I really hate math and I will never use it, why do I have to study this?

Every year, students ask this. Usually around October, usually right after a quiz.

And every year, adults respond with the same speech about baking cookies and splitting pizzas, and every year, students correctly identify that speech as nonsense. You have a phone. It splits the pizza for you.

So here’s a different kind of answer. After years of hearing “I hate math,” our teachers have noticed that this sentence almost never means what it says. It almost always means one of three things underneath. And we’ve built how we teach around all three.

Reason 1: “I hate math” often means “I’m drowning.”

Math is unlike most subjects in one brutal way. It’s cumulative, and every topic stands on the one before it. Miss a few weeks of fractions in fifth grade, and ninth-grade algebra reads like a language you never learned. Nobody enjoys sitting in a room feeling lost for an hour a day. Of course you’d hate it.

But notice what that means: you don’t hate math. You hate feeling lost. Those are different problems, and the second one is fixable.

This is why our teachers constantly adjust the level of the work. The goal isn’t to make it easy, but to land it in the sweet spot - challenging enough that you have to stretch, manageable enough that you can actually reach it. That spot is where real learning happens, and it’s different for every student. Which leads to the most important sentence in this article: if you’re drowning, say so. Telling a teacher “I think I’m missing something from a few years back” is not embarrassing. It’s the single most effective move a struggling math student can make, and adjusting for it is literally part of how we teach.

Reason 2: “I hate math” sometimes means “I’m bored.”

The flip side is just as real. If the work is too easy, math becomes an hour of doing what you already know, and boredom curdles into hatred just as fast as confusion does.

The fix is the same sweet spot, approached from the other direction, with harder problems, deeper questions, and work that makes you think again. So this cuts both ways. If you’re coasting, say that too. “This is too easy” is not bragging. It’s information, and our teachers will use it.

Either way, the point is the same: the level of challenge in your math class is not fixed. It’s a dial, and you’re allowed to help us set it.

Reason 3: “I hate math” often means “nobody told me why.”

It’s hard to care about something that seems pointless, which is why our teachers make a habit of explaining what each topic is actually for before diving in. In that spirit, here’s the honest, big-picture version of the “why.”

It keeps your doors open. You don’t yet know who you’ll be at 22. Plenty of adults who swore off math at 14 wanted to be a nurse (dosage calculations), a carpenter (geometry, daily), a game designer (trigonometry and physics), or a psychologist (statistics, more of it than you’d believe). Math is nearly unique in that quitting early closes doors permanently. You can pick up history at any age, but rebuilding eight years of math at 25 is brutal. Studying now isn’t a bet that you’ll need it. It’s refusing to sign away the options of a future you that you haven’t met yet.

It’s self-defense. Someday soon, someone will offer you a “no money down!” loan, or a headline will scream that something “doubles your risk!” (from one-in-a-million to two-in-a-million, which is a fancy way of saying “still basically zero”). Every ad you see and every video your phone queues up next is math, running quietly, making decisions about you. A calculator can compute, but it can’t tell you what to ask, or notice when an answer smells wrong. That judgment is what math class is actually building.

And one more honest thing

Sometimes, none of the above applies. The level is right, you understand the point, and you still just… don’t find it interesting. That happens, and we won’t pretend otherwise.

Here’s what our teachers tell students in exactly that spot, because it’s true: learning to do good work on things that don’t fascinate you is a skill in its own right, and maybe one of the most important ones. Your adult life will contain plenty of necessary things you didn’t choose, like taxes, contracts, and the tedious parts of jobs you otherwise love. The discipline to work well anyway is a muscle. Left unused, it stagnates; exercised, it grows. Math you’re not in love with is a safe place to train it, with people whose job is to help you.

Nobody does push-ups because life involves pushing the ground away. The exercise isn’t the point. The strength is.

The bottom line

We’re not asking you to love math. We’re asking you to figure out which of these is actually behind your “I hate math” (drowning, boredom, missing the point, or plain disinterest) and to tell us, because we have a real answer to every one of them.

Hate it loudly if you must. Just don’t quit, and don’t do it alone.