there are worse things in life than math

People hate math because of pre-formed ideas. You go to school, fall in love with the rebel in the leather jacket, skip classes when you can, and hate math. It's in every high school movie. Kids go to school, prepared to be confused and overwhelmed by math. It's a horrible stigma, like Americans being fat and stupid, the Land of the Free needs to get rid of.

Personally, I dont like math. Or, at least I used to. When i was smaller, I never understood the concepts or what I was supposed to being doing. No one ever explained to me what math was, or why it was even necessary in m y everyday life. At first, I thought I needed to know math only to get a good score on the SAT. However, after middle school, i realized that wasn't the only reason. We need it to function, and believe it or not, math applied in the right ways can make life easier.

Artists-the good ones-feel, experience, and observe things that have never even occured to other people. Artists are able to package their different point of views in ways that entrance us, entertain us. Math is in every form of art- dance, painting, sculpture, music, even theatre. Math is just another element artists can harness to explain the world they see, the expressions they feel, the things they observe. Art is not always math, but math is always art.

Mathematics, I feel, has been put on the back burner in math education. People are always pushing literature and reading, and while those subjects are important, I think math holds equal ground. Having a solid foundation is incredibly important. One cannot learn algerbra without understand simple addition. I went to a montesorri school from Pre-K to Third grade. For math concepts, I used tangible objects to represent the symbols on paper. For someone like me who is not visually-oriented at all, having actual objects helped me develop an understanding of math. I think if all kids had montesorri education for the early stages of math, it would help them grasp the concepts of simple mathematics.

scatterplots and our lives

Any sort of graph, people, especially teenagers, are going to avoid. They're boring, uneccesary, and never contain any information that anyone could ever care about. At least, that's what I thought. Graphs were outdated, relics of the pre-technology/cellphones/internet/everything era. However, I found out on friday, that's not not true. If applied right, they could be fun, they could be somewhat inportant, and they could possibly hold my attention for more than eight seconds.
Ms. Jalilvand showed us a graph from a TED conference that really impressed me. It was interesting, and because it was so intriguing, I learned from it. It allowed me to look at something I had never taken much thought to in a differnent light. What amazed me even more was that something as mundane (or at least what i previously thought was mundane) made me realize that.

math/life

sophomore year at BTWHSPVA is a lot better from freshman year, i think. i dont know why- my friends are the same, i'm the same, the school is the same, but i think i feel more comfortable with just everythinggg. so its nice.

anyways, i like math now. i actually understand algerbra, and im making an A.
therefore, i love it.