Here’s the second part to my answer.

You never know, not only because it is nearly impossible for teens to be able to accurately predict what they will be doing ten years from the moment they so feverishly insist that they will be NOT be doing anything related to the content you are teaching, but also because the human brain is able to make amazing connections between things that you never realized connected in the first place.

I will use myself as an example again.

I never felt like I was good in math.  I had good test scores, especially at a young age, but I never felt like I “got it”.  I could add fractions with unlike denominators, and could multiply things and follow a process…but I never understood what I was doing.  You could ask me, “Which is bigger…1/4 or 1/3?” and I  honestly would not be able to tell you.  I was not able to tell you until somewhere in my mid-twenties, and to be honest I’m not all that confident now with my responses to those types of questions.

Other kids seemed so much more at ease with mathematics, and I had to work so hard.  For me, there were never any shortcuts – no easy ways to solve problems.  I latched onto a process and used it, no matter if there were more efficient methods.  I had friends that seemed to do math so effortlessly, and I wondered how they saw things.

It got worse in high school.  Algebra was fine.  In Algebra, there was a process.  There was linearity, there were ways to solve equations that followed a pattern.  There were graphs.  There was a distance formula, a slope formula.  I could plot points and solve systems of equations using methods I had been taught.

The next year, Geometry kicked my ass.  Suddenly now it seemed as if everything algebraic I had labored to understand so intently had traveled elsewhere, possibly to be revisited again in a land known as Algebra II.  Now I was confronted with shapes, angles, perpendicular lines, theorems and postulates that felt like a list of Do’s and Don’ts at the local pool.  Like, who reads those and who cares anyway? Who says you can’t have diarrhea and go swimming?  Really?

And there were proofs.  What an awful concept.  I felt that perhaps if somebody else long dead had proved this stuff hundreds of millions of years ago, why should we have to prove it all over again.  Couldn’t we just copy him?  I would study for tests and have no idea whatsoever what I was doing, and it scared me.  I knew that there were more math classes out there, and they would probably be harder.  I felt like I was trying my best and getting nowhere.

The first time I talked to my geometry teacher about my frustrations and falling test scores, I was nearly in tears.  He agreed to meet with me two mornings a week before school, to help me review and to try and understand new concepts.  Without his help, I could never have scratched out a “C”.

Had you told me then that I would be a teacher when I grew up, I probably would have scowled at you.  Had you told me that I would be a math teacher someday, I might just have barfed up my lunch.  I was going to be a writer, or a marine biologist, or the Pope – and those professions probably didn’t use a whole lot of math.

Life progressed and college happened.  Much to my chagrin, upon switching to Business from English (foolish, short-sighted, ill-advised yet necessary move) I discovered I needed to take a Calculus class.  Laughable, I thought.  Ridiculous, I surmised.  Stupid, I concluded.  Calculus for Business majors, not like real Calculus but some dumbed-down version for people like myself.  I bought the book, purchased a special calculator, and showed up on the first day with a bad attitude.  My professor was this tall elderly woman that acted and dressed like a 4th grade teacher,  replete with ugly sweaters and odd burlapy hoop-like skirts to match (or not).  She treated us like 4th graders too.  “Spit out your gum”, “Sit up straight”, “Where is your pencil, young man?”  I was in hell.

Yet somehow not. Along with being out-of-place traditional in appearance and retro in her methods, my professor was really into her subject matter.  I slowly began to find that I actually liked the class.  As time went on I discovered that my liking of the class coincided with my understanding of the material, or vice versa.  I felt that for the first time ever, I could see how other parts of math congealed and came together to form this mystical math called Calculus, and that it really wasn’t anything to be afraid of.  I started to ask questions, and to make connections between things that I had never thought to connect before.  Finally there seemed to be a reason why I learned math in the way it was taught.  I learned how the concepts built upon themselves and became ever more complex.  I learned to enjoy problem-solving, at least in an abstract sense.  I learned that I could do math, and I could enjoy it.  My crazy teacher helped me to see the connections, and she made it possible for me to learn.

Again, to you – E.  So right you might be.  You may never use this.

But you never know.  You cannot possibly predict what you will be able to do 2, 5, 10 years from now.  Which doors will open and which will be forever lost.  I never connected with any math, of any type, ever.  Then suddenly I did.  How could I have known what I would be able to do?  How could I have seen that I would be able to see?  You might be able to solve the most complex problems facing the world today – climate change, poverty, war, or even why all old ladies over the age of 75 suddenly smell exactly the same.  It might just be a mathematical connection, a simple drawing of a line between concepts, something nobody has ever thought of or done before.  God knows you are smart enough to do that.   Do you know what I mean?

Maybe not, E.

Maybe I’m the naïve one.  Maybe I got lucky, and have simplified things into a convenient narrative for storytelling purposes.  Maybe it’s true that you either get it or you don’t, that you either use math or you don’t, that you will never have a need for point-slope form.

But you never know.