If you work or study in a technical field — particularly if you’re in math itself — you get used to a particular type of reaction when you tell someone what you do. It’s far from universal, but frequently the response is something like, “I was never very good at math” or “Math just wasn’t my thing.” You learn to get used to it, but really, I’m sick of it.
It’s not that it’s not true. Probably these people really are bad at math. Probably it was always their worst subject. I’m just tired of no one feeling bad about it. These kinds of sentiments are very common, but imagine how weird it would be if you replaced “math” with “English” or “reading.” Do you think authors, when they tell people they write for a living, ever get told “I was just never very good with words” or “I’m just not a reading person”? They obviously don’t, because it’s not acceptable to be lacking in reading skills. Some people are, but they would never go around saying so, and they usually work very hard to get better. Somehow it’s become dishonorable to admit English is a bad subject for you, but perfectly fine to say the same for math.
It’s really sad that in a technical age, where more and more people are engineers, scientists and computer programmers, we don’t have this deep societal appreciation for math and science. The same thing that makes people freely admit their math skills also affects college curricula. Look at the required curricula at most liberal arts colleges, which proudly proclaim the value of the “well-rounded” education that they give. There are very few math/science/computer/engineering classes, and extremely few math classes in particular. What requirements there are can always be filled by worthless classes. Then look at the curricula for technical, math/science-focused schools. They always have a substantial humanities requirement, and a totally unscientific survey of people I know has found that there tend to be few joke courses to fill those requirements, and that most students don’t take them. Which schools really give the most well-rounded education?
In this day and age, there is no excuse for brushing off math. It’s tough if you’re bad at it, especially since faking competency is a lot harder in math than in the humanities. Nevertheless, brushing it off and not caring is not an acceptable defense mechanism. There’s a part of me that really wants, next time I hear someone say “I was always bad at math” to respond with “Well, I guess you’re just stupid.” It’s obviously not the correct response, but at least it’d move the average in the right direction.
Update: some follow-up comments here.
July 18th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
I was always bad at math - and now I work in finance. How? Microsoft Excel. I would be making a lot less without having learned it. I think it’s tools like this that make a lack of math knowledge easier to navigate.
July 24th, 2008 at 11:43 pm
[...] presents an editorial on Being Bad at Math posted at It’s the Thought that Counts. This post is about the popular idea that it’s [...]
July 26th, 2008 at 5:06 am
[...] presents an editorial on Being Bad at Math posted at It’s the Thought that Counts. This post is about the popular idea that it’s [...]
July 26th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
[...] those of you, ahem, less mathically inclined, try the post on being bad at math or for a more positive slant, math history on the internet. (if you go there, don’t miss the [...]
July 28th, 2008 at 1:42 am
Progressive Conservative…
What do you do when the built-in functions are wrong? Actually, how do you check them to know which ones are wrong in the first place?
I’ve been dealing with bugs in Excel since the early days. Some of them get fixed after a decade or so, but sometimes to newly buggy versions - and sometimes the fixes are worse. You really need to know what you’re doing to use Excel with any confidence.
It’s better than it used to be, but Microsoft knew many of the functions were buggy for version after version after version before they fixed many of them.
At least the std dev function is better now. Wow, that one used to suck.
July 28th, 2008 at 2:20 am
I was never very good at math, either. Oh, I can deal with the ordinary stuff that you need to do engineering or geology, like calculus and differential equations; but real, honest-to-goodness, abstract-as-hell *math* baffles me. I used to be embarrassed about it, but life is too short to worry about it much. I’ve also been able to do both engineering and geology competently without it.
July 28th, 2008 at 3:10 am
ProgCon (sounds like a convention), I wonder if you’re falling into the math=calculation trap. Certainly Excel will save you in sheer tedium of grinding out sums and products, but if you don’t have some clear notion of what you’re trying to make the numbers do, it’s easy to be led astray.
July 28th, 2008 at 4:03 am
I was bad at math, and I’m actually ashamed of that. I wish I had put some more effort into it when I was kid. I could be reaping the benefit right now. (It’s not like I’m exactly stupid — I managed to earn a PhD in formal linguistics, during which process I learned that, if you want to have some real competence, you need to have a decent understanding of set theory, lambda calculus, and various other subrealms of math).
July 28th, 2008 at 8:54 am
I’m good at math, but I’m not a very good writer. I’m not ashamed of that.
July 28th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
I was great at math, always was. Essay writing on the other hand I am hopeless at.
July 28th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Tee hee, so far, almost 1/2 of the comments start with the apology, “I was never good at math”!
I’m fine with math when I sit down and take the time to pay attention and figure it all out. However, I very rarely took the time to do so when I was in high school, and I consequently got it in my head that I wasn’t good at math and that I didn’t like it. It’s like exercising for me, though. When I’m not doing it, I hate it. When I AM doing it, I start to enjoy it and feel all happy inside.
