The Atlantic- Only 22 percent of the nation’s workers use any math more advanced than fractions, and they typically occupy technical or skilled positions. That means more than three-fourths of the population spends painful years in school futzing with numbers when they could be learning something more useful.
2 comments:
How are we supposed to find the Math geniuses without Algebra and Calculus classes?
As someone who was very poor in math in middle and high school, but then ended up doing well in engineering and taking enough math to choke a horse at university (through differential equations and linear algebra), I oscillate back and forth on this.
In our democracy, what we need are people capable of quantitative reasoning, which is something that you think you would learn in advanced math, but math is so poorly taught in this country that most math classes are basically procedural memorization with very little mental engagement and not much skill-building in how to use math to understand the world outside of textbook problems. I resonate strongly with Lockhart’s Lament
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematician%27s_Lament
If I were running a school, I’d preserve the existing classic sequence for the kids who succeed with it so that they can go as far as possible with the pre-calculus and calculus sequence before graduating, but at the same time I’d make sure that all kids have a math class social studies class — a media literacy and decision science class, concentrating on teaching how to frame problems and see through BS claims from “experts” and advertising, and survey research reports (and misinformation).. The actual math computational content would be not all that strenuous but the mathematical reasoning element would be very high; the texts would be things like Edward Tufte’s books and Darrell Huff’s “How to Lie with Statistics” and Jordan Ellenberg’s book “How Not to Be Wrong.” The exams would be developing arguments in favor of or against public policy positions.
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