Elizabeth Green, writing for the New York Times:
To cure our innumeracy, we will have to accept that the traditional approach we take to teaching math — the one that can be mind-numbing, but also comfortingly familiar — does not work. We will have to come to see math not as a list of rules to be memorized but as a way of looking at the world that really makes sense.
Great piece overall, but that particular quote stuck in my mind, in part because math education is so terrible that it is not in the consciousness of “I’m not a math person” people that math could be anything but the mind-numbing rules they saw in school.