http://bigstory.ap.org/article/f7b0c544f83743509960e1a665000751/algebra-unnecessary-stumbling-block-us-schools make it look like he opposes algebra 1 as well.
Um…yes. Yes it will. Either he’s talking on issues that he is completely ignorant on or just fearmongering. Either is disingenuous.
Algebra 1, 2 Geometry and Pre-Calculus and Statistics are absolute necessities.
The anti-intellectualism continually permeating American culture is absolutely disgusting.
I am a parent of a public school kid. I had my head in the sand when she was in elementary school. She very rarely had any homework. Was a straight A kid. So when she started 6th grade in middle school. I got interested in her math because she was GT and math is her best subject.
So I started her at mathnasium with the goal of testing via credit for exam to skip a year of middle school math.
She flew through 4 months of mathnasium math and they were impressed with her work ethic. I then decided we could do this at home without dropping $$ down the toilet.
So she “afterschooled” at home with a solid pre AP program. Aced the CBE and was able to take Algebra I in 7th grade. She supplemented via “afterschooling” at home on Algebra I with Paul Foerster textbook. This textbook, along with Math without Borders, gave her a much more solid understand of algebra than she learned at school.
She aced it, aced the STAAR exam and now is working on via “afterschooling” at home with Algebra II, again with Paul Foerster’s textbook…
Not to advance anymore but to get a very solid foundation.
My daughter is fortunate to have gotten her mom’s head of the sand and I am now a active mom in her education.
I wish every child could have such a parent. I am now a great partner with her school/teachers.
I work in Marketing. I use Algebra and Stats every day.
But I also use math outside of work: budgeting, shopping (constantly adjusting “how much more can I spend?” after every item is tossed into the cart…), etc. I also use Geometry, but more for kicks: like when I am on a plane and gazing out the window, I use it to try to judge the distance to a point on the ground that I’m staring at – both from my eyes and from the point on the ground over which the plane is flying. “How far away is that town over there?” I ask myself, and get to work.
Probably the most useful lesson I learned in college was how to research… followed by math, the social sciences, and anything related to writing.
I am definitely one who believes in the importance of math.
Necessities for what? The only time I have ever used my HS Geometry or Algebra was for the SAT and later the GRE. I never took Pre-Calculus, and there has never been a point in my life when my progress at anything has been halted because I didn’t know logarithmic functions.
Attorneys as a group suck with math. You can get a lot of them to squirm just by presenting them with some sort of math problem. And you can get them to think you are a wizard with basic arithmetic or simplistic algebra. Seeing some of them draft around math can be painful. And funny at the same time when you ask them questions about it and/or seek to revise it.
The problem is, everyone looks at math the wrong way and asks the wrong questions. Too many look at various math concepts, like algebra, and asks “when will I need to know this” or “will I ever use this”. The question they should be asking is “How can I apply this to situations in my life”. Math isn’t about giving you tools to solve specific problems, it’s about giving you tools that can be applied to various problems in order to derive solutions to those problems. Anyone who says they have never used algebra in their life, falsely assumes that no opportunities ever presented themselves and ignores the fact that there were probably numerous occasions that they used algebra and didn’t even realize it.
Actually, @snarlatron, I would suggest you do use algebra (and geometry or at least trigonometry, most likely) in your everyday life, but you don’t realize it—it’s all so transparent and obvious that you simply don’t see it for what it is.
I mean, have you ever figured out compound interest? Created an equation in an Excel spreadsheet? Figured out how to avoid overextending yourself budgetwise? Bought an appropriate amount of paint to redo a room? Converted between imperial and metric measurements? Projected income and expenses, whether for business or personal life? Compared different offers for similar products or experiences? Figured out the number of days until an event? (And so on.)
If you have done any of those, congratulations, you have used algebra or geometry or trigonometry for something other than the SAT and GRE!
^ amazingly all the above can be done by googling them. I guess all we need is one person who understands it and makes an app. That is it, like not everyone needs to know how to grow rice in the field…
Some of materials in Algebra 1/ algebra 2/ geometry /precalc are totally waste of time. I bet anyone on CC ever applies what was learned in geometry proofs. Neither for graphing rational functions. Maybe only one did graph inverse trig function by hand. Most of people who claim they like stats actually may not understand what gamma function is…
Anyway, my point is that we need to get rid of something that is useless and teach the students something useful.
Years ago when I was involved in rural medical work in a central African country, one of my coworkers, who traveled to South Africa to purchase supplies, brought back a number of pairs of men’s shoes of varying quality with the intention to sell them-- at cost-- to our African hospital employees, who really needed shoes.
My coworker had not recorded what he had paid for the shoes individually-- he only knew the total he had spent in South African Rand for the whole lot. I told him I would work out an equitable break-even selling price for them that took into account the fact that there were varying levels of quality.
First I converted the total amount spent in South African Rand to our country’s currency, which I will call a “dollar”.
I do not recall the exact amount he had spent on the shoes, or how many pairs he had bought, so I will just make up the numbers; I am not far off, in any case.
Let us say the shoes had cost $1252 total and that there were 51 pairs of shoes.
