It’s easy to get frustrated with math and science. You think you understand, and then come test day you don’t. Or maybe it’s not even test day. Maybe it’s just never. “Maybe,” the disaffected STEM student begins to think, “It’s time to just do something in the liberal arts.”
No slight to the liberal arts, but people do tend to give up too easily on the sciences. Students, myself included, tend to think that not understanding something and not doing it right away is a curse. Well, it’s not. It’s natural. In fact, admitting to the complexities of a topic (or a situation or a novel or a poem) is the first important step toward deeper understanding.
Just think about it: What was the more memorable moment from high school, learning watered-down chemistry in order to pass the Regents or that time your teacher described the chemistry behind how beer is brewed? The latter was definitely more complicated than the former, but which one really captured your attention?
When you get down to it, the complexities of the universe are the reason we study science in the first place. We want to understand its intricacies, and frankly, that can get frustrating at times. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth studying. One just has to change his approach.
One important thing to keep in mind while studying some complicated theorem or law is that the brain still works things through even as you are not consciously aware of them. This happens especially during sleep—the brain consolidates memories and tasks and also helps to foster creativity, which is more important than one would think when approaching a scientific problem.
In my experience, this ended up being the difference between my Regents physics course and my current college physics course. In the Regents curriculum, they give you the formulas and equations and then give you all the numbers that you need to fill in the equation. Basically, all you needed to do was figure out which equation to use and then plug numbers into a calculator. This is not necessarily easy, but it is not necessarily science either. It’s something more like “other people did science and figured out complicated stuff, and now we are making it simpler for you.”
However, in my current physics class recently, the professor taught several concepts about dimensional analysis (the measurements of things) and one-dimensional kinematics (the study of the motion of particles) and asked much more think outside the box questions on the homework and quiz. For one question, he simply gave the lengths and diameters of the two tubes that comprise the Holland Tunnel and then asked how much dirt must have been removed to make that tunnel. He gave us no equation, no “How To” book. It was expected that we take everything we know and apply it in our own individual way.
This is the difference between being given tools to build your own house and watching someone build it for you. It’s the difference between answering questions as if you’re a machine and answering questions as your own, free-thinking human being.
So the next time you get frustrated with your calculus homework, just remember: If you stick with it, you are that much closer to becoming more of an individual, more of a free-thinker, and more wholly yourself.
