For much of the late Mercantile to the end of the pre-industrial revolution era, formal education, as we understand it today, it did not really exist for the common person.

The average person would receive a bare bones education in their childhood if they were lucky and had an adequate enough school teacher or parents who had time and energy to devote to teaching them, they would learn how to read and write and do common arithmetic.

If a student was lucky enough, they might have had the chance to go to a finishing school or boarding school, receive more education in the arts, science, and mathematics beyond just simple arithmetic, and eventually either go into a business, or continue to a form of higher education.

Contrast this with the modern day. It is almost expected of an individual to go to university and complete some sort of undergraduate degree. Many jobs require some form of undergraduate degree, and there are plenty of programs that require some type of professional certificate (such as a journeyman’s or master electrician’s license).

As a result, most of the education in the world is geared towards this more professional viewpoint: Education as a means to an end, rather than education for the sake of itself. It has become a war against the tests, the grade point averages, and the knowledge itself, all for the sake of a job or a career.

One of the casualties of this war is mathematics. From an early age, we are taught how to count, how to multiply, and before we can develop an appreciation for it, we are told “you will have to know this or you will work a dead-end job at McDonald’s.”

And right there, that’s where the misunderstanding begins. Instead of seeing math as a creative language of patterns, we’re taught to see it as a punishment. No wonder people fear it.

Paul Lockheart summarizes his feelings on the matter in his short 140-page essay/novel, “The Mathematician’s Lament.” At the very beginning he asks a simple question: What if we taught music or painting the way we teach math?

While I am no professional musician, I was in bands and choirs in both college and high school. I played the trumpet and french horn, sung, acted, did speech and debate, and plenty of other traditionally creative pursuits. How these pursuits are taught aren’t like how we teach math: Rather than teaching rotely the theory and technique behind drawing, painting, music, or writing, we give students a chance to express themselves and in doing so they start to learn and refine the technique.

Contrast this with how we teach math. We learn how to count at an early age. It’s just as natural and normal as learning to read or write. Math is a form of language, a way of expressing oneself. While the language has rules and is quite formal, that formality adds a constraint that tends to be where creativity thrives. However, due to the nature of modern education, that creativity is often snuffed out for rote memorization and boredom.

This is exactly why I say math isn’t scary it’s just been taught wrong. When you treat it like music or art, as play, the fear disappears.

What we get wrong about math, as students, former students, young adults and former young adults alike, is the false sense that math is not creative. That it is a dry, boring, and rote subject for dry, boring, and rote people. However, this isn’t just the farthest from the truth, it is the exact opposite: Math is one of the most creative, artistic, and expression-based fields out there. To study math is to study humanity.

The Joy and Beauty of Math

In this series, I want to you to go on a journey with me. Whether you are an expert in math, a student struggling through algebra, or someone who wants to relearn what they never, really, truly learned in high school it doesn’t matter. Together, we’ll work from the ground up and relearn how to find joy and beauty in math.

Long way will explore all sorts of concepts in math from numbers to geometry will relearn the dreaded al algebra that made you hate math in the first place, overview all of the seemingly Naughton connected ideas and concepts that when normally presented in school, fill us with anxiety and dread, but we’ll do so in a way that is natural and creative.

Well, we can’t change how school is that would require a fundamental uprooting of the entire system that exists to this point we can certainly take time on our own to love and appreciate and enjoy math for what it is a creative experience that is just fundamental as painting, drawing music or writing.

To understand how math can be fun and exciting we should think of math as a playful experience. Something we get interested in curious about we might think we don’t have the “math brain” but then again I’m not a professional musician and I do know how to play a few instruments. I have a sibling who I think definitely has a “Music brain.” he’s so exceptional Music that by the time I publish this video you’ll be very close to being called doctor Chris coded Brother.

He has a knack and aptitude that naturally exists for music, but does that mean that I can’t appreciate it not in the slightest I could still learn how to pick up a guitar relearn the piano maybe even try my hand at singing again in a acquire.

You don’t need to have a “math brain" in order to appreciate math math exists for itself. It’s something that we humans created alongside writing, dancing, and music. And like with anything, it’s a skill that we grow as we use it like any other creative pursuit.

So let’s learn how to grow it!

Numbers

I want us to start by booking numbers the very first thing we learned when we were little on top of learning our ABCs we also just naturally learned how to count maybe from one to 10 1 to 20 doesn’t really matter. We start counting around the same time that we started learning how to use our letters.

Not long after that, we quickly began to associate our letters with numeric values one for one item 2 for two items, three for three items and so on and so forth. The higher we could count more numbers we knew.

Maybe we would stack blocks or we would count money or some other object something small and easy to mess with we would learn that we could do a couple of different things we could divide our candy into groups or take our candy from groups and make it into one big pile like it Halloween if you’re familiar with Halloween.

We learn how to remove a certain amount of money when we paid for something and add a certain amount of money whenever we work a job.

Very quickly, and not long after learning how to count we’ve already discovered the four basic operations of math: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

For many people, this is about as far as you’ll ever need to go with math, at least in a professional sense. But obviously this is going to be a whole series so there’s a lot more to math than just simple numbers.

