It's February. Which means that we are or soon may be fighting off the winter doldrums. Part of the struggle with the doldrums is a sense of purposelessness. The temptation is to ask questions like: Why are we studying these polynomials anyway? Who needs to learn about matrices? When even am I going to use this information?
Before you start adding your own questions to this list, I'd like to ask a question of my own. Why are you asking?
Do you ask these questions because you really want to know the meaning of life and everything ( my son tells me it's 42), or are you asking because you're struggling emotionally and need someone to blame? While most middle school students may claim that it's the former, it's usually the latter that fuels these types of questions. Yet, I'll bite...
Why are we studying ______ anyway?
I honestly don't care what you put in the blank. Polynomials, rates, math, geometry, grammar, chemistry... The truth is that you can put anything into the blank of this question and the answer will remain the same. We study hard subjects to discover the unchanging truths of God and reveal His beauty and goodness to us through the creation of the topic. That's it. Is it hard. Yes. If it was easy to study the things of the eternal God, I'd be disappointed, and so wouldn't you. A God that is easy to understand is no god at all. In the words of the Hulk: puny god.
When am I even going to use this information?
Here is the short answer: I don't know, and I don't care. I don't wrestle with the beauty of mathematics in order to use it in some servile job any more than a person strives to play the piano in order to perform for money. Doing a task for money, while essential for our industrialized existence, is not the first and more important reason to do anything.
Here is the long answer: I think that what you mean by this is what practical reason does learning this very difficult subject have? The practicality of doing hard mental things is revealed when you find yourself observing patterns and predicting the future. When we first glimpse that our brains have learned to think about problems in a way that equips us to lead others in business, engineering, building, medicine, art, or any other vocation with which we engage, we quickly realize that the seemingly unrelated subjects we struggled with in school were the most important.
If the winter doldrums are threatening to take your peace and tempting you to protest in despair. Remember, you serve a mighty God who can't be mastered yet calls us to learn about Him as the Lord of creation through creation. It is hard, but it's worth it.