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<title>Ladders Go Both Ways - Comfortably Numbered</title>
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<h1>
<a href="/"><span class="left-word">Comfortably</span><span class="right-word">Numbered</span></a>
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<h2>Ladders Go Both Ways</h2>
<h4>Monday, November 20, 2017 · 5 min read</h4>
<p>Earlier this month, Frederick Koh, a Singaporean math tutor, invited me to
write a guest post for his <a href="http://www.whitegroupmaths.com">website</a>. Of course
I accepted — blogging is, after all, a conversation.</p>
<p>But what could I write about?</p>
<p>I spent the month of November on the lookout for an idea worth sharing, and
last week I found one. I follow a lot of math-educator blogs (blogging is,
after all, a conversation!), and one of my favorites is that of Dan Meyers.
Recently, Dan posted a rather provocatively-titled piece, “<a href="http://blog.mrmeyer.com/2017/dismantling-the-privilege-of-the-mathematical-1/">Dismantling the
Privilege of the Mathematical
1%</a>“.
He makes the case that those with a mathematical education — those who are
mathematically <em>privileged</em> — those who make up the mathematical 1% — they
are the ones with the responsibility to define what mathematics <em>is</em>. Dan says,
eloquently as always, that “through our action or inaction we create systems
that preserve our status as the knowers and doers of mathematics.”</p>
<p>Dan’s post made me think deeply about where I myself fit into his spectrum: I’m
hardly one of the 1% — and certainly won’t graduate with a math degree —
but at the same time, I love math, both as an activity and as a set of truths.</p>
<p>And I realized that this gives <em>me</em> a privileged position, one where I can
comment on mathematical topics from a somewhat neutral perspective. I am
neither the person who barely scraped through high school calculus, nor the
person who skipped high school calculus because it was too easy. So, trapped
between “math people” and “not a math person people”, I wish to use this post
to explore what exactly creates this divide — or, rather, explore it in a way
slightly different from what you have probably heard a dozen times already.</p>
<hr>
<p>It is almost universally acknowledged that “education is good.” More education,
says society, will lead to a happier, more prosperous world. Educate everyone,
says society.</p>
<p>I agree, of course.</p>
<p>And yet, paradoxically, we are so attached to the notion that education —
college, in my case, grad school or high school for others — is a means to
distinguish oneself from one’s peers. A degree, we argue, makes us stand out in
both the workplace and in society. The more competitive the institution, the
more valuable the degree.</p>
<p>Less enthusiastically, I agree with this as well: reality forces me to concede
the point. Why else would college admissions be so competitive? Why else would
classes be graded on curves? Why else would we even have grades in the first
place? As disturbed as I am by it, society cares very much about my academic
performance, <em>especially</em> in relation to others.</p>
<p>And therein lies the rub. Reader, are these not contradictory notions? If the
purpose of an education for an individual is to separate him or her from the
general populace, then what follows is the absurd notion that universal
education is self-defeating: that the more people we educate, the less an
education is worth to the individual.</p>
<p>How does one reconcile this? Can education in the limit benefit both the
individual and the society? As an optimist, I wish it could. And in fact I
believe it <em>can</em>, but only if we rethink what education means to the
individual.</p>
<hr>
<p>Here is what I think. I believe that too often, we conceive education to be a
ladder that lifts us — above others, if we’re fast enough — rung by rung.
