I was also annoyed for the opposite reason. I had assumed until then that math was more about application of what’s been proven rather than revisiting the proofs. I think the majority of students feel what I felt; that math got a lot less applied and a lot more esoteric in the academia.

Some people out there do both. As a physicist, I mainly use applications of what's been proven.

IMO, good math ed is balanced:

- Enrichment, visual, and speedy stuff to build intuition

- Proofy stuff to build rigor and reasoning ability

- Rote stuff to build arithmetic and symbolic manipulation skills

Ideally, it would be balanced this way from kindergarten to mid-undergrad. In practice, most students rotate through these.

Yeah, people who say the rote stuff isn't part of math don't get it, or they have a simplistic view of math that isn't as bad as the ones who don't know of the proofy side of math and think it is only rote and bland calculation. It's all of it and you need the rote stuff to build intuition too in addition to the things like visual "proofs" and graphs.

You do not build intuition about things without having some amount of those things in your head which is memorization.

Same. I feel robbed of something that could have radically changed my life. I’ve always suspected that I could have had an aptitude for math, but was too young to be able to articulate it. I just knew that something was wrong with how it was being taught.

It’s a bit late for me now at 38, or at least it feels that way. I never took college math so HS-level algebra and geometry is my current level of understanding and sometimes it really hampers my programming ability.

If you find it too tedious to self-study on your own (there are books for this purpose), then you can consider taking a trig or calc course at a local community college. Just think of it as a temporary hobby.

Or go for one of these gamified math tutorials.

For instance: this one teaches geometric proofs without mentioning the formalism, just letting you "unlock" the tools from a few "axiom" starter tools.

https://www.euclidea.xyz/

Wtf this is awesome! This should be better publicized. Thank you!!

This is very nicely done. I run a training group and I will use this for my students. Thank you for posting this resource.

I feel for you.

I stopped after discrete math and analysis-lite class but I wish I took more algorithm and higher level math classes to be better at my craft. It's also hard to take classes when you have competing priorities when you're 30+. I don't know your current situation but I feel like you can totally do it since you have renewed determination for learning.

I consider the whole math educational curriculum a waste of time because no math teacher or textbook ever taught me WTF math is supposed to mean. There was an absolute lack of context to basically everything beyond very basic arithmetic, and I ended up hating math.

It was only when I got into programming and it taught me math is actually much more than just meaningless letters and numbers that I finally came around to appreciating it. Programming taught me math is the language spoken by the universe, anything in this universe could be explained with math and it was truly a mindblowing paradigm shift.

Math education needs a complete redo from the ground up, it teaches nothing of value and only serves to mass-produce math-haters to the detriment of us all.

Unfortunately there are not sufficient good mathematics teachers around to impart this level of understanding to students in school. Not that the teachers we have are trying to be bad, just realistically if you have a mathematics competency and good critical thinking skills, you are able to earn 2-3X as much not being a teacher, so most people do that.

you do get proofs in HS geometry