But before we continue, I want you to kind of grab something you can count and I want you to start playing around with what you know about numbers right now and make it focused to addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

I want you to pause and think about some of the different principles you learn as you play around with it and if you don’t wanna play around with it, that’s fine. Maybe you can follow along with the example. I’m going to have right here.

Here we have eight boxes in the question I wanna ask is if we wanted to group our boxes into groups of two how many different groups would we have?

Maybe you can find eight of something or make eight dots and you can just start grouping them together after you’re done you see that we’re left with four if we had eight or something whenever we want that something to be boxes shoes hats funny YouTube channels, and we wanted to group them into groups of two we would have four groups that’s all division is separating things out into groups and seeing how many groups are left over.

Likewise, with physical objects when we divide numbers, we are left with a numerical representation of how many groups exist. This process of division is usually the most confusing for a lot of students and many students often don’t understand the relationship between fractions and division. All a fraction is is a representation of division, dividing into groups and objects.

If I have for over two, that means, I want to take four boxes and divide them into groups of two or left with two or two group groups. But what about the other way around? I want to take two boxes and divide them into four groups. We can’t just make more boxes magically appear. We just have two boxes in a group of four meaning we have 2/4 of a group which is equal as you can see to 1/2 and already we’ve discovered some other common areas of math we can reduce down our fractions into easier forms. We can also move things into fractions and represent our numbers. That way fractions are just parts of groups and likewise our parts of numbers just a few minutes of playing just letting ourselves go and have fun. We’ve already explored some pretty foundational areas of mathematics areas that may scare you or freak you out or were you in reality they’re quite simple and they’re fun and if you didn’t think this was fun well at least try give it a shot. Try to make it enjoyable as enjoyable as possible. Find ways to make it fun and playful because again math is about creativity and play having fun with it.

Shapes

For our next example, I want you to get a piece of paper. Draw a square and give a side a length. Don’t worry about feet, inches or centimeters right now. just put a number somewhere. What are some things you notice right away about it? You might notice that ever side is the same length, or that if you cut it in half, you get a triangle.

In fact, you might notice that this triangle has a right angle, just like our square does. It also splits our square in half. If a square has nothing but right angles and our triangle splits right angles in half, then that means we know something important:

If we were to add up all of the angles on the inside of the right triangle, it would be equal to the value of $A_i = A_r + \frac{A_r}{2} + \frac{A_r}{2}$, where $A_i$ is the sum of all of our interior angles, and $A_r$ is our right angle.

If this freaks you out, don’t worry, it isn’t as scary as it seems. I’m just using symbols to represent an idea in short hand. You know that the 🐶 emoji means “dog” and I could use “🚶🐕💩” to mean “I took my dog on a walk so that he could go potty.” However, it is pretty open to interpretation. It could also mean “My pet dog, my pet poo, and I were walking.” That’s the beauty of our “normal” language. It does allow room for a lot of creative interpretation.

Math, on the other hand, needs to be well-defined and specific. $1$ needs to mean 1, and $\pi$ needs to represent pi. There can’t be any confusion about what $1 + 1$ equals. If $1$ can mean 1 AND it can mean $2$, then we are going to get confused. That’s why we even have formulas in the first place: They represent fundamental truths about objects and ideas in math. We’ll be working a lot with this shorthand as we go along, but we’ll introduce it slowly and a a guide to help you learn, not to confuse you.

If you are wondering how we can explore math creatively, something I recall from a visual media class is this: “Creativity love constraint.” Put yourself into a box and you will naturally try to find ways around it. In fact, by just playing around with shapes, numbers, and formulas, we can come up with trigonometery all on our own.

By allowing math to become a form of play, we let go of the anxiety and frustration that often haunts us when we go to math class, prepare for a math test, or are quized on a subject we might not be as familiar with. I know this method works because of my personal life.

I failed statistics twice. I got a 36 on my college algebra final and I barely pass my trigonometry class by the skin of my teeth. I HATED math. As a result, my degree is in communications and more specifically in business communications strategy. I wanted to be a lawyer because of how much I hated math. By choosing to learn math in a new way, in a way that allow me to make it fun without the pressure of school, I was finally able to really dig into why math is amazing and beauitiful.

So while we’ve done a little bit of exploration so far, we’re going to start our first video in the series by re-talking about numbers, giving names to things, and thinking in a fun way about math and more importantly learning how to overcome our anxiety and fear surrounding math problems.

But throughout all of this, I want you to remember if you keep things:

  1. Much of our knowledge about math exists because people were willing to be creative, to play around with ideas, and to allow themselves to think.
  2. Many of these things are fundamentally true. Because they are logically true, we can arrive to them ourselves if we give ourselves enough space and time.
  3. You are not “too stupid” for math. If you are a human, then you are built for math.
  4. Allow yourself to play around. Give yourself time to draw with things and be curious about the world around us. That’s what really math is about.

Math is not something to fear. It’s not a test score, it’s not a punishment, and it’s not reserved for geniuses. Math is a creative pursuit — just like drawing, writing, or playing music. And when we treat it as creativity and play, we can learn anything in math.

So let’s go on this journey together, and learn math from the very beginning — the way it should have been taught all along.