Still find it amusing how many hours of our lives we spend learning/practicing/testing math only to live in a society essentially designed to prevent 99.9999% humans from doing any calculation that would be important
Letting kids leave school without being comfortable with numbers is one of the biggest failures of our school system. Calculators should be banned until college.
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Sure but each progressive year humans are allowed less and less opportunity to calculate anything themselves in the real world, we have decided it’s an unnecessary liability as a society to have humans make calculations outside of a few situations. That doesn’t mean we should stop teaching math
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We should be better at estimating, at being less impressed by “discounts” that aren’t really discounts. Someone being offered 24% interest on credit shouldn’t have any problems understanding that is a crappy offer. Instead of new math we should be focusing on practical math for most students and math math for students who want to study it. Yes, I realize I’m yelling at clouds, but they should hear it once and a while…
Being both very good at practical math and being able to critically think are absolutely mandatory skills for modern life. Without them you aren’t even playing the game. It scares me to imagine what life would be like without either of those things honestly.
Imagine going to the goddamn grocery store without it. Absolutely terrifying. You’d get straight up mugged.
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Yeah I definitely agree on practical aspect. Like you said financial areas are a place where there needs to be a combination of practical math as well as increased literacy of the associated vocabulary.
Like not knowing trigonometry identities isn’t causing people to die of strokes and heart attacks but not having a basic conception of what 2k calories of food looks like literally is killing people. Or like you said almost nobody is going to be financially stressed because they don’t know the quadratic formula (outside of ability to pass school) but not understanding compounding interest leads to a lot of unnecessary suffering.
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From the thing I posted - it’s not really a rant about “new” math (I thought it was gonna be about common core, which I hate for different reasons) - it’s about how they’re rolling out the curriculum now WRT delaying algebra I and offering a watered down stats class optionally to algebra II, which is basically trig.
All of this has been inspired by a “let’s teach kids math they’ll actually use” approach and the outcomes have been indisputably terrible.
I’ve been a math tutor off and on for 10 years and the last kid I tutored was not even bad at math but I recoiled in horror at what they had him doing as a 9th grader. It was stuff I was doing well by 7th grade and I wasn’t even in the super advanced track nor did I go to a good school.
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I’m sure results haven’t been great but I think by definition if we actually someday successfully moved to teaching math that is useful for life (whatever that is decided to be) then kids will inevitably be way worse at “traditionally” taught math and society has decided that is OK so that itself can’t be the measure of if it’s working.
I’m not saying changes are good as I don’t know what’s going on with them but I do think it’s a relevant conversation to have if “traditional” math education is the best use of 25% of 12+ years of human life.
Obviously raises hard questions about when we want to have people silo off into various educational/career tracks who need this sort of knowledge.
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The problem is calculus is a hard requirement for many many sciences in college. If you start algebra 1 in 9th grade, you will not see calculus until college, and anecdotally, I think this is a really bad outcome - kids who went straight to calculus from HS did absolutely terrible at my school, even when they took Calculus AP. Our math education is just bad.
as the author notes, replacing alg 2 with stats is ridiculous too - many concepts in stats build off concepts in algebra.
O yeah, I’m musing about burning it all down completely. Like I took up through differential equations, quantum mechanics (if you call that math), etc and now the computer systems literally won’t let me multiply number of pills x days at work
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Yeah, if I’m remembering right calc 1 relies a lot on trig and it was a weak background in trig, and learning how to drink, that moved me from engineering to being a theater major. Don’t remember why I wasn’t taking more math in high school, probably doing too much theater. By high school I think most people have enough of a clue about what they’re going to be doing with their life to know if they would need technical maths or practical maths.
Yeah I think it’s an interesting question. I don’t know much about worldwide education but feel like the USA has probably the latest in life decision points as far as education tracks. Feels very inefficient but you do read articles about other places where seems whole career trajectory gets set at a relatively early age based on standardized testing which doesn’t necessarily seem ideal either
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I was a big slacker in high school and had zero calc knowledge going into college. I just took basic algebra with some trig in high school. Also didn’t really have any idea what i wanted to do once i was there. Ended up going chemistry which required a bunch of math classes, that Calc 1 class was a bit of a struggle but i got through it ok. I certainly wasn’t an A student but the following math classes weren’t that bad either and i ended up taking a couple extra ones to complete a math minor.
I was basically in the same boat. Didn’t start taking calc until college, wound up taking math classes over summers to get caught up.
I took a year of calc plus an extra trimester. Planned to take more but never went back.
It was super easy, so a damn shame not to do more.
Spring tri we could drop one grade and the final was the last unit test followed by the comprehensive all in one sitting.
Took me 15 minutes to do the unit test. I needed a 94. I was confident so I turned it in with a blank final. The prof said hold up a second, looked at my test and said “have a nice summer”.
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when you’re an Italian caretaker, they let you do it
good news, everyone! as if you weren’t getting crushed enough with housing costs and decades of stagnant wages and increasingly more expensive debt you were already maxed out on, your food bill that’s doubled won’t go up any more? maybe?
jesus christ
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Also on the subject of class warfare:
Sorry, renters.
This isn’t really true though. Being decent at math puts you light-years ahead of the Average American with respect to the ability to manage your finances and not set money on fire.