I divided the shoes into 3 levels of quality.
X would represent the cost of the cheapest shoe.
Let us say there were 27 pairs of those. The total cost of those was therefore 27x.
Looking them over, I decided the next-best quality were worth 1.5 times as much as the cheapest ones.
Let us say there were 16 pairs of those. The total cost of those would be 16 (1.5x), or 24x.
The best shoes, I decided, were worth twice as much as the cheapest ones. Let us say there were 8 pairs of those. They had cost us 8 (2x), or 16x.
Adding up the three kinds of shoes, 27x + 24X + 16X = $1252.
67x = $1252.
x = $18.69.
I set the price of the cheapest shoes at $18.70. (By selling all 27 pairs, we got back $504.90).
For the next-best shoes we charged 1.5 times that, or $28. (By selling all 16 pairs, we got back $448).
The best shoes were priced at $37.40. (By selling all 8 pairs, we got back $299.20).
Well, we almost broke even. In my example we made 10 cents profit. That’s about what happened in real life.
The hospital staff were very happy to be able to buy affordable shoes. We sold out fast!
We were happy to be able to tell them that they had gotten them at cost.
Here’s to Algebra!
I am a pretty good pool player. No doubt, many principles of geometry are at play when I make my shots. But nothing in that horrible 9th grade geometry class I had to take has made me a better pool player.
The logical thinking skills practiced in doing mathematical proofs are useful in many other contexts, such as understanding and writing computer programs. Or reading the instructions for doing parts of your US income tax:
https://www.irs.gov/publications/p17/ch01.html#en_US_2015_publink1000170407
https://www.irs.gov/publications/p936/ar02.html
https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc409.html
^ then teach them logic, like some schools do. And it is not harder and it is more useful. The two column proofs or flow chart proofs are not really logic but some weird materials to let students go through. I don’t see that students are benefiting anything from this but wasting time, and for some, it leaves some notions that they can not do geometry.
Does someone really need two years of Algebra to figure out compound interest? It’s just a matter of plugging numbers into a formula. We use Turbotax now, but we did it ourselves before. The shoe example I could probably do in my head. These are important things to be able to do, but I’m not convinced you have to take that much math do it.
The same argument can be applied to most other things in the high school curriculum:
English literature
Science
History and social studies
Foreign language
Art
Should these all be eliminated from the high school curriculum?
It seems to me that some people who struggle in a particular subject or on a particular test tend to poo-poo its importance and validity, just as some of those without a particular degree claim its uselessness. I think it’s in our wiring to try to protect our pride by acting like we don’t need that which we lack or that which we struggle with. Sometimes we’re right, for ourselves, but who’s to say gobs of others don’t get a great deal of use or knowledge or success out of the academic skills or pursuits we think aren’t useful? Who’s to say they aren’t better off for having followed those pursuits, cultivated those skills?
Obviously, some who poo-poo academic pursuits are good at them (like tests, subjects, etc.) or have them (in the case of degrees…) – there has to be that caveat. For them, it’s not jealousy or frustration driving the resentment of academic pursuits, but some other unknown motive.
One HS classmate would have been very happy to eliminate English literature from HS graduation requirements because as a hardcore aspiring CS nerd and pre-med…he felt analyzing literary works he wasn’t very interested in was a huge waste of his time.
He even tried acting on it by somehow arranging his class schedule so he somehow ended up not taking any of the 4 year English lit requirement during our HS years. It was only after he was already receiving college acceptances…including to 2 Ivies that the course scheduling office and HS admins found out, notified his colleges about his deficiency in English lit credits, wouldn’t allow him to graduate, and retained him as a 5 year “super-senior” so they can ensure he makes up all those English lit credits he skipped.
Turned out this was only a minor bump on the road for him as after a year at a SUNY, he ended up being accepted as a transfer student to one of the Ivies which had initially accepted him before word about his missing English lit credits due to his circumvention of the scheduling office caused them to rescind their offer during our senior year, successfully graduated as a premed, and is now a practicing MD.
Knew of a few hardcore math/STEM whizzes in HS who didn’t believe in mandated math/STEM…or any academic requirements despite excelling in math/STEM and all around.
Their reasoning is largely derived from a naive assumption that because they were strongly passionate and willing to go all out to learn as much as possible and excel academically that everyone else should be able to do likewise.
“Does someone really need two years of Algebra to figure out compound interest? It’s just a matter of plugging numbers into a formula.” and they teach that formula in the second year of algebra. If you want to actually understand what is going on, you need algebra 2.
It’s hard for me to think of many things that are currently taught in high school which I think are more important than math through algebra2. But I guess many people would like to entrust the most important financial decisions of their life to a black box they don’t understand.
Does plugging things into a formula help you understand relations between numbers in any depth beyond, “this magical machine tells me that this number is correct”?
There is quite a lot to compound interest. Even when it comes to personal finance (especially if you have any assets), there’s a lot more to it than just what formulas can give you. There’s a whole field of study related to it, that is pretty inaccessible if you don’t understand functions and their relations (which is the core of Algebra 2). Calculus creeps its way into that as well, but that’s a story for another time.