The more you climb, the higher you get.</p>
<p>But too often, we forget that you can also climb <em>down</em> a ladder. That an
education can also lower the arrogant to humility and place them alongside the
less privileged, on common ground. That education builds capacity for empathy
and communication, empowering the individual but also society at large to have
a dialogue. That this view resolves the paradox of the previous section,
because both individuals <em>and</em> society benefit from the capacity for having
that dialogue.</p>
<p>What do I mean by this? Let’s return to mathematics for a moment.</p>
<p>If you are reading this blog, you most likely have been at a gathering of
mathematicians at some point in your lives. It is quite a marvellous thing to
behold: a congregation of brilliant minds sharing ideas. Mathematics as a
community has its own folklore, its own in-jokes, and its own language. You
need only to glance at sites like <a href="https://artofproblemsolving.com/community">The Art of Problem
Solving</a> or
<a href="http://www.mathmo.org/test/mathmotest.html">mathmo.org</a> to see this community
in all its glory.</p>
<p>I love it. There is charm to the way mathematicians celebrate their field,
unlike any other profession I have come across.</p>
<p>And yet, imagine being an outsider for a moment. Imagine being part of the
mathematical 99%. How would you feel if someone responded to a question of
yours with a grin, saying “left as an exercise to the reader”? Or if someone
made you use this <a href="http://www.danielallington.net/2016/09/the-latex-fetish/">weird software
package</a> with lots of
backslashes to write up your homework? Or if someone went off on a tangent
about why their coffee mug said “donut” on it? Or if someone makes an
arithmetic mistake and then says “it’s true in base 12” before you even notice
the error? Or if someone claimed a very unobvious-to-you solution was
“trivial”?</p>
<p>These phrases aren’t meant to be exclusionary. Some are common inside jokes.
Others are part of the mathematical vocabulary. The word “trivial,” after all,
has a very specific mathematical meaning — think of the “trivial group” with
one element, for example. I
<a href="https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=trivial+site:hardmath123.github.io&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8">use</a>
it all the time.</p>
<p>Yet to an outsider, they make the mathematical community seem simply
impenetrable. How am I ever going to understand all this? I can’t think that
fast!</p>
<p>“Math people” tend to be remarkably self-selecting, and I believe this is one
of the reasons why: there is a divide between the initiated and the
uninitiated, and far too few resources for the latter.</p>
<hr>
<p>Education, I believe, should be tasked with <em>bridging</em> this divide — rather
than exacerbating it as it does now. Education should give the 99% the
opportunity to join the magical world of mathematics, but education should
<em>also</em> show the 1% how to open up the world to new members. It should teach
students to write about mathematics, finding a middle ground between dense
manuscripts weighed down by Greek-letter jargon, and airy puff-pieces that
contain nothing of substance. Where will future Ian Stewarts, Martin Gardners,
and Brian Hayes come from? I myself would almost certainly be very firmly a
“not a math person” person were it not for an Ian Stewart book in my dad’s
bookshelf that taught me about Fermat’s Last Theorem and the Mandelbrot Set
when I was very young.</p>
<p>Education should also encourage the next generation of professors to move away
from lessons that consist of the copying of lecture notes onto a chalkboard,
and provide them with the tools they need to create engaging, interactive
lessons that appeal not only to those whom we believe are pre-ordained to be
mathematicians, but to artists, musicians, writers, and athletes. It should
teach students about the bigger picture of where their mathematics fits into
society, about who produces and who consumes mathematics, and why.</p>
<p>At the same time, it should explain to the mathematical 99% what exactly those
math people are on about all the time. It should teach them the mathematical
canon, help them learn the language, and help them discover the beauty that the
1% have already found.</p>
<p>Yes, such an education will produce a more diverse generation of
mathematicians, not only in terms of demographics, but also in terms of ways of
thinking. It will produce a generation that writes not only more effective
grant proposals, but also clearer papers. That’s what the individuals get out
of it.</p>
<p>But it will also inspire the mathematical community to rise up against the
tyrrany of Alice-gives-Bob-three-bananas standardized tests, to use their
passion for mathematics and their perception of its beauty to guide the
development of curriculums and lesson plans. Not to reject non-math-people as
heretics who refuse to see the light, but rather to see them as evidence of a
broken education system that failed to convey the beauty of mathematics.</p>
<p>To redefine mathematics to be the way <em>they</em> see it, because, whether or not
they realize it, the way the mathematical 1% sees mathematics — as the
pursuit of beautiful truth — is far from what the mathematical 99% sees it as
— the painfully rushed manipulation of symbols on a midterm. To <em>care</em>.</p>
<p>That’s what society gets out of it.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This post first appeared on <a href="http://www.whitegroupmaths.com/2017/11/guest-post-ladders-go-both-ways.html">White Group
Maths</a>.</p>
</blockquote>
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