As senior year progresses, one thought has surfaced above everything else while I’m in class:

Why the hell do we have to know this?

This one question is loud in my head as I sit in chemistry class learning about the shapes and polarities of molecules (“trigonal bipyramidal”, noted for the AP test). I tend to verbalize it to my friends in MVC as well, “when will you ever actually rref a matrix by hand?” This is why, ironically, I find statistics—easier than all of my previous math classes—to be the most useful math course offered at North simply because of its undoubtedly vast application field.

 

imagine having to know all of this in your math class

To put the issue in more formal terms, it boils down to theory versus application—which deserves more attention in the learning process? I’ve had quite a few interesting conversations with some of my extracurricularly-involved friends about this topic, and their responses have stimulated some interesting questions. Can one be exclusively focused on either theory or application? And lastly, is there a correct balance between theory and application within the education/extracurricular system?

Since most of my experiences involve STEM subjects and activities, that is primarily what I will be discussing in this post. However, it is important to note that all fields have their own version of this debate between knowledge and experience.

Perhaps my strong avoidance of knowledge for memorization’s sake is what steered me towards clubs like robotics rather than science olympiad or science bowl. Sure, robotics is a “school club” in the sense that students with a common interest in engineering meet after school. From my view, though, robotics is truly unlike any other club. A project management system, cost accounting, prioritization schedules, and version control, all things I was dumbstruck by simply because of how practical they were. Sure, it hurts to spend hours debugging code only to have my project shirked away due to cost-benefit analysis, but I can’t help but think that wow, this is the real world with real decisions. It’s no surprise that robotics often coins itself as a “medium-sized engineering firm”.

I like to think that robotics is the real deal in preparing me for the corporate world. I really have to deliberate over every decision I make, how it will cost the team and how it will help the team; we have to come together as a group of individuals with different skills to design and engineer a complex system within only a few weeks of time and with a few thousand dollars of money. 

This is where someone points out that I am also on the school’s math team, and that I really truly admire my friends who do participate in science bowl/olympiad. And this is where I would agree that theory has its well deserved place in the learning process.

In fact, as much as I complain about the useless knowledge we learn in school, sometimes I can’t help but become completely fascinated by the “impractical” subject matter (see my art history blog post).

Part of it, as is the case with my math team experience, is cleverly twisting and manipulating a problem so it fits perfectly into that tediously memorized theorem or fact. It’s recognizing a pattern in the sequence of numbers or realizing that the robot’s arm movement can be mapped out by a polar coordinate system. There is something undoubtedly satisfying about those eureka moments.

The flowers on my kitchen counter

The other part of it is the pure sense of appreciation for the way the world works. My dad puts it best when he takes pictures of our counter-top flowers and exclaims: “look at that flower, isn’t it awesome? All the smartest engineers of the past century combined can’t produce something as awesome as nature can!”

Going back to my initial sense of agitation though, I need to discuss a conversation I overheard between two precalculus students. Something along the lines of “I got two-sine-x-cosine-x-squared.” “Shoot, I thought it was four-cosine-x-cubed.” That was the peak of my exasperation with the schooling system within the last week. When in their lives, I thought, will the formulas they were tested on ever be practical in any way shape or form. In fact, my sediments seem to be voiced by students all across America; “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” has become a running internet meme for how public schooling has failed to provide students with any applicable knowledge.

So how do I consolidate my advocating for applicability and my love for pure learning. The one thing that consistently precedes the why the hell am I learning this question, I’ve noticed, is a sense that I am being forced to do or learn som

d, the cevian, can be found knowing b, c, m, and n

ething. I’m really not interested in learning the names of every single enzyme in charge of DNA replication, but when I look at the flower that my dad points out to me, I really have a deep appreciation for how a few molecules spiraled up into a protein can write the code for life itself. I really couldn’t care enough about triangles to willingly memorize Stewart’s theorem, but when I come across such a problem on a math contest, it really gives me appreciation for how the length of a cevian elegantly fits into a simple equation involving the other lengths of the figure.

And this is what I leave you with today, that even tedious learning that cannot be turned into application still has its value. Sometimes, the burden of making-it-interesting falls onto the receiver of the knowledge. It’s true that some subjects will just not spark any sense of curiosity for some individuals (for me it’s mechanical engineering), but even then there is probably some niche Wikipedia article in that topic or engaging YouTube channel that just pushes you to learn more.

 

Whether it’s “PEMDAS” or “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”, brute memorization has done its job in getting the message from instructor to student. However, if you want something deeper—real problem solving, watching the puzzle pieces fall into place—it’s going to take some effort-driven curiosity. It may seem tedious at first, but as my dad puts it, it will be “awesome” in the end.

 

YouTube channels to make math and science more interesting:

Minutephysics: https://www.youtube.com/user/minutephysics

Veritasium: https://www.youtube.com/user/1veritasium

3Blue1Brown: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw

Vihart: https://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart

ElectroBOOM: https://www.youtube.com/user/msadaghd

Mark Rober: https://www.youtube.com/user/onemeeeliondollars