taught in school is absolutely not useful.

To follow Gary’s thoughtful reasoning, open the link and read the rest of his post.