Assigment 5 Dany Waller

I think the polarized attitudes towards mathematics that we see today are the later effects of math anxiety, in its many manifestations and insidious ways of thought. I have often encountered situations with friends and family who think of math as something "too abstract" but readily accept that their English classes dealt in emotionally abstract concepts. As someone who experienced both public and private school in Kentucky, I never had a math teacher who was well-prepared for the lesson or comfortable with questions beyond the topic we were learning in class that day. Actually, I had a math teacher in high school who actively discouraged questions and disparaged the advanced study of mathematics. The state of Kentucky has also voted to drop Algebra II from high school graduation requirements, so we face an even steeper decline in the number of mathematically literate adults in our communities.

I do not think it is a personal affront for people who have extreme math anxiety to react negatively to the idea, but a response to time spent in an education system that does not value students or reward teachers who are involved and invested in their subject. As a remedy when confronted with the reaction of fear and discomfort, I try very hard to be as welcoming as possible. Personally, I have taken the approach of asking when they first felt uncomfortable with math and bringing up an "easy" math that they learned, then relating it to a higher-level subject with applications, like statistics in political campaigns or number theory in cyber security. This works best with family and friends, strangers will more readily dismiss my opinion on their math education, so I will often take the approach of explaining a simple physics problem or showing them an easy way to calculate a tip. 

On a national level, we face an uphill battle because of the recent movement in politics to make education a for-profit system. These individual conversations can shift the attitude within our social circles, which in turn will hopefully make mathematics a more accessible conversation point for non-mathematicians. Curiosity begets curiosity, as a basic question leads to a better question which leads to an interesting discussion. The more people that we can encourage to be curious, the more people who may vote with a conscious for improving education as well as choosing politicians who are scientifically and mathematically concise in their claims. Pressuring politicians to fund scientific endeavors and be academically rigorous in their stances will create a higher standard for future candidates and an expectation of fact-checking and logical arguments. 

It is in our interest as mathematicians and as people who participate in society to persist in our efforts to educate our peers as well as the next generation. A mathematically literate population is only a danger to those who wish to manipulate the statistics in their favor.