Why MATH is important

   We all remember sitting in elementary and high school math as the teacher strains to find a purpose for us to learn things like:

1. The Pythagorean theorem 
2. The Quadratic equation
3. Logarithms 
4. Imaginary numbers
5. Sines, Cosines, Tangents
6. Geometric rules and axioms
7. etc.. etc.. etc..

     For many kids, if you didn't find some fascination with numbers, you were bored to tears.   Many teachers feel you have to find a purpose for math in order to teach math.  But for many people, the math being taught only has use in teaching ... more math.  So for many kids, they say to themselves, "I'm not going to be a scientist or an engineer.   So why do I have to learn this stuff?"   They then begin to shut themselves off from learning it and their only goal is to just "get through it and graduate. 

     A while back I even heard that schools were giving into this response by providing students with a dumb-ed down version called "Every Day Math" in which math was taught with the idea that it must have a use in every day life to keep their interest.  To me this is just wrong headed for much of math has no real day-to-day usage (I dare you to find an everyday use for the imaginary number 'i') and even if it did most kids would argue that they can use their calculator on their smart phone to do most of the work anyway.

Building a better brain

     Math's importance isn't in how we apply it directly every day.  Instead, math's purpose is to simply enable teachers to teach basic logic to children and therefore, "build a better brain".   There is simply no other method given to man to do this other than math.  (the brain is the one organ in the body that has the power to fix itself)

    To illustrate this, consider going to a professional football game.  As you watch the lineman

(offense and defense) come out of their locker rooms.  Ask yourself this: "How did they get that big?".   Of course part of the answer is genetics/DNA, but a large part of it is that they spent many hours in the weight-room lifting increasingly heavier and heavier weights.   Would they have ever told their high school coach, "Coach I don't want to weight-lift.  It's boring and hard, my arms hurt when I am done and other guys can bench so much more than me. Can't we just play football instead?  I have no desire to become a professional weight-lifter.  Why do you make me do this?"    Of course not.  Every athlete knows the importance of lifting weights to build strong health muscles (even runners weight-lift a little).  Next consider this, when you see the football players come out on the field, do they carry dumbbells and barbells out on the field with them?   Are they doing curls and over-head-presses while they are standing on the sidelines?  Does the use of these barbells play ANY role in helping the team win the game by showing how much they can lift ?  Not a bit.   Yet, without a doubt, those weights helped make them a better football player.  Sure they could build muscles by pushing each other around the field during practice or doing other kinds of exercise such as: pushups, swimming, biking, heck even dance for that matter.  But none of those activities comes near to weightlifting for building large strong muscles.

    The same goes for math.  Most math (especially higher level math) has no direct use in day to day life just like those barbells have no direct use in the game of football.  But math plays an integral role in helping us think logically and rationally as opposed to emotionally.  Math is the weight-room of the logical mind in which humans must struggle to make new logical connections.  Let's look at the similarities:

For weightlifting to be effective the person must:

1. Workout multiple days per week
2. Do repetitive sets of a weight (not just 1 lift) 
3. Must use different kinds of weights to work out different groups of muscles.
4. Start with smaller weights in the beginning and increase the size of the weights over time to challenge the body to grow 

For math to be effective the student must:

1. Attend class multiple days per week
2. Do repetitive assignments doing the same type of problem over and over again
3. Must learn different areas of math (basic,number theory,fractions,geometry,word problems..)
4. Start with lower level (basic) math and move up through algebra, geometry, trig and calculus to challenge the brain to develop better logic/thinking skills.

   And just like there may be other ways to build muscle (swimming, biking, hiking, dancing etc..), so also other subjects such as history, literature, music, art can help the brain grow and develop,  but none of those methods comes close to transforming the brain in logical reasoning than math.

IT'S THE MOST EFFECTIVE METHOD!

     Consider the first time you learned 1+1=2 ... POW! your brain made a new connection that wasn't there before.  It didn't happen by accident.  It was taught to you.  You then went on to learn 1+2 = 3 ... POW!  another connection was made and to solidify that connection you needed to do repetitive homework in which you added 1+1=2 10 times and then did the same for 1+2 then 1+3 ...      Later your teacher showed you that 2 + 2 + 2 +2 = 8  and you can come to the same answer faster by doing  2 x 4 = 8 (or 4 x 2) and now your brain was learning how to "group"  and do math faster with a new function called multiplication.    Your teacher may have even conducted in-class verbal drills in which the whole class repeated after the teach a whole table of multiplication saying: "1 times 1 is 1", "1 times 2 is 2", all the way up to "10 times 10 is 100".

