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Mathematics. S: (n) mathematics, math, maths (a science (or group of related sciences) dealing with the logic of quantity and shape and arrangement).
'What is there to be said about maths' was the approach that I was going to take when I started thinking about what to write in this article - that changed after a few minutes contemplation to 'What isn't there to say about maths', which is the more appropriate paradigm to adopt when you're considering something of such a massive scale...
Back in high school, the accepted behaviour was (and will probably always be, unfortunately) to disregard mathematics as something that needs to be passed and thrown away as early as possible, the bailiwick of quantum physicists and investment bankers. I hated maths in all of its forms - geometry and trigonometry theorems single-handedly ruined any enjoyment I had in academia for a good six months of my penultimate year (Grade 11). Luckily I had a teacher who was enthusiastic to the extreme about her subject, and slowly but surely my opinion swayed, as did a few of my contemporaries, and I began to respect mathematics as the powerful, all-pervasive engine that it truly is.
Look around you. Electricity probably powers most of the things in your room, governed by mathematics for appropriate current flow. You're sitting in a house that was (hopefully!) designed by an architect. The construction of which was assisted by mathematics to calculate load-bearing points. Outside your house, the global economy works as a never-pausing machine relying heavily if not fully on mathematical principles and theorems. The entire planet on which that economy operates is screaming around a distant star at 18.55 miles per second, a fact that we understand and use in our dealings with the universe around us thanks to mathematics. It is absolutely everywhere in the metaphysical sense, and it pains me to see students all too keen to disregard it and let their lives pass them by without a pause to genuflect or at least tip their cap to the ultimate creation of the human mind.
I am but twenty-two years old, and what little maths I do know fascinates me - my only regret is that mathematics is such a large field with such exponential growth, and as such one can never understand all of it. This is no longer the fourteenth century, wherein the proof of why a triangle is isosceles if the bottom two angles are equivalent was sufficient for one to earn a Masters degree (seriously) - nonetheless it's nearly a crime for one to not at least paddle in the pool that is our accumulated mathematical knowledge for a while, if not out of a genuine interest for the field then at least to descale your mind of the belief that "I'll never use it, it's boring and too difficult!".
It is with this that I bring myself to the point at hand - I see a lot of students not much younger than (if not the same age as!) myself simply giving up on the whole effort because they don't understand a part of it, or they work through material too slowly, or (and this is the one that I found I fell prey to) peer pressure prevails and everyone finds themselves not giving a stuff, disregarding the person at the front going through great pains to get something as insignificant as a decimal place correct.
This is quite simply the wrong way to go about one's education if you care anything for it at all. There are other students who appreciate mathematics and wish to do well in it, for whatever reason they have, but simply cannot grasp the 'why' factor of a statement or theorem. This generally comes down to a misunderstanding of appropriate axioms, and it is for this type of person that I have real empathy for, for whom I wish to enter academia cum education in later life and for whom I tutor in the first place. There are few things more satisfying to myself, or to anyone like-minded, than helping someone clueless about a certain concept to understand/even surpass myself eventually in it.
In conclusion I would like to remind each and every one of you that reads this article - we all started from nothing mathematically, and true - some understand more easily, some work quicker. However I implore you to not give up on it and simply do 'something else' in lieu if you don't understand or are battling with a certain part. Mathematics is far, far larger than your GCSE or A-Level syllabus, infinitely so. However, the poignant thing about it, and the ever-so-cheesy point I shall use to end this article, is that it is the one thing you can study to understand everything. Think about it.