July 28th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
People do freely admit to being bad at English. They just mask it by saying they hate it or find it boring instead of saying they are bad at it. Frequently, among my college-aged students these are people who say that they are good at math or science, and somehow they think this means that I don’t have the right to expect coherent arguments from them. Personally, I think that their math and science background ought to make them better at logical argumentation, but somehow it doesn’t.
I’m proud of the fact that I was good at both math and writing. I managed to get beyond calculus into linear algebra and differential equations before I decided that I liked literary puzzles more than I liked math puzzles. In fact, it was the very fact that the math came easier to me that I majored in English.
July 29th, 2008 at 11:08 am
At a recent party, I was asked by a lyricist/playwright for some pointers on how a mathematician might respond to a situation. Now, I gave up after 5 years of college math (excluding high-school calculus), but I manage to cultivate an aura of knowing a little about it.
The character was an accountant! Um, it seems to me that accounting is to math as crawling is to ballet. I tried to explain the difference, briefly. With futility.
But I then geared down to the idea that the public may perceive accountants as mathematicians, and tried to give some useful advice. It was really just the essence of nerd culture that she wanted from me. Lehrer help me!
July 29th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Actually, I have to say there are lots of people who say they ‘just were never very good at reading’ or ‘reading just wasn’t their thing’. And, yes, they say it with a level of pride. I’ve gotten this often when I was in high school and now when I read in public. I read a lot and people seem to think it’s totally okay to come up to me and bother me. People were always asking how I could do such a thing. Wasn’t it so boring? Isn’t it hard? So, no, it’s not just maths.
By the way, I was good at maths when I didn’t have a teacher who sucked at teaching. Every time I had a teacher who was bad at teaching, I did poorly in maths. I found a certain peace in doing algebra in front of the television.
July 29th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
I have tried the response, “Oh I understand your shame! I was never very good at home repair.” I explain that my father only knew the name “pair of pliers” but never how to use them. Then I say that I learned which way screws turn in vector calculus. The “I understand your shame,” answer does put people off. Maybe not always a good idea.
The other day a banker was on the radio complaining about the new risk assessment tools that were being imposed on his industry by regulators. He had the audacity to say that these rules were unworkable because you had to be a mathematician to understand him. I thought that he could afford to hire a mathematician for about 1/2 of his salary and thereby avoid the monumental losses that his industry has sustained.
August 1st, 2008 at 12:11 am
There are maybe just as many people who don’t read as people who admit they aren’t good at math. It reminds me of this Bill Hicks clip when he talks about reading a book in a waffle house:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcPQhS8W8g4
August 2nd, 2008 at 3:39 pm
[...] all the comments on my post about people who readily admit to being bad at math, as well as the discussion occurring on various other blogs, I figured it was time to respond to [...]
August 2nd, 2008 at 11:35 pm
My dyslexia was not diagnosed until my ’30’s and it severely handicapped my math education. I learned to read well because words have internal context and can be reconstructed from the rest of the sentence. Not so with numbers, and no discussion of interesting mathematical logic concepts was allowed until I’d solved forty identical, trivial problems that I could not interpret accurately. Though my lack of success was perceived as lack of effort (because I could do math verbally) I was trying my heart out and dying inside. Eventually, I gave up.
Until adulthood, that is, and I’ve spent years trying to catch up as well as I can. Many important questions just aren’t approachable without math. So I think it’s important to identify kids with perceptual handicaps and make sure they don’t fall through the cracks. Because weakness in math does make me stupid in areas where I should be smart.
August 3rd, 2008 at 8:02 pm
Hate to say it, but way too many people are really proud they’re lousy readers and writers.
I announce I’m a writer, and I get a sizeable subset of folks who puff up, proclaim their inability to focus on a book for more than thirty seconds,boast that English was their worst subject, and their writing sucks in all ways. As if this is a badge of honor.
It’s not just mathematical ignorance that’s celebrated in this country. It’s all ignorance.
August 26th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
In engineering we seem to take pride in our inability to write, we take one first year english course in second year (sometimes dubbed english for retards). the fact that I knew what a thesis was and could put together an interesting sentence put me waaaay ahead of the pack. Being bad at something and being proud of it could be the new definition of human.
October 9th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
[...] Depicting science as something reducible to sound bites and cute animations ultimately harms science literacy rather than helping it. It also encourages people who have dismissed the entire field of mathematics as not worth their time, since it implies you can understand science while being bad at math. [...]
November 6th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
I’m really bad at maths. I don’t really know why. I know how to solve equations. But complicated equations or story problems confuses me so much. And a friend of mine is like a real math-whiz. He always get straight A+’s for maths without even studying for tests and his school math’s curriculum is much harder than mine (his school is one of the top schools and has really high standards).
So I started thinking “Am I stupid or something?” I’ll be starting college on January. But I’ve like forgotten everything I’ve studied before. And I’m feeling really HOPELESS right now. I don’t really know if I’m really stupid or I just didn’t put much effort in maths. And the thing is I’m really not interested in maths.
I have no problem with writing though. I’d rather write thousands of words of essay rather than doing math problems.