Boring?

Probably.

But necessary.

    Have you every memorized lines for a play or a speech?   You probably practiced your lines out loud while standing in front of a mirror over and over again.   Why?  Because you knew instinctively that using more of your senses (hearing, seeing, speaking ) will enforce the memory faster and better than just reading the lines quietly to yourself in your mind.   So also math (which combines logic + memory) needs this process as well.  If I asked you "What is 5 time 4 ?"  you would probably say "20" in less than a second.  Did you calculate that by visualizing 5 rows of 4 balls and then count all the balls in your head?  No.  Instead you recalled that answer from your second or third grade math class in which you learned 5x4=20.  This memory allows your brain to concentrate of higher concepts and not get bogged down counting "balls".  This memory work also paved the way for your brain to memorize other concepts down the road such as how to add or multiply fractions or do long division or find the length of a hypotenuse (or even recall what a hypotenuse is).   
 
Efficient way to try out ideas

  But math does more than just give us a platform to add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers.   It allows us to rationally think out the future without it actually happening and in the end it saves time, money and energy.   I don't need to buy a whole roll of carpet if I don't need to.   I don't need to try 1000 different methods to see which one works, I can test them mathematically.  Thomas Edison (the inventor of the light bulb) is often used as an example of how hard work and perseverance can pay off.   When looking for a filament for his light bulb he tried over 1000 different things (including human hair) and nothing worked until he came across carbon thread.  While his method did eventually find a solution, it was very wasteful and many of life's problems are way too complex for this kind of tinkering. Just imagine NASA using Edison's approach to send a man to the moon.  I don't think they would have found anyone willing to be the first astronaut (ie guinea pig) to try it out.  A person's math ability allows them to think ahead to a future that doesn't exist yet and to create a pathway to get there for others to follow.

Solve day to day problems in our jobs

    Studies have shown that people who were competent in math make more money regardless of their career path than those who did poorly in math.   This isn't because they can add 11+15 faster than anyone in their office or because they were able to solve a quadratic equation in a meeting when no one else could (that only happens in the movies).   The reason is simply because they were able to think logically and find solutions to problems that give them an advantage over other competitors.   Take for example, UPS.  A truck driver in UPS found that he used less gas and got his routes done FASTER by only taking right-hand-turns.  Because of this he never got stuck waiting for a left-turn light (3 rights = 1 left) which happen less often and for shorter periods of time than straight-ahead lights.  His logic was then deployed across all of their UPS drivers (their GPS system even now uses it when selecting a route) and they were able to save time and gas.   That driver didn't know it, but he owed his good idea to some math teachers he had along the way when he was younger.

Create a society of  "free thinkers" 

     Finally, beyond earning a living, math makes for a better world and better citizens by enabling them to "think for themselves" rather than others to do the thinking for them.  A society cannot be free unless all of its citizens are first able to think for themselves and make their own decisions.

Take for example the following question:  

                                        "Is healthcare a right(A) or a privilege(B) ?"

      Right now your brain is calculating the answer to that social problem.   You may have considered "B" but that sounds like you are an elitist and don't care about the poor.   But "A" has implications of me needing to provide it to others for "free" which you know is not entirely possible.   But A is less elitist than B and may lead to less arguing or name-calling. etc etc etc.    But the REAL answer to the question is "C" -- none of the above.    "Wait a minute!" you say, "You didn't give C as an option.  You just made that up!".   But in reality, I didn't.  It was there all the time.   To illustrate this let's change the question to something less controversial :

                               "What is your favorite animal: cats (A) or dogs (B) ?"  

Here is a Venn-diagram illustrating the choice.

Notice the "yellow" area?  That represents everything that is NOT "cats" or "dogs".   In mathematics its referred to as the "universe" and constitutes everything outside of the 2 choices.   It's always there in every circumstance.   Yet many never see it.  Questions posed about things like healthcare are meant to corner people into making only one choice.  In this case A.   This is the choice the questioner wants you to make so they can manipulate you into thinking like them rather than think for yourself and choose "C" as your answer (such as, "It's a PRODUCT you either want or you don't want.  It's up to the individual.  Maybe they think they don't need it.  Maybe they want to take care of themselves").  Math, therefore,  helps create a world of "free thinkers" who don't allow themselves to be boxed in by others and their view of the world.

    These are the reasons every child (and adult) needs to learn math regardless of their future employment.  For by doing so, we can remain a free, efficient and rationally thinking society that can find the answers to the everyday problems it faces.