I can’t recall, how often I’ve heard from admission officers, visiting our STEM magnet school
smart kids are boring
you can’t build a well-rounded class from nerds, because nobody would like college experience surrounded by nerds. They are boring!
there are too many smart kids in USA
Intellectual prowess is not celebrated in USA, unfortunately. There are many, many exceptionally smart kids in our high school. Great kids! Feel sad for them.
My oldest D is bored to death by 4 years of English/ Literature, US government, World History, US History, Health, PE, and what-ever-else. Poetry?! Really?!
Why truncate math? There are so many other subjects that could be easily reduced (deleted) from the HS curriculum.
Who is saying your kids shouldn’t take all the math they want? I’m just saying that I don’t think it’s necessary for every college bound student. Most, yes, but not all. Our HS senior (who also took algebra in 6th grade) took linear algebra and multivariate calculus this year. Our sophomore has A’s in algebra 2. Still, I think there are students who have a lot of trouble with algebra who can be successful in college. What’s right for our kids may not be right for everyone. For what it’s worth, I also think classes like creative writing and journalism should count as English credits. That’s one thing I think my high school did right.
Basic education is not about picking and choosing. It’s about providing a base of knowledge that is highly universal that allows them to further explore a wide range of fields. I don’t think that students in HS are very qualified to say that “I won’t need that” because they simply don’t know better. I certainly thought that I wouldn’t need a lot of classes that ended up very useful later in life (good thing I still studied those subjects). Algebra is most certainly one of those fields. So is English and history, and I feel the same way about those kids who say “I don’t care about anything but math and science.” Maybe that explains why too many engineers are really bad writers.
Everyone can learn algebra, and part of education is to learn subjects that are difficult. I simply suggest that they get over it.
On interviews: I really, really don’t like questions that quiz basic or somewhat advanced general knowledge on the entire curriculum. It seldom tracks actual knowledge (it would be better to ask them about their specialty, but that doesn’t really work because either the interviewee knows more about that than the interviewer, or no one can tell), and it’s akin to a pop quiz. It works out to be a trivia contest where the prize is a job. Furthermore, success depends on being asked the right questions (every manager has their own pet questions and pet methods of solution) and not missing some of the far more important aspects of gauging the ability of a prospective employee. Companies that ask trivia have a massive false negative rate and too often end up hiring someone the second or third time around that they didn’t want the first time around (when the questions happen to be slightly more to their liking).
I personally prefer a strictly practical approach to math and math education. Even as someone with a math degree, I never cared for the intricate structure or “internal beauty” of math, no more than I cared for uninspiring literature that happened to have intricate structure (e.g. A Tale of Two Cities). However, math has a whole lot of concepts whose teaching is two steps removed from their application. It took a whole lot of time after I initially learned the subject before I actually applied subjects such as discrete math, real analysis, linear algebra, number theory, etc., in meaningful ways. But they have real application, and that’s what makes them worth learning. I never cared for “purely theoretical” mathematics myself, and I don’t think that people should learn anything purely theoretical if they don’t want to.
Yes! Remove Algebra 1 from the curriculum - harsh and brutal subject, that keeps students away from living happy, productive lives. Yes, do it!
Recently California abandoned HS graduation exam and gave HS diploma to all students who failed the exam, even if it happened many years ago. Justice for everyone!
Incidentally, the GED some of my non-college classmate tutoring clients were working towards during my undergrad years covered algebra and geometry(basically a watered down version of 9th and 10th grade math compared with a standard NY state HS curriculum). Even so, the credential is regarded as so far less than a bona-fide HS diploma that not only will many colleges, especially some respectable/elite ones regard it with skepticism, even the US Army regard it with dubiousness as a qualification for enlisted personnel.
This is illustrated by the fact that with exceptions of periods where demands for personnel are unusually high(i.e. OIF/Afghanistan), the Army tended to maintain a maximum quota where they will accept no more than ~10% of enlisted recruits with only a GED*. And the ones who are accepted usually needed higher ASVAB standardized scores to compensate.
Heard from some friends who served that if a GED holder wanted to avoid that issue, one recommendation is for them to enroll at the local Ccollege and take a semester or two worth of credits with reasonably passing grades as that will place them at the equivalency of a bona-fide HS grad in the eyes of those overseeing educational qualifications of enlistees.
Personally I think that CCs should offer a formal “remedial HS education” that qualifies as a HS degree for people who are too old to go to high school normally. They already basically do that informally, so I don’t think it would be too hard to manage.
I think we have to differentiate social studies from social sciences. We can take social studies for enjoyment, but without a strong background in quantitative analysis, I don’t believe one can truly understand the social sciences.
A few years ago, Charles Murray has this to say:
In engineering and most of the natural sciences, the demarcation between high-school material and college-level material is brutally obvious. If you cannot handle the math, you cannot pass the courses. In the humanities and social sciences, the demarcation is fuzzier. It is possible for someone with an IQ of 100 to sit in the lectures of Economics 1, read the textbook, and write answers in an examination book. But students who cannot follow complex arguments accurately are not really learning economics. They are taking away a mishmash of half-understood information and outright misunderstandings that probably leave them under the illusion that they know something they do not. (A depressing research literature documents one’s inability to recognize one’s own incompetence.) Traditionally and properly understood, a four-year college education teaches advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the intellectual capacity of most people.
From reliable sources, I learned that the best graduate students in economics have undergrad degrees in math or physics, not economics. Interesting, isn’t it?
Depends on the social science and the sub-field concerned.
For instance, in poli-sci someone who emphasizes a qualitative approach to studying politics may agree some proficiency in some quantitative skills(stats) is needed, he/she may not necessarily agree one needs a “strong background” in quantitative analysis.
Most poli-sci grad students I know who are in comparative politics tend not to have strong quant analysis backgrounds…but can use the basic quant skills necessary such as basic statistics one would find in courses like the elite U Intro stats course I took one summer for Econ and anyone who wasn’t a math or engineering major. Most qualitative oriented poli-sci grad students I knew found courses like that to be near the maximum threshold of their quant capabilities.
Where I live in California, my local high school district offers a high school diploma programs for adults. I’d guess that lots of other high school districts do also.
This was why, in an earlier comment, I suggested students should be taking statistics rather than calculus. To be an informed citizen, statistics is required in order to help sort out the real from the bs.