<p>Does prestige matter?..</p>
<p>I kid, I kid…we don’t want thread # 15,974 on the prestige topic, LOL</p>
<p>Funny how Sakky didn’t pick this quote</p>
<p>"Personally, I resent this idea that we need people to choose between “science classes” and “English classes.” I hate meeting engineers who can’t craft an expository argumentative thesis to save their lives and I hate coming across fellow liberal arts majors who can’t figure out how much to tip at a restaurant, nonchalantly claiming that they’re simply “bad with numbers” (imagine the double standard there too! I guarantee you we wouldn’t be so accepting of a response if the person claimed to be just as bad at reading).</p>
<p>The world needs good writers just as much as it needs good engineers. While I don’t claim to know how to solve this disparity, I do know that addressing this nation’s problems with secondary education is probably a good way to start. We can’t expect people to be prepared for college level classes when so many public schools are pressured into giving obviously unqualified students passing grades."</p>
<p>Which leds me back to one of my prime arguements that public school teachers who don’t like math is part of our problem. Have you ever gotten a kid home from 3-5th grade who has just been taught fractions by someone who can’t balance her own checkbook and had to practicaly reprogram them? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat through “but my teacher said” and had to say to a kid, “Honey your teacher isn’t an engineer and she wasn’t required to take 1/2 the math classes I took. Trust me.” and then of course once you can get them to let go of the totally wrong concept they are holding on to for dear life and listen to the completely logical explaination from mom the engineer, THEN the light bulb comes on. Gee, shocking isn’t it! How can you expect people who don’t like math to be able to explain math. Of course this wasn’t so much of a problem when women had three career choice: teacher, nurse or secretary. But just like all the good engineers are going into finance right now. All the good math teachers went into engineering when the market opened up for women. Maybe you didn’t notice because they made the decision in high school rather than after they had finished their degrees. </p>
<p>Engineers who can’t write and can’t explain their ideas and can’t teach worth beans are a problem. But the fact that it is socially acceptable to say, “Oh I’m not good with numbers” is the bigger problem. It is a huge problem. It is a problem we need to be addressing. If you want more engineers in the future. You darn well better get more decent math teachers in the high schools and on down. You better require 4 years of math to graduate high school. And you better stop accepting “Oh, I’m not good with numbers” as an excuse from anybody for anything especially mothers who wait for the husbands to get home to help with the math because 4th grade fractions are just so hard! Or 6th grade math teachers who say to the mothers, “I know you all wait for your husbands to get home because 6th grade math is so hard.” Or the two MD’s who weren’t able to help their kid with 6th grade math because Oh it is just so hard and the GC said, “We understand!” Choke gag vomit!</p>
<p>^ Oh come on, math was made up mostly by guys who thought drinking mercury would make you live forever.</p>
<p>Aegrisomnia: That. Was. Awesome.</p>
<p>MomfromKC: You make a very good point in that most people don’t have the basic understanding of math that they should. I, however, was blessed with a dad who is ‘better with numbers’ than anyone else I’ve met; so I’m probably biased.</p>
<p>PIGs(Peoples in General): If you don’t think there are enough engineers, become an engineer. Or, you know… Shut up.</p>
<p>What about lawyers? Why do they get more respect than engineers? Is the JD degree really that much harder to get than engineering?</p>
<p>Number of top 5 professional degree earned in the last calendar year:</p>
<p>1 . Law (LLB, JD) 24,430<br>
2. Medicine (MD) 9,880
3. Pharmacy (PharmD [USA], PharmD or BS / BPharm [Canada]) 5,658
4. Divinity / Ministry (BD, MDiv) 3,064
5. Dentistry (DDS, DMD) 2,933 </p>
<p>Lawyers are overrated.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Are you comparing law school to undergrad engineering? Law school is of course harder. Is the material itself harder? I think that question is irrelevant. Law school itself is hard because any good law school grades on a curve and you’re competing against kids who made it through the very challenging feat of getting into a top law school. Most of the time you’re graded on writing and not whether or not x = 4.</p>
<p>Getting into a good law school is much harder than getting into a good engineering grad school because of the overwhelming demand for law school spots. UC Berkeley has similarly ranked engineering and law schools, but their law school is much more selective. Does that mean they have better job prospects? Not at all.</p>
<p>If you look at how SAT scores and LSAT scores correlate (although the correlation is rough and should be taken with a grain of salt), the kids with average LSAT scores at top Ivy League law schools (low 170’s) had average SAT scores in the 1550/1600 range. That SAT score will easily get you into most of the best engineering undergrad schools if accompanied by a solid GPA. Those LSAT scores (low 170’s) actually won’t, they need to be combined with stellar grades and other accomplishments.</p>
