Mathematics Education.

As I may have said previously somewhere in this blog, I am a mathematics education major. I love math. I think it's fun, enjoyable, puzzling, beautiful, and intriguing. However, most people don't.

In fact, usually when I tell people my major, I am met with various distaste. There are those who look to the ground saying, "Oh... I was never good at math," while the look on their face tells you that they are recalling terrible experiences of fractions, ratios, and trains that left two different towns and for whatever reason were going to meet in the middle. (Why were they on the same tracks? Why do they need to meet? Why don't all trains go the same speed? I have many more questions for the inventor of this train scenario.) There are the people who look at me in some mix of awe and pity, as if I had said I was going to single-handedly enter into a fight against the greater terrors of the world, where I of course would lose but I blindly still believed in victory. There are the people who stare at me in utter horror and just ask, "Oh God, why?" as if they can somehow plea for my soul to be saved from whatever evil has led me to this choice. And lastly, there are the few like me, the mathematicians, who light up at having found another as we enter into discussions of what classes we've taken and what we thought of calculus and linear algebra and what we plan to do with our mathematics degrees.

The thing is, I wonder when it became acceptable to mock the mathematics students in their choice of education. For some reason, all other majors are met with, "Wow," or, "That's cool," or ask enthusiastically what inspired them. But mathematics is universally recognized as the major that is allowed on which to be picked (I wanted to say allowed to be picked on, but I shan't end sentences in prepositions.) I think it's rather unfair, seeing as I don't make fun of majors which I detest. When I hear that someone is a literature major, I don't stare at them in utter disbelief, wondering if they actually plan on doing something after they graduate from college or if they are just wasting four years of their life for giggles. I don't roll my eyes at art majors and ask them what in the world made them think that was a good choice. I don't tell business majors that they chose a boring major, though I appreciate their practicality and think they should knock some sense into the previous two majors. And pre-med! Everyone loves pre-med, but I'd like to shudder and ask them why they would submit themselves to so much organic chemistry! However true or not these aforementioned feelings may be, I always express nothing but enthusiasm, because even if I didn't enjoy their topics, I still realize that they have different tastes than me.

I don't know if you believe in destiny or a calling. Or maybe you think it's all random chance. But if there is some sort of purpose to where we are supposed to go, or some career to which we are called, somewhere that I was intended to be, it's this. Whether I made this path for myself or I was led here by something higher, teaching mathematics is what I think I was meant to do. My life has prepared me for this and led me here. I am passionate about my major and the task I am undertaking, and I believe whole-heartedly that math is an art and that I can at least help students to appreciate that some people find it as beautiful as poetry or music or paintings. I at least have to try, and I don't know why people can't appreciate that just because they have yet to see math the way I do, even if they never do, that it's still exciting to some people.

Besides, to y'all who don't like math: you are n00bs.