RE: Math Educations: who needs it, how much and when?
July 24, 2014 at 2:02 am
(This post was last modified: July 24, 2014 at 2:12 am by Whateverist.)
(July 23, 2014 at 6:46 pm)Minimalist Wrote: What is happening is that by teaching trig and calculus you are graduating a bunch of kids who learned just enough to pass the tests and who will never ever use it again but who also can't do their own income tax return because they lack basic math skills.
The whole concept of "subject-based" education...as opposed to skills-based education seems, IMHO, to be geared more to the interests of the teachers/administration than the needs of the students.
This has led to enormous job dissatisfaction for many of us under No Child Left Alone. In California a bunch of parents and college math professors got together and backward planned from incoming math majors to kindergarten and that has established our scope, sequence and pacing for K-12 mathematics instruction for all kids. Our standards have been even more fast paced than the common core. No input was taken from college education departments (where there actually are a very few good heads) or teachers.
In addition, administrators have gone from being very grateful for everyone's input to being tyrannical micro managers, since their jobs hang in the balance. Professional development time which teachers gladly worked into the schedule in better times, has become complete administration controlled and look like pre-service silly stuff. All in all, my job pretty much sucks now .. except that I can relate to the age group pretty well, even better now that I remind them of their grandfather and not their father. Somehow I still think I brighten some days.
One thing I've always done is speak truth to power. That hasn't won me a lot of friends in administration, but I do have the respect of parents and many teachers. I've stopped taking on student teachers because I just can't recommend the field to anyone. I think next year I'll level with students that they probably won't need high school math except as an arbitrary gate key into college and if they take particular majors and seek out a very few careers. I'll continue to encourage them to get what they can out of it both to improve their minds, make the folks happy, get into college and just in case their future interests take them in a surprising direction which requires more math.
(July 23, 2014 at 10:23 pm)Jenny A Wrote: But I agree that I've had little use for math beyond addition and subtraction in college, law school, or daily life. I used trig once in the 30 years since I learned it for quilting designs and once to figure out how tall a tree was in our back yard. I've caclulatedted volume regularly for bark dust and stuff, but it's just arithmetic. English, history, civics, geography, science and even shop, have served me much better. They're also continuing interests whereas math is not, though I've enjoyed some books like 1, 2, 3, Infinity, The History of Pi, and Innumeracy.
However, math does teach a kind of thinking, that I think is important to learn. It also teaches precision which I was certainly in need of. I think there is real value in learning different ways of thinking. It's one of the reasons I think at least one foreign language should be a high school requirement (I really suck at languages except in writing---I have a tin ear).
The one suggestion in the video that I really liked was teaching logic. Logic, I took in both high school (we were spoiled it was an elective) and again in college. That I use daily.
Could we compromise and leave off math except for the science bound at algebra or geometry and teach logic instead of calc and trig? Statistics would be useful. That I didn't get til college, but I use the knowledge reading the news daily.
If you've been through law school you obviously got all that you needed from what math has to offer. The logic obviously was a nice bonus. I completely agree about the importance of statistics as a core skill.
Like you I enjoy the subject and recognize several ways in which it is a boon for anyone. But isn't that true about a lot of subjects? I'm glad you found a way to get what you needed and found things to enjoy/appreciate too .. even with the dyslexia challenge.
