Why this make me sad

Since I learned English, I’ve tried to study in English. There are many reasons to do that, but the range of resources is the biggest one. It’s logical: more people speak and write in English than in Portuguese, my native language. If I want to learn something, there are more books available in English, and some of the best ones have never been translated into other languages.

This is great, and it’s one of the reasons I’m not totally stupid. Don’t think I’m not grateful to my teachers. They did an excellent job, almost like magic, because the source material was really poor. Most Brazilians don’t have the same luck as me. Most of them don’t even know basic mathematics.

Once, I had to split the cost of a pizza with another guy. It was R$100, so I paid half and he paid the other half. He gave the delivery guy R$50, and I took the R$50 and gave the delivery guy R$100. Then the guy asked me why I had taken his money and why I didn’t split it with him.

I had to draw it out on a piece of paper because he thought I was stealing his money. He wasn’t a scammer. He was just dumb.

Another time, I tried to teach a girl. She was studying quadratic functions and was in her last year of high school. Then I discovered that she didn’t even know how to solve a linear equation. I had to teach her something as basic as x - 4 = 0 during her last year of high school. That was exactly the kind of problem she couldn’t solve.

And that makes me sick. I see marvelous books teaching about all kinds of things, and most Brazilians don’t even know how to learn from them in Portuguese, let alone in English!

There are so many ways to learn something new, yet they aren’t accessible to people in my country. The problem isn’t the teachers, although some of them may be part of it. It’s the way we learn, and this obsession with memorizing things without understanding what we’ve memorized.

A Brazilian can talk about “Bhaskara’s formula” (that’s what Brazilians call the quadratic formula) and joke about how they’ve never used it in real life, but they don’t realize that they’ve used it countless times. They’re just too disconnected from what they’re actually doing to recognize it.

We don’t learn things. We don’t understand what we study. We just memorize random shit like formulas, dates, and other stuff, but we can’t recognize what any of it means.

It was only as a self-taught learner that I realized that mathematics isn’t about numbers. It’s about patterns. None of my teachers ever told me that. I could have been a much better student if I’d known that earlier, but no. As a student, I was told to memorize formulas so I could use them in my exams.

In Brazil, exams become the goal of studying instead of learning itself. That’s why so many Brazilians don’t like studying. It’s all about the exams.

We lost years of our lives studying the wrong way instead of learning something actually useful. How can people like learning if they never really learned anything? We memorize equations, we know songs about the position equation for constant-acceleration motion, but we don’t know what they mean or how the formulas were derived. Is that knowledge? I don’t think so.

Every time I remember that, it makes me sad. We could be better. We could be a prosperous nation. But no one cares about the important things. It’s just futebol, caipirinha, and corrupção.

At the end of the day, it’s “feijoada, nada acontece.”