<p>S1’s AP stat was quite good and comprehensive. All must not be taught in the same way.</p>
<p>Lots of students do not take AP-Calc. S1 did not (and did fine in the college admissions sweepstakes). For his fourth year of math, he took a course called Discrete Math. I would have been happy for him to take AP-Stats. He took Stats in college, still without a calculus background. He struggled through it. I wish he could have taken a year to absorb the materials rather than a college semester.</p>
<p>Ray192, remember it is hs statistics and probability that we are talking about here. And even at my alma mater Cornell the intro stats course does not require calc as a prereq for its intro statistics course. </p>
<p>And per my first post read the book Innumeracy and you will understand why even a cursory knowledge of statistics and probability can be of great importance in everyday life, unlike calc, linear algebra, discrete math, etc.</p>
<p>Also regarding your post about quantative reasoning statistics and probability fill that bill too according to Harvard U’s academic catalogue.</p>
<p>Like VP’s D, I’m a humanities kid and will be taking BC next year–instead of Stat–because of the admissions effect. Stat is “easy” at my school, so it wouldn’t reflect favorably in the counselor’s eyes or adcoms’ eyes. (I don’t have room in my schedule to take both.)</p>
<p>^^And after this, you probably won’t ever use calculus ever again; but you will need a knowledge of stats and probability to make sense of the news throughout your life. I endorse Originaloog’s recommendation of Innumeracy.</p>
<p>^^ I suspect Keilexandra (who is at TASP right now) and my daughter (who will be at a top debate camp soon) will be able to make sense of the news throughout their lives. I suspect they have taught themselves and will teach themselves enough to get by. </p>
<p>My D will almost certainly take Stat in college and hopefully it will be taught at a higher level in college than in high school.</p>
<p>This seems a very odd argument.</p>
<p>It’s not the point of a curriculum to address the needs of TASP attendees or those who can learn on their own. My S learned Calc BC on his own. Does it mean that Calc BC should not be taught in high school?<br>
There are plenty of profs who don’t think that Calc BC is the equivalent of an intro Calc course in college and even demand that students who scored 5s on the exam take the intro Calc class anyway. Does this mean then that AP-Calc should not be taught because it’s not rigorous enough by college standards? One can say the same of most AP courses, too.</p>
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<p>That is because it isn’t an argument at all :)</p>
<p>I am with you on the desirability of promoting statistics/probability in the H.S. curriculum. I loved the Arthur Benjamin video posted in the OP and made my D watch it and she loved it too and we agree with it. </p>
<p>But the stakes for next year are too high for her. She has decided she doesn’t want to look like she is choosing to take what is perceived to be an “easy class” i.e, AP Stat. She has the same dilemma with some other APs. She would love to take AP Psych and AP Gov but those are considered easier classes than AP Physics and AP Euro History. She will compromise and probably take AP Physics and AP Gov. She is not motivated to take the ‘easier’ classes because they are easy, but because they are more interesting and relevant to her. No matter, her A’s will look less shiny if they are in the easier classes than if they are in the harder classes. </p>
<p>Hopefully in college she will be free from this ridiculous need to prove to others that she can handle ‘difficult’ material.</p>
<p>You don’t need statistics to understand the news. Just Latin. Cui bono.</p>
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<p>Probably true. Mine was an online class that stuck rigidly to the AP outline.</p>
<p>VP"</p>
<p>That’s the problem, isn’t it? Students take classes they don’t need or particularly enjoy because it will look good to admissions officers (who may not have taken the courses themselves–the mania for AP Calc is fairly recent). They could instead take courses they really enjoy and would be of use to them in college and thereafter.
