{"id":847,"date":"2007-10-25T11:11:28","date_gmt":"2007-10-25T03:11:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/?p=847"},"modified":"2014-11-19T08:24:18","modified_gmt":"2014-11-19T00:24:18","slug":"is-math-useful-poll-results","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/learn-math\/is-math-useful-poll-results-847","title":{"rendered":"Is math useful? - Poll results"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently I ran a poll on Interactive Mathematics<\/a> and asked users:<\/p>\n

\n

The math you are studying now - how useful is it for your future job?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The response from 1000 voters was quite encouraging:<\/p>\n

\n

Very useful: 51%
\nNot useful: 24%
\nSomewhat useful: 14%
\nDon't know yet: 11% <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Most users of the site are currently studying mathematics at school or college level.<\/p>\n

The result is encouraging to me because for years I needed to respond to this kind of question from my students:<\/p>\n

\n

What are we doing this stuff for? We're never gonna use it!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And then adults would love to say things like:<\/p>\n

\n

You teach math? But it's so useless! I have never used any of that stuff since school.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And even in a recent squareCircleZ post, It's fun to hate math<\/a>, math educators like Underwood Dudley are throwing up their hands saying:<\/p>\n

\n

... algebra and subjects beyond it are, for almost everyone, not practical, nor are there any applications that anyone needs<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I was starting to get the impression that the vast majority of students (and people generally) believed that mathematics was just an exercise in passing exams. And that concerns me because I have really enjoyed finding out what all that stuff was for when I started to teach more applied engineering mathematics. A large portion of my working life has been trying to convince students (and adults) about the utility of math.<\/p>\n

In this (very unscientific) poll at least, the majority of readers (65%) believe the math they are studying has relevance for their careers.<\/p>\n

Considering the 11% of users who responded with \"I don't know yet\", at least they have not been turned off by the strong societal pressures against math and are keeping an open mind.<\/p>\n

You can see the results of previous IntMath polls<\/a>. [The current poll asks about the use of math software. You can vote on any page on Interactive Mathematics<\/a>.]<\/p>\n

See the 9 Comments<\/a> below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent IntMath poll indicates that the majority of students feel that math will be useful to them in their future careers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[130],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}