Carolyn Y. Johnson at Boston.com has brought this video to my attention:
The video is by former math teacher Dan Meyer, who elaborated at his blog:
In fairness, people hate math. Hollywood just turns on the cameras.
And he also calls out some of his commenters who note that when Hollywood does portray math in a positive light, it’s always something that geniuses are doing, never ordinary nongenius folks.
Do you agree? Does Hollywood have a math problem? If so, is it a separate problem from Hollywood’s general disdain for anything intellectual?
(If you have a suggestion for a QOTD, feel free to email me. Responses to this QOTD sent by email will be ignored; please post your responses here.)
I do think that picks and chooses a little. My favourite mathies in film are Fallon and Barrymore in Fever Pitch; neither of them is depicted as a genius; she’s a smart person but not a rarefied genius who discusses how math let her rise to being a pretty successful exec, while Fallon is a math teacher, a little schlubby, and pretty ordinary.
And then there are people like Kaylee, smart and cute and an engineer, and real life examples like Danica McKellar and Mayim Bialik (admittedly she’s in a field that has a lot of math in her science, not a pure math person). And that leads to The Big Bang Theory set at Caltech and very, very mathy, etc.
I think with 2 minutes of editing, I could prove pretty much anything about Hollywood. I read the blog, and while he has some points, it really is very ‘seeing what I want to see’.
I think the problem is pretty simple to explain. If you force kids to go to school every day and spend hours doing difficult work, and you hire underpaid teachers to instruct them, then they’ll start to hate school. When they grow up, some of them will write movies, and they’ll talk about how much they hate school.
I don’t think Hollywood hates math any more than it hates chemistry or poetry. Once in a while, you’ll find a movie or TV show that says something positive about the educational system. (I particularly like Wit and the “Venus and the Man” episode of WKRP in Cincinnati.) But generally, Hollywood tells the truth: A lot of school is dull and unpleasant. I say that as someone who liked school and went on to get a master’s degree.
But I still hated math class.
Yup. (This is a ‘yeah that’ post. Wordy-er than voting up.)
Hollywood has an everything problem. Try it! Study any subject (even to only passing familiarity) and then watch a movie where it is featured, guaranteed endless frustrations. Granted it seems worse for technical subjects, math as you mentioned, but also computers are usually some sort of magic box or physics which are ignored entirely.
I don’t think I can judge. I hate math too.
I think part of it is that anything outside the adolescent jock experience – i.e. that of the target audience for most of its films – is alien to Hollywood. Even if maths is treated as something useful, it’s still magic, like computer “hacking”: there’s rarelyany attempt to portray anything intellectually complex as anything more than “feed inputs to smart guy, wait for outputs”. Not, of course, that it would be easy to do; the precognitive action scenes in the recent RDJ Sherlock Holmes films are a clumsy attempt at that…
Yes, it would in general, which is too bad, as mathematics is logic in symbol form.
Always loved math. In fact, switched from English to it for my major, thanks to senior-year calculus.
Mean Girls halfway does this too. Cady is a Math nerd because she loves Math and says it’s because “it’s the same in every country.” Damian thought it was beautiful though.
It might be as simple as this: the people writing and script editing movies are writers, not mathematicians. So if it’s not intensely relevant to the plot, math is going to be a more common subject that will initially pop to mind as a hard subject. (Lazy, perhaps, but it makes sense)
Am I the only one who saw Stand and Deliver? It’s a rebuttal all by itself. by definition none of those kids are geniuses.