I agree with this. I could’ve pursued an easy major and graduated a year early, but I wanted to get a STEM degree, because I knew I’d be far more knowledgable. I actually had enough credits to graduate in 3.5 years, but choose to take the full 4 years so that I could have 3 units of graduate credit by the time I did graduate.
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Math based degrees are the hardest so not many students dare to take that route, unless they are naturally gifted or masochists.
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My son is 17 and his roommate is 19, they get along great and age hasn’t been an issue for either one.
My D’s friend group has been together for about 20 years. Some are a year or more older or younger than others. When they were near 21 (a decade ago) it was an issue as to whom could legally drink alcohol. Now, it really isn’t much of an issue at all. Several of her college buddies all turned 21 around same time as her do they all went to Vegas to celebrate together snd had a nice time.
An age difference of couple of years shouldn’t be an issue after high school. In college years, it makes no difference if you are 19 or 20, junior or senior, often juniors born after cut off date are same age as seniors, if red shirted then older than half of their seniors.
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D and her friend group started when they were all about 13ish, give or take a year above or below. They were summer after 7th grade. It grew when she started 9th grade and shrank a bit when people went to college and settled. The girls seemed fine with the few years of age difference over the decades.
That is not even close to being true. I have no idea where people come up with these ideas…
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That’s true for some folks. My H is a person who found his math, physics and engineering classes much easier than some of his liberal arts classes.
Math isn’t that difficult, at least to understand. The problems in math are, A, it is taught badly, and B, complex mathematical problems have many moving parts, and it is not always easy to keep them all in place.
As I have complained before, math is taught as template filling, not as problem solving. What math is about is problem solving and abstraction of problems. Memorizing equation formats by solving 1,000 examples with different numbers is not “learning mathematics”. Kids finish high school thinking that they are good at math because they can solve quadratic equations quickly, when those equations are provided in a format with which they are familiar, even though these kids do not actually understand what a variable actually is.
This is based on fact - my wife has taught CS majors who had A’s in Calculus who really did not understand what the term “variable” means, and how it differs from a constant.
Hell, they don’t even really understand arithmetic. When you ask somebody who learned math why the 2X3 = 3X2, but 2/3 ≠ 3/2, they will not really have any answer than “because that’s the way that it is”, since they simply memorized this a fact, performed a few hundred examples of multiplication and division, and moved on. The kids who could multiply or divide quickly were considered “good at math”.
Kids whos entire math education has been this sort of memorization are not actually prepared for college level math.
Math isn’t any more difficult that nay other field. It is just taught so much more poorly than, say, science.
“Liberal arts” include math and the sciences.
I think you mean “humanities classes”.
The Liberal Arts initially referred to the Seven Liberal Arts: Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy.
Today, a liberal arts education generally includes the following:
- Life sciences (biology, ecology, neuroscience)
- Physical science (physics, astronomy, chemistry, physical geography)
- Logic, mathematics, statistics, computer science
- Philosophy
- History
- Social science (anthropology, economics, human geography, linguistics, political science, jurisprudence, psychology, and sociology)
- Creative arts (fine arts, music, performing arts, literature)
So math is part of the liberal arts
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My mistake. I know that math is technically part of liberal arts. My own degree (biology major, chemistry minor) was from my university’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. My background includes required classes in calculus and physics. I later returned to college to change careers and became a CPA. So yes, I have my own math related background and understanding of math.
My point is that math may be more difficult for many people but not all. H was able to breeze through college engineering, calculus, physics classes (confirmed by his roommates/ other close college friends) but classes like language arts, history and philosophy were hard for him. His SAT and ACT scores are pretty lopsided with math scores much higher. I have no comment on whether his math education before college was good but he attended a small high school where only about 10 - 15% of his class attended a 4 year college/university. Only a handful attended very selective colleges like he did.
While math may be harder for some/most people it is not true for everyone.
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Sorry, I should’ve been more clear. I was talking about the post-calculus math classes taught in college. Obviously, high school AP calculus is a joke compared to those classes.
No question about that. It is also true that people who are have a lot of talent in math often teach themselves pretty successfully.
My minor point about math was that math isn’t any more difficult than any science or humanities course, however, it is generally taught so poorly that it developed an undeserved reputation of being the most difficult course.
I do think that even those classes would be far more accessible to far more students if their math educations from elementary school would have been better.
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I don’t think the standard of teaching is necessarily the main issue, but that truly gifted mathematicians find the problem sets easy enough that they can complete them in fraction of the time it takes for less talented students in the middle of the class That’s true even for the most selective colleges and makes those median students feel that math is hard. It’s very different to subjects where you write an essay or do a lab and the amount of time it takes the best student is likely very similar to the median student.
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My observation is that real math starts a couple of courses after calculus when the students have to be comfortable thinking in an arbitrary number of dimensions. Many kids are comfortable in three and even four dimensions but drop off at that point.
Although the quality of my math teachers was quite variable, I don’t know how easy it would have been to teach that kind of abstract reasoning. I do think they do a terrible job of teaching about how to do proofs. While good professors take you through a proof in ways that are clear, what they don’t teach you is how to see the best way to prove things. You learn more or less by trial and error.