Math Goals for your High School Student

I’ve cov­ered math goals in pre­vi­ous blog posts and you can find them at the links below. How­ev­er, I think that it is time for a reminder. Edu­ca­tion is a jour­ney. It is con­tin­u­ous pro­gres­sion toward virtue. We work out our sal­va­tion with fear and trem­bling. We are fall­en and liv­ing as the first Adam, but we seek to be rec­on­ciled to our heav­en­ly Father through the blood of the sec­ond Adam. 

The study of math­e­mat­ics seems so far removed from the pur­suit of virtue that we some­times feel as if we’ve lost our way. The truth is that God is the Truth, Good­ness, and Beau­ty that we are seek­ing, but the seek­ing isn’t the goal or end. The seek­ing leads us through con­stant changes from being to becom­ing and back to being again. Ulti­mate­ly, we are all on the path to becom­ing some­thing; we’re just not all on the same path. If our seek­ing has lead us to dis­cov­er­ing the logos of cre­ation which can be described in a man-cre­at­ed lan­guage, then it is our duty to search out the hid­den truths. Proverbs says that it is the glo­ry of God to con­ceal a mat­ter and the glo­ry of kings to search it out. As we con­tin­ue on this path toward virtue, we are transformed. 

The study of the revealed world through the lan­guage of Math­e­mat­ics is a wor­thy goal in itself, but it isn’t the ulti­mate goal. We don’t need to jus­ti­fy our pur­suit of virtue through math­e­mat­ics by explain­ing how STEM fields need stu­dents with strong math skills, or how my high school tran­script needs four math class­es. None of that mat­ters. What mat­ters is how we live for Christ; how we are becom­ing more like Him — the sav­ior of cre­ation, math­e­mat­ics, and us.