<p>A good chunk of law school students majored in political science (although this is by no means a requirement), and that is also often a very challenging degree in the same way law school is challenging. The material does not necessarily have to be hard but good LACs usually grade very hard for poly sci majors.</p>
<p>And yes, lawyers are more respected than engineers depending on how you define respect. You don’t have Law and Order for engineers and engineers don’t wear fancy suits while putting on grand performances (lawyers usually don’t either, but perception is reality). That only matters if that’s what you want people to respect you for, though. Here’s a funny example of what the general public thinks about engineering: The enlisted Air force “civil engineering” job has a 4ish month training for recent high school grads, and they basically work as plumbers, electricians, etc. I’ve heard basically any field you can imagine have the word “engineer” slapped on the end of the job title.</p>
<p>An important thing to note, though, is that if you go to law school with an engineering degree, you will be among the highest paid lawyers because you can take the patent bar (requires a hard science/engineering degree - biology, zoology, etc do not qualify). I’ve heard patent attorneys get paid like surgeons. Normal lawyers’ job prospects are terrible after law school, though - and they aren’t earning nearly as much as they used to. Top law school grads from top 50ish law schools are having a hard time finding jobs and are settling for practicing family law or worse.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I dunno how this is in any way relevant to lawyers being overrated. There are more doctors than Navy Seals, does that make doctors overrated?</p>
<p>Frankly speaking, and based on my understanding of what it is (some of the most visible) lawyers do, I think that they should be respected more than (what most people imagine when they think of most) engineers. There are some great engineers and some lousy lawyers, but lawyers’ work is by no means easier than or inferior to engineers’ work. </p>
<p>I see a trend in academics and industry to try to paint engineers as more social, free-thinking, active, cool, admirable, etc. than prevailing stereotypes suggest. While that’s all well and good to a point, I think that there comes a point when reasonable people need to face facts: engineering is a good job for some, and not for others; and it’s probably neither the best job nor the worst job any given person could get. There are jobs that are (and should be) less well-respected and well-paid than engineering, and there are jobs that are (and should be) more well-respected and better-paid than engineering.</p>
<p>There. Now go ahead and flame me.</p>
<p>“There are more doctors than Navy Seals, does that make doctors overrated?” </p>
<p>Thank you for pointing out the complete lack of logic to all these articles that Sakky just keeps posting. Now if FirstMove wanted to also post the number of entry level job opening for each professional degree and it turned out we needed only 5,000 lawyers, 10,000+ doctors 6,000+ pharmasists, etc. then you could fairly say that becoming a lawyer is overrated which has led to an over supply, which has led to way too many un/under-employed new lawyers. Which I think does happen to be true, but certainly isn’t proved by the data posted.</p>
<p>I was ignorant and wanted to know what you guys thought. Thanks.</p>
<p>So I guess lawyers stand to be more respected and prestigious…</p>
<p>MomfromKC, I appreciated your post about math education. When my son was in second grade, I got a note from the teacher that said something like, “Please do not show your child the ‘traditional’ method of subtraction. We are teaching them the _____ method and don’t want to confuse them.” As you can imagine, the _______ method was a bunch of _____! Lengthy and confusing. I’d already TAUGHT my son how to subtract, so I told him to keep doing it that way. I called the teacher and let her know what I thought. Then, lo and behold, I got the SAME note when my next kid got to second grade! It turns out the note was a canned one provided by the curriculum publisher. It made my blood boil. I’m still showing my 8th-grade daughter simpler ways to do math than the ones she’s learning in school. I think the school’s ways are supposed to help them learn concepts better, but all I’ve seen is a lot of frustration on the kids’ part.</p>
<p>The 9th grade teachers in our district are tearing their hair out, because the kids in geometry and algebra don’t know BASIC math skills. When I checked into it, the 8th grade teachers are being told that the kids don’t need “pencil and paper” skills like they used to, since they can do everything on a calculator. Grr. I spoke before the school board about the situation and was patronizingly told that the district’s curriculum has worked very well around the country. Yeah, right!!</p>
<p>How on Earth are they teaching kids to subtract numbers? Can you provide an example? Here’s how I learned it…</p>
<p>334 - 247</p>
<p>7 > 4, so borrow and carry</p>
<p>32(14) - 247</p>
<p>4 > 2, so borrow and carry</p>
<p>2(12)(14) - 247</p>
<p>Subtract corresponding entries and write them down in the same order:</p>
<p>(2-2)(12-4)(14-7) = 087</p>
<p>So 334 - 247 = 87.</p>
<p>Right? Or am I one of the forsaken?</p>
<p>Oh, aegrisomnia, you’re so “yesterday.” ;)</p>
