Why must I do math?

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my name is Will I'm 17 years old and I have aspergers syndrome and I have a question. So in my state you need to have 4 years of math to gradute high school if you're on a thing called ACE, but if you opted out of ACE which I did but will have to do math in college which I'm streesed because I'm not going to use math for my career which s screenwriting and directing films. My parents don't have the time for a math tutor and I can't afford one. So what do I do I struggle in it and always had C's and one time in the past a D.

It always took me twice as long as normal to do maths and physics because I took every course twice: once in regular classes and then again in summer school. Get bad marks or fail first time round, retake course in summer school for better grades. Rinse and repeat as necessary.

Consider Math a course in logic. No matter what path you choose in your adult life, you will always use logic.

The skills you learn in math class will help you in your entire life, even if the exact knowledge won't.
In my country, maths are optional in high school starting this year, but i think that that is a bad move; i was D-level in math myself, i struggled with it, but it has given me very useful skills

Skills in math transfer to a variety of real world situations. Here are a handful of examples of times I've needed to use math in recent years (that are not related to my job, which requires math all the time):

1. I wanted to install a projector in my living room. My couch can be positioned 10 feet from the wall it will project on. Optimal viewing size is the distance from the screen divided by 1.5. But that's for the width of the screen and screens are sold by diagonal measurement. My wall is 8.5ft high and the bottom of the screen needs to be at least 2 ft from the floor. What size screen should I buy? To figure that out you need algebra and trigonometry.

2. I want to max out my retirement contribution this year, but I get a bonus in March that skews the contributions. So I can't just divide my salary by my number of paychecks (26) to figure out how much my contribution needs to be. If my salary is X, and my bonus is 10%, what should my contribution rate be? You can figure this one using just algebra.

3. I want to buy a house. The mortgage company will lower my interest rate if I pay "points" up front. A point costs 1% of the mortgage value of $200,000, but it permanently lowers my interest rate by a quarter of a percent. I plan to only be in the house for 7 years. Should I buy points? How many? You can solve this with algebra.

4. I need to buy a ladder to get on my roof to hang Christmas lights. The gutter is 12 feet from the ground. To be safe, the ladder should extend at least a foot past the gutter and the base should be at least 4 feet away from the wall. How long of a ladder do I need to buy? This one can be figured using trigonometry.

5. I have a job offer. The job pays 5% more than my current one. However, I have to pay $200 a month more for my health insurance and it includes a 15 minute longer commute into work. Should I take the job? This one's a bit subjective, because it depends on how much I value that 15 minutes of my commute. However, I can't make an informed decision until I calculate what I get in return for that extra 15 minutes, which requires at least some arithmetic and possibly algebra.

These are just a few concrete examples of times I've had to use math in the last few years, though it's certainly not a complete list. However, there are also a lot of times knowledge of math benefits you, even when you're not sitting down to do the actual calculations. For example, a politician says their goal is to lower unemployment by 5%. If you're not math-literate, you may not realize that there's an important clarifying detail that statement needs (do they really mean 5 percent, or 5 percentage points? they are not the same thing). You don't need to calculate anything there, but you need to be familiar enough with math to recognize when someone might intentionally be trying to mislead you about something that requires mathematical thinking.

Math is important, in pretty much all areas of life. Learn it well and you'll be grateful that you did.

My algebra teacher once told me that "People who don't know maths don't count".

I guess she thought she was being funny.

A lot of colleges offer free tutoring to enrolled students. I worked as a math tutor while I was in college. I was paid by the college through work-study, the students didn't have to pay for anything (or rather, the service was included in their tuition).

From my experience, you'll get better instruction if you take math courses at a community college instead of a university or four-year college. That may not be true everywhere. But with community colleges the focus is on teaching, not on research. I can tell you from experience, you don't want to be taking integral calculus under a professor who sucks at teaching but nobody cares because they publish regularly and have tenure.

I sucked at math too when I was 17. Didn't enroll in college until I was 20, and then I placed in remedial math. But when I took that first elementary algebra course, it was different than before, it made sense that time. Four years later I graduated with a bachelor of science degree in mathematics. The 17 year old me would never have believed that.

I did the Pure Theory track of study so I didn't learn much about the applications of the math I was studying. But the result for me was that now I see math all around me, no matter where I am. I see beauty in everything. I think much more clearly. I commit significantly fewer errors of logic in day-to-day life.

Even at 17 your brain is still growing. Over the next couple of years you might find that something finally clicks into place about math and it makes much more sense now. Not saying that this *will* happen but it might, it did for me.

Math is exercise for your brain. It's practice at problem solving, at thinking in ways that are utterly unnatural but extremely useful. Sure it's directly applicable to STEM careers, but most careers require you to think and math helps you to think better.