…A thought provoking question that popped into my mind one day while solving a MEJJI puzzle.
Why do we bother studying mathematical courses in school? Is it just to pass the exams, or is there more to it. Afterall, when you graduate, you don’t find people shouting questions at you on the streets or at work, “by the way, what’s 2x+y, if x is 3 and y is 5?”. That would be indeed, a most bizarre thing to ask anyone anywhere outside a classroom – a mathematics class-room.
So, if you are like me and studied the sciences. Surely, you must feel that you’ve spent several years, learning unuseful mathematical concepts that are never to be used again in the real world. Better still, if you were really good at maths, you might indeed want people to shout at you, “by the way, what’s 2x + y…”, so you can show-off your mathematical abilities. But, no. Once, you’ve left college, that opportunity just never seems to come by anymore.
Ok, so, may be you need to step back a bit and understand why all those mathematical concepts were being taught to you in the first place. Surely, your lecturers must have recognised that you would not need to answer mathematical questions anymore after leaving college. Or,… may be not, as they themselves have continued to answer mathematical questions even after leaving college (as lecturers). Hence, may be someone needs to tell them those maths problems will be useless to you in the real world.
Let me step back a bit, before getting carried away. Besides, if you are a graduate, you already see where I’m going and have most probably thought of these points before and have your own personal conclusions.
My personal conclusion, regardless of usefulness of subject outside college walls is,… Colleges fundamentally try to teach the art of learning using all the different subjects as a tool: maths, physics, chemistry, business, geography, etc. The exams are a way to check cognitive ability – how well you have learnt to learn. And the certificate represents how good a learner you have been. That’s all!
So, one can think of the whole schooling process as brain development, using different “tools”. This is why, after leaving college, we may tend to lose the brain workout we got while at school. Depending on the job you end up doing, the built-up brain muscles may begin to relax and you may begin to feel you are not as sharp as you were at college. Well, yes you are not, if you have not been exercising your brain. Also, no one is testing you now, so you may not really have a reason to be as sharp.
For me, this is where I feel solving puzzles comes into the picture. The more I think about this point, the more I see that all these learning tools are fundamentally,… wait for it,… “puzzles”. However, as they are not ‘fun’ enough to be called puzzles, they have been somewhat relegated to the four corners of college walls. And in some cases lecturers have tried to use the word “quiz” to soften the rigour!
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