NafeeJ
Nov 1, 2018
Undergraduate / SOCIAL DOGMA OF MATHEMATICS - Common App Essay on Math (Prompt #3) [2]
Hi! I'm looking for some last minute edits on my essay. Thanks!
Prompt: Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?
People really don't like math all that much. Ever since I was a kid, I've always known that people didn't like math and wondered why. Whether I liked the convenient solutions, I didn't like all my other classes relatively, or because I felt I had to like math due to family pressure, I always told myself that I liked math. However, the way that I viewed mathematics was fundamentally flawed. I thought that math was purely systematic, that there was only one way or a set, that was taught to me, to solve problems. For the majority of my life, I never understood what math truly was and just viewed it very statically, as just some numbers you do stuff to in specific ways to get a desired result. I remember always hating word problems in math, and looking back on it it was a true testament to how badly my view of math was.
Math is a language. I feel like if I were to tell this to anyone they would just think I'm being pretentious. Despite this, I carry on with this mantra as my new view on mathematics. The first mathematicians were not even really thinking about math; they were just some people who wanted to know how the world worked. From its first conception, math has been a method by which we further our understanding of the world around us. Math is the base of our understanding of the world. From math to physics to chemistry to biology and every other school of academia in between. All of this built upon the language that people from the past centuries and millennia have used to explain the world, mathematics. With this, it hurts to see people view mathematics how I did.
The fixed way of thinking about mathematics was my view until roughly 11th grade. I'm not going to be pretentious and say that I had some huge epiphany during 11th grade about math; I had just started watching a lot of videos about math on YouTube and slowly started to understand it much better than I did before. Since this new thought of thinking about math, I had not just started understanding how math worked in my classes, but I had started to genuinely enjoy it. For example, simultaneously learning about the unit circle in precalculus and then learning about oscillatory motion and waves in physics made me appreciate how perfectly math connected with the how the world worked. I would consider that as the crux of my appreciation of mathematics and ever since, I have wanted for people to see that math isn't the bland subject that next to all teachers make it to be. The teaching methodology is at the core of the problem; they force equations to be memorized rather than explaining their derivation, don't show the applications of math, etc. As a result of a combination of these things, most people just hate math and find it to be useless. Currently, I am in calculus and I can genuinely say that I am enjoying its content greater than any of my other classes. It is just really nice to see because calculus deals with ideas that build upon each other that manage to collectively solve only a couple core problems that have a beautiful solution. Then, seeing this application to my current physics class (which is algebra based but is combined with another calculus-based physics class) starting with the position, velocity, and acceleration vs time graphs and going to solving the pressure on areas of an irregularly shaped object submerged in a fluid. Seeing math in this new way has turned a subject that I did not care about studying to one that I actively look forward to.
Word Count: 632
Hi! I'm looking for some last minute edits on my essay. Thanks!
Prompt: Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?
SOCIAL DOGMA OF MATHEMATICS
People really don't like math all that much. Ever since I was a kid, I've always known that people didn't like math and wondered why. Whether I liked the convenient solutions, I didn't like all my other classes relatively, or because I felt I had to like math due to family pressure, I always told myself that I liked math. However, the way that I viewed mathematics was fundamentally flawed. I thought that math was purely systematic, that there was only one way or a set, that was taught to me, to solve problems. For the majority of my life, I never understood what math truly was and just viewed it very statically, as just some numbers you do stuff to in specific ways to get a desired result. I remember always hating word problems in math, and looking back on it it was a true testament to how badly my view of math was.
Math is a language. I feel like if I were to tell this to anyone they would just think I'm being pretentious. Despite this, I carry on with this mantra as my new view on mathematics. The first mathematicians were not even really thinking about math; they were just some people who wanted to know how the world worked. From its first conception, math has been a method by which we further our understanding of the world around us. Math is the base of our understanding of the world. From math to physics to chemistry to biology and every other school of academia in between. All of this built upon the language that people from the past centuries and millennia have used to explain the world, mathematics. With this, it hurts to see people view mathematics how I did.
The fixed way of thinking about mathematics was my view until roughly 11th grade. I'm not going to be pretentious and say that I had some huge epiphany during 11th grade about math; I had just started watching a lot of videos about math on YouTube and slowly started to understand it much better than I did before. Since this new thought of thinking about math, I had not just started understanding how math worked in my classes, but I had started to genuinely enjoy it. For example, simultaneously learning about the unit circle in precalculus and then learning about oscillatory motion and waves in physics made me appreciate how perfectly math connected with the how the world worked. I would consider that as the crux of my appreciation of mathematics and ever since, I have wanted for people to see that math isn't the bland subject that next to all teachers make it to be. The teaching methodology is at the core of the problem; they force equations to be memorized rather than explaining their derivation, don't show the applications of math, etc. As a result of a combination of these things, most people just hate math and find it to be useless. Currently, I am in calculus and I can genuinely say that I am enjoying its content greater than any of my other classes. It is just really nice to see because calculus deals with ideas that build upon each other that manage to collectively solve only a couple core problems that have a beautiful solution. Then, seeing this application to my current physics class (which is algebra based but is combined with another calculus-based physics class) starting with the position, velocity, and acceleration vs time graphs and going to solving the pressure on areas of an irregularly shaped object submerged in a fluid. Seeing math in this new way has turned a subject that I did not care about studying to one that I actively look forward to.
Word Count: 632
