There are children in elementary and middle school whose foundational math skills were hit hard by the pandemic. The pre-college kids gravitating toward math enrichment programs span a wide spectrum. Humanities enrollment is down 17 percent overall. A recent New Yorker article titled “The End of the English Major” lamented how English and history majors have decreased by a third over the past decade. In terms of the gauntlet you have to run to get to the prize at the end, it’s much easier to be a programmer.” Numbers bear this out. There is a set of lawyers who do great, but a very large group who don’t. “There’s less perceived potential in things that come after the humanities major,” Rusczyk says. This sea change, combined with a disheartening economy and college tuition bills that can run up to $80,000 annually, has led to a new push for math among the wider population of students and their parents, who find comfort in imagining their kids as software engineers, chief technology officers, and game designers. “When I was in middle school, all the cool people were basketball players,” says Richard Rusczyk, the founder and CEO of the Art of Problem Solving (AoPS), an accelerated math program that serves nearly 200,000 school age kids. Indeed, nothing is more responsible for this new paradigm than the rise of Silicon Valley, with its billion-dollar IPOs and daily life–altering “products.” Being a nerd has become not just an acceptable trajectory but an incredibly desirable one. Gates and other tech leaders like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg now define the culture-for better or worse-far more than anyone in politics or traditional businesses. Doug Wilson // Getty Imagesīut a lot has changed since then. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, photographed in 1983. Focusing singularly on math was viewed as a narrow path toward pursuits in academia or applied science. For teenagers at the dawn of the 20th century, the ideal was to be a well-rounded dynamo who could effortlessly nail a back heel kick on the soccer field, ace the SAT, and weave Macbeth references into casual conversation. Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford who was fond of Walt Whitman. The video of the Microsoft Windows launch in 1995 is a study in ebullient but cringey math geeks gone wild: Gates and Steve Ballmer bop around a stage as they awkwardly pump the air to a Rolling Stones tune.īack then the pinnacle of high achievement hewed to more classical lines-and stereotypes. Even for those who were hypersuccessful mathletes, like Bill Gates, it wasn’t until this century that they became viewed as glamorous tech gods and global ambassadors. The tutor was so booked that the only time she could see Alex’s son was late on Sunday evenings.īeing a math nerd-in school or later in life-was once the definition of social marginality, a demarcation rife with ruthless stereotypes: the pocket calculator, the smudged glasses with bent frames. It was like trying to get Jackie Kennedy’s Social Security number.” She finally managed to obtain the sacred digits one evening over drinks with a fellow mom-it took alcohol to shake the information free. “Getting the tutor’s number was a nightmare. When Alex (her name has been changed) tried to hire the tutor that “everyone” at Collegiate used, she said that parents turned mum. She quickly learned, however, just how competitive the math game has become in places like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cosmopolitan hubs populated by moneyed strivers. “I just wanted him to get an A- or a B+,” Alex said recently. Her son had shown an aptitude for math on the school’s placement test but then flubbed the first two exams he took once school was underway. A few years ago, when Alex, an academically minded Manhattan mother, first hired a math tutor for her son after he was placed in seventh grade advanced math at the prestigious Collegiate School on the Upper West Side, it was not, she said, an example of competitive parenting.
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