Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - March/April 2011 - (Page 8)

Launched in 2003, Art of Problem Solving (www.artofproblemsolving.com) is an online community for students who love math. In discussion forums, free online learning opportunities, online competitions, and fee-based classes, students receive both challenge and support as they develop their mathematical problem-solving skills. And problem solving is a topic that AoPS founder Richard Rusczyk is passionate about. Here, he explains why learning to solve problems you’ve never seen before is the most important thing you can do to shape your future. Two thousand years ago, if you wanted to shape your own future, you needed to master only one skill: choosing your parents. If you picked an emperor to be dad, you were set. Otherwise, you were pretty much doomed to the poor, nasty, brutish, and short life Hobbes promised. Fast forward to 200 years ago, and you at least had another option. Choosing your parents still worked then. But if you didn’t like your lot in life, you could pitch it all and “Go West.” Building a new life in a new land required incredible bravery, strength, and, above all, luck. Nowadays, however, the only physical frontiers are space and the bottom of the ocean, so fortitude and wanderlust aren’t enough to blaze your own trail. If you want the freedom to build your own future and pursue your dreams, then your best bet is to learn how to solve problems you’ve never seen before. It’s been more than 20 years since I’ve been in high school, but from my discussions with students at Art of Problem Solving, not much has changed in the schools in this regard. Homework assignments and tests still reward memorization and regurgitation of mastered facts, and never confront students with problems that are unlike anything the student has seen before. Repeating mastered tasks may have been valuable 50 years ago, but now we have machines, not to mention billions more people who are very good at mastering straightforward tasks. Unfortunately, the first time most students learn this lesson is in college, staring at a test with five unfamiliar problems for four grueling hours, wondering why those long nights of doing the same problems over and over in high school didn’t include any problems like these. The Problem You’ve Never Seen Today’s frontiers are intellectual, not physical. The heroes of your generation won’t have titles before their names, like General or President. They’ll have titles after their names, like PhD and CEO. They’ll earn those titles, and the freedom that can come with them, with their minds. The action is out on the intellectual frontier, so that’s where you want to be. How do you get there? Is getting A’s in all your classes enough? Of course not, and it hasn’t been for a long time, not even if you plow through the regular curriculum twice as fast as everyone else. When I first started Art of Problem Solving, I received an e-mail from a Princeton classmate of mine. He wrote: I certainly wish your website and materials existed when I was in high school. I went through junior high and high school without ever missing a question on a math test, and then took Math 103 and 104, which was one of the most unpleasant and bewildering experiences of my life, and poisoned me on math for years. Learning How to Learn If acing all your classes isn’t enough to prepare you for the most rigorous schools and the most competitive careers, then what should you do? This is where problem solving comes in. There’s no set path to success. No batch of drills to follow. No magic formula to memorize. As good as the instructors at Art of Problem Solving are, even we can’t teach you that single skill whose mastery will bring you fame, fortune, and world domination. We can’t teach you that super skill because no one knows what specific skills will be important in the future. Most of the jobs I’ve had since graduating college in 1993 essentially did not exist when I started high school in 1985. There weren’t a bunch of hedge funds staffed by mathematicians and physicists, and no one had even heard of the Internet. How could my teachers have prepared me for careers in these areas? The situation will be even more extreme for your generation. We educators can’t predict the tools you’ll need, and many of those tools don’t even exist yet. Worse yet, mastering narrow skills just sets you up to compete with computers. That’s a battle you’re IStOCk 8 imagine Mar/Apr 2011 http://www.artofproblemsolving.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - March/April 2011

Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - March/April 2011
Contents
Big Picture
In My Own Words
Problem Solving
Orange County Math Circle
Number Theory
Count Me In
National Mathematics Competitions
Math at the Science Fair
Just My Speed
MathPath
When Origami Meets Rocket Science
Selected Opportunities & Resources
Making a Difference
High School Options for Gifted Students
Off the Shelf
Word Wise
Exploring Career Options
One Step Ahead
Planning Ahead for College
Students Review
Mark Your Calendar
Knossos Games

Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - March/April 2011