<p>It’s the Everyday Math Curriculum (GAG ME!!). They teach several methods. They eventually get to what we consider the traditional method (they call it “Trade First”), but they also use several other methods. They taught those first. Here is one of them. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Here is the link, because I couldn’t get it to format right: [Everyday</a> Mathematics (Chicago Math) Basic Algorithms](<a href=“http://math.nyu.edu/~braams/links/em-arith.html]Everyday”>http://math.nyu.edu/~braams/links/em-arith.html)</p>
<p>Be sure to look at the long division algorithms. Here is what the link says:
</p>
<p>I haven’t talked to a single student who understood or liked these alternative algorithms. I tutored a couple of HIGH SCHOOL girls who couldn’t do long division until I showed them the way it used to be done! You probably don’t believe me, but I’m not exaggerating. It’s frightening.</p>
<p>LOL, I remember having issues with long division in Everyday Math.</p>
<p>That has to be the absolute most goofy way to do math I have ever seen.</p>
<p>This is just… embarrassing. I would put myself against any student that was using those “algorithms”, using nothing more than pencil, paper, and good, old common sense. Then again, I was taught that math /makes/ sense. Now, I’m not so sure.</p>
<p>There are some “shortcuts” that are both useful and provide a means of illustrating formal mathematics. For example, one might use the straightforward method of multiplying 302 * 298, or take advantage of the fact that it is the product of the sum and difference of two numbers (300 + 2)(300 - 2), which can be simplified as the difference of two squares 300^2 - 4^2. Understanding how and when these operations hold can make certain types of computations faster, for example.</p>
<p>WRT long division, an argument for teaching it is that it can be applied not just to numbers, but other things such as polynomials.</p>
<p>An important discussion (IMO) is how and when to introduce these topics so they are both effectively utilized and properly understood. It’s not obvious, given the amount of time available for math instruction at any level, prevailing attitudes towards math education, skill levels of math teachers, etc.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Books like this would suggest that people with engineering background can and do find challenging work as Wall Street quants.</p>
<p>[The</a> Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It [Paperback]](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Quants-Whizzes-Conquered-Street-Destroyed/dp/0307453383/ref=sr_1_15?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322850672&sr=1-15]The”>http://www.amazon.com/Quants-Whizzes-Conquered-Street-Destroyed/dp/0307453383/ref=sr_1_15?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322850672&sr=1-15)</p>
<p>FirstMove, i do not now nor will I ever understand an obsession with who is mor respected and prestigious. Maybe it is the fact that my family is rooted in midwestern farmers. In my book respected people do the right thing and NOT respected people cheat on their wives, sell lemon cars, lie, cheat, steal and kill. What you are talking about is who makes the most money (I think) and who makes the most money has a heck of a lot of luck in it. Yes Doctors and Lawyers make a lot of money. But cardiologist make a heck of a lot more than the family doctor and nobody (that I know) considers the family doctor less trustworthy or honorable. And Lawyers, well I don’t think many people give them an automatic pass, too many people have heard at least one “shister” story. So I’m thinking you have to know the lawyer personally before you trust them too far. Trust and respect are the same thing in my mind. Prestige has more to do with the Rolex watch, fancy suit and nice car. None of which anybody needs to be respected or respectable.</p>
<p>yagottabelieve
“An important discussion (IMO) is how and when to introduce these topics so they are both effectively utilized and properly understood. It’s not obvious, given the amount of time available for math instruction at any level, prevailing attitudes towards math education, skill levels of math teachers, etc”</p>
<p>Very good, and one of my points is that the teachers and text book writers who are making the determination as to when and how to introduce the various methods are NOT qualified to be doing so. </p>
<p>MainLonghorn
Thanks for the support. And you can patronizingly ask your school board for math SAT and ACT scores to prove it. One of my concerns is that the middle and high school have cut their class times back to 42 minutes in order to make room for more electives and have reduced the overall math teaching time. I’m actually considering petitioning the state to force them to put the time back on math. If they have to have 42 minutes classes then they need a math lab at least once a week to make up the time. Everytime they add a health class, or extend the forgein language requirement it cuts into math. Not that I want them to stop teaching forgein languages or band or put the kids at risk for AIDS, eating disorders or whatever else is the cry of the day. I just want them to stop taking it away from math. Without math you can’t do science. It is very important the they get the math down cold long before the years of Chemistry and Physics. I wouldn’t have a problem with math being a double class for 6th and 7th graders because that is when I think they need it most. Then you can cut them back to one 42 minute class in the 8th grade. Provided they pass. It should be a huge benefit to all concerned. Of course they would have to actually teach traditonal math.</p>