I never thought that reading something on a message board could make me so mad.
Algebra as in 6th-7th grade math?
Middle schoolers are actually struggling to solve variables and graphing curves?
I don’t want to live in this world anymore.
I think the guy writing that article is just trying to get attention because he is poor from his social science degree not helping him, and because was stupid and could not pass algebra
Word, not every decision is meant to be made rationally or logically.
Namely, love.
it means you’re a dumbass.
Also, nice guys in this thread.
logic has nothing to say about love. Logic by its very definition cant be used for anything emotional.
However, rationality can be used with love, if you have an abusive partner its rational to leave them. Primitive emotions may mislead you into staying with them
That was essentially my point, I was just using love as an example of decision making outside of logic.
I heard that some kids don’t even learn long division anymore. Yes, it’s really getting that bad: http://planoparents.blogspot.com/2011/03/is-long-division-gone.html
I can chime in with my views as a former high school teacher with a BS in math, and since there’s so much to say my thoughts may be all over the place. The situation is probably more grim than most of you realize. One huge factor in student achievement in math is teacher knowledge, and so many math teachers simply don’t know their subject. One of my colleagues showed his students a (false) proof that 1=2 and insisted that it was valid, even when shown the division by zero error! Another math teacher wasn’t aware of the geometric interpretation of complex number arithmetic, despite the fact that it was largely this tangible way of thinking that led to the acceptance of complex numbers as being, well, “real”, or at least as real as any other number. But hardly any math teachers know much about the history of their own subject, and geometry in high school is almost extinct, so I can’t say I was surprised.
Unfortunately, the problem is even worse with elementary school teachers, who are all too often scared of math and probably no better at it than an average person picked off the street. This is where the problem starts, since obviously a weak understanding of arithmetic makes learning algebra practically impossible. Even among the better mathematicians in this thread, I bet more than a few can’t really explain what “carrying” and “borrowing” represent, or why long division works. The latter is especially sad because long division is maybe the first example of an algorithm that arrives at an answer by successive approximations, which should interest any applied mathematician or engineer or computer scientist.
I don’t blame the poor teachers either. They just want to teach kids and it’s a relatively thankless and difficult job, and nobody should be asked to teach every subject to elementary school students. How can someone be asked to know large amounts of history, teach reading and writing, do art projects, etc, and also know math well enough to teach it? We need math specialists starting in elementary school.
So basically, we’ve already eliminated algebra for about three quarters (probably more actually) of the students because they don’t learn it anyway by the time they graduate, and the current trend of pushing harder and trying to move algebra earlier in the curriculum is the opposite of what’s needed! I’d be happy if we could get a large amount of high school graduates to have a solid understanding of algebra and geometry by the time they graduate and that’s it, because if you know that, then you can learn the content of a high school trig course in about a month, single variable calculus in six months or a year, multivariable and linear algebra simultaneously in another year, and so on. I’ll take depth of knowledge over breadth, at least when it comes to math.
Lol. Quoted for proof.
Sad thing is, you’re obviously not retarded.
I honestly think advanced math should be taught in school.
But it should be in the form of optional classes.
Dude our whole educational sysem is a joke its not math its the fact that no one can teach math and those that could never will because our society doesnt value education and will not offer reasonable pay. It’s going to take another 2-3 decades of teachers getting paid competetive wages before we see better academic performance in this country.
Most people do Algebra every day. Its that whole “looking at it in written form” that fucks them up.
This is all true, and just an extension of what I said earlier. The thing about math is that there’s always at least two ways to look at a problem. Many teachers barely know one. I remember in grammar school just having to learn this long seemingly arbitrary thing called “the distance formula (for graphing).” It had these variables with subscripts, and a square root all of which were simply lost on me at the time. It wasn’t until I got to college and, had the best math teacher I ever had which I owe everything to, who showed me that it was a simple extension of the pythagorean theorum. To this day I can’t rattle off the distance formula, but I can easily derive it and get the distance between two points in a 2D, or 3D space simply by understand that.
My statistics teacher in college (fuck anyone who laughs at this) was horrible at her job, she frequently forgot how to do shit properly, or even what she was doing at all.
Sweet lady, horrible teacher.
I had a college professor whose job it was to teach some kind of math. I don’t think anyone knew what kind of math, because he pretty much never taught it.
It was a 3 hour class, yet he’d spend just the first hour teaching, the other two rambling on with stories. Some of us just bounced after that 1st hour.
I remember some guy TRIED to pick on me in HIGH SCHOOL and I told his ass to fucks with me after school. I let him throw punches that I evaded without trying while sexy big tittied hoes looked on. Needless to say NO ONE fucked with me like that after the fact. It helps having a MASTER KARATE/KUNGFU nigga as a dad to be honest.
It wasn’t until I took Aikido that I took a real beat down because I was so full of myself and so kind. Never do that shit again. My Cuz said I was getting punched while drunk and spouting off shti talking/slash/ryuHAIKU’s about being a real man and not ganging up on a dude. I think he was getting back at me for the time me and our other cousin set back and let him duke it out after a dude sucker punched him in the face after saying a GLORIOUS line.
That nigga fucked dudes old lady and the guy asked if he remember. My cousin claim innocence. The guy then asked if he REMEMBER THIS as he sucker punched him in his FUCKING FACE. We STILL LAUGH ABOUT THIS!!!. God we are assholes.
That’s nice, but how about expressing those events as parabolic formulas?
I took a senior level actuarial course last semester and dropped it very fast after I saw my 1st exam grade. Pretty big wakeup call for me. I like math, but I’m not touching probability models or risk management ever again.
Pics?