Arthur Benjamin and others are trying to get colleges and high schools to think differently. Benjamin is very well known and respected, so perhaps he will be able to get his message across.</p>
<p>I watched the video again, more carefully this time. He did not directly attack arithmetic and algebra as I first thought. But based solely on this video clip, my opinion of the speaker remains the same. </p>
<p>Just listen to what was said: If president Obama invited me to be the next czar of mathematics, then I would have a suggestion for him that I think would vastly improved the mathematics education in this country, and that it would be **easy **to implement and inexpensive. </p>
<p>Havent we been down this road before, again and again? The New Math, the New New Math, and here comes the New New New Math. It sounds so eerily like the New Economy we had been promised, which led to dot com bubble and housing bubble. </p>
<p>But only if Prof. Benjamin had been our math czar, all these economic calamities would have been completely avoided. Thats right, all we needed was to teach statistics to every high school student. I didnt make this up, this is what he said in the video: if our students, our high school students if all the American citizens knew about probability and statistics, we wouldnt be in the economic mess that were in today. </p>
<p>Really? I dont know what teaching statistics will do for our national economy, but two of my close friends happen to be professors of statistics. From what I can tell, their investment portfolios and 401k/403b did not fair much better than that of the art history professors or the secretaries, their expertise in statistics notwithstanding. </p>
<p>I find the claim that statistics is more useful than calculus in daily lives somewhat amusing. Not that I have ever used calculus in my daily life, neither can I recall ever having a need to use Pythagorean theorem or to solve a quadratic equation. But I am also hard pressed to come up with a single daily situation (outside work) where I need to calculate a variance, do a t-test, or estimate the odds of getting hit by passing vehicles when I step onto the crosswalk. </p>
<p>I am all for teaching combinatorics/probability in high schools, but it requires a good grasp of algebra. And without learning calculus, a student wont understand the underlining principles of statistics, simply memorizing a few formulas wont help him/her to reliably apply statistics in real life situations. There have been too many examples of misuse of statistics, even in academia, because of the lack of understanding of statistics principles.</p>
<p>The ability to state the meaning of two standard deviations from the means without knowing how the result comes about isnt any more impressive than the recitation of a few bible passages. It does not convey any deeper meaning that cannot be expressed using simple English language sans the jargons, nor does it required a whole semester or a whole year course. The numerous chance threads on CC show that students do not need AP statistics to understand the concept of randomness and odds.</p>
<p>Prof. Benjamin advocates a new modern, discrete mathematics of randomness, of data as opposed to the classical, continuous mathematics. I dont know what he exactly means, but it sounds like a frontal attack on the more traditional rigorous math education that includes the teaching of trigonometry and analytical geometry (pre-calculus). While these topics are important for learning calculus, they are indispensable for learning physics, which is a subject far more useful in our understanding of the world and our day to day lives than calculus AND statistics. </p>
<p>Prof. Benjamin proclaims the world has changed from analog to digital. And its time for our mathematics curriculum to change from analog to digital. Ironically, the microprocessors that power our digital world are built from resistors, capacitors, and transistors, all of which are analog components. And statistics, the summit of this digital mathematics curriculum, is built on the foundation of calculus.</p>
<p>People who argue for more useful math subjects and against the more abstract and rigorous math curriculum that covers geometry proofs and conic sections have completely missed one of its most fundamental purposes. The abilities to deduce the similarity of two triangles or to figure out the trajectory of a thrown football are probably useless to most people. But the most important aspect of a rigorous math education is that it teaches abstract, rigorous, and logical reasoning, the power of induction and deduction, the frame of references, and the understanding that all conclusions/results reached depend on their initial conditions and constraints.</p>
<p>Well analog is continuous and digital is discrete. I get what he’s saying. </p>
<p>Continuous math courses deal with infinities - infinitely close, plotting curves with an infinite number of points between 0 and 1, etc. Discrete math courses deal with with finite math - generally integers but basically things that are rational and nowhere near transcendental.</p>
<p>While it’s true that electronics appear to be continuous they act as discrete. They’re either on, or off, even though on has varying degrees of on and sometimes can be misread (very very rarely).</p>
<p>But discrete vs. continuous is an old, old debate. The Greeks questioned whether or not one could infinitely divide up stuff or not - if one could, then the universe is continuous. If there was a smallest something - whether it be water, air or the “infinite”, then the universe is discrete. Thousands of years later, quantum physics thinks of the world as discrete, but relativity thinks of the world as smooth, continuous and geometric.</p>
<p>I think that too much importance is given to continuous math in grades K-12 - I personally dislike discrete math and probability and statistics but I certainly agree that we stress continuous math too much and should cover: discrete, combinatorics and ESPECIALLY logic.</p>