even if you are an engineer, no one does actual math. takes too long. it’s all done by computers and programs that can solve equations and do simulation. i’d say i only encountered only one equation i had to solve by pen and paper as an engineer.
Sorry, but I can’t tell you how silly this line of reasoning is.
I’ve known too many people who can’t even make change when their computer goes down and how bad it messes up store efficiency. You have to know those skills even if you have a computer to do it for you because all too often the computer won’t work or gives you an incorrect answer. Bugs happen, computer failures happen, and in those moments you need to know what to do to keep your business going.
If I try to type in 5+5 into a calculator and get 25 how would I know what my error is if I don’t understand that 5*5=25 and 5+5=10?
Computers do not make it so you don’t have to learn math. That’s a disaster waiting to happen. That and if the computer is smarter than you are then why does an employer need to pay you?
It depends on if you are doing more applied engineering or designing new systems.
Seriously?.. SERIOUSLY?
[media=youtube]Aiyo2K7DvfA[/media]
Is Math really that exceptionally difficult to relate to? I never found grammar particularly engaging or relevant (which isn’t something I stand by now). A great deal of the literature I studied couldn’t have been less interesting to me (Shakespeare might as well have been in a foreign language to me as a high schooler). It always seems like Math is singled out the most as being irrelevant to our daily lives.
Besides, even if you won’t use this shit in your future job, don’t we have schools as opposed to apprenticeships so that children have a broader range of knowledge than just what they will do to make a living?
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Welcome to 90% of school today. Just memorize, don’t think.
hi poison pussy i already responded to your points which you reiterated here a few pages back. to recap - nothing taught in school is applicable - math, science, history, literature, foreign language, etc. but you teach them to kids at a young age so that if they do choose careers that do utilize these fields, they aren’t handicapped by not already having the fundamentals. this is especially true for math, because if you don’t have a basic grasp of algebra by high school, there is no way you will ever become an engineer/physicist/statistician/job that is math heavy. and as a feminist, you should know that there is a dramatic shortage of women in engineering and science fields. i blame shitty american culture, since there is no shortage of asian/indian/russian women in those fields. that’s a separate discussion point, but either way, crippling future generations of potential american women scientists by not teaching them algebra would be a shame.
- sincerely,
SCRUBBY MC DICKHOLE
So what you’re saying is math is important, it’s just improperly distributed… I believe that statement is reasonable… So… Yeah… /thread?
Ummm, I use math like that in every day situations. Maybe not AS complex, sure, but yeah, if you think I haven’t had to do (1/x) = (5/27) and figure out the x for regular shit, you’re dead wrong.
The only excuse for not being able to handle math, is you’re either retarded, or lazy. Either way, society don’t need you.
Also, Nanoanvil, stop competing with Mattritard here for the stupidest poster of this thread award. Your opinion that we don’t need math because machines do it for us, is one of the dumbest things I have ever heard. EVER. You (literally YOU) are why America is failing.
I say it’s necessary in my experience because every person I tutored in algebra has had a mental level-up. it seemed like their brain was just not ready to process the subject matter but once they did get the proper perspective needed to solve problems things clicked a lot easier and it had an overall positive effect on their ability to think critically.
I tutored one of my friends one weekend before their final and literally in the span of 2 days they went from getting Ds on their tests to having the highest grade on the final and all I really did was just force them to calm down, step back and learn how to break something down. Years later that person still thanks me for that because they could tell it was something that applied beyond the material in the textbook.
that’s the most extreme example from my experience but everybody I’ve helped had experienced something similar where their critical thinking and cognitive abilities had some increase and I use algebra often enough in my everyday life that I think it’s best staying in the curriculum instead of being replaced by something that would have a similar mental benefit but not actually teach algebra.
Hold on for a damn second. You are asking psychologists, fucking psychologist? those are the last people you should ask whether or not Algebra is needed, and if it can be substituted by other classes. You insist that you can simply substitute “logic” class, but fail to realize that Arithmetic and Algebra are nothing more than pure applied logic. In a logic class, you can rationalize all the crap you want, in Math you cannot. Algebra or Arithmetic does not give a crap about what you think, its pure simple logic at its core.
BTW, if you where to pair Math with a tangible subject, it would not be possible until the completion of Intermediate Algebra. Chemistry uses a lot of system of equations, quadratic functions, rate of change (Calculus), etc. Physics needs an even stronger foundation in Algebra and thorough understanding of Calculus as well. Computer programming needs the student to understand Intermediate Algebra.
Therefore teaching math through science is not possible.
Practicallity means nothing. Just because it isn’t practical for you does not give you the authority to dismiss a subject you find boring/useless/impracticable/repetitive. And just because you find no use for the answers that are achived by factoring a quadratic equation does not mean they are useless. Solving a basic Algebra function is a test of simple logic. There are no opinions or feeling that you have to worry about. Math doesn’t give a damn about that, all it cares is whether or not the answer is a logical solution to the given problem.
Fishjie addressed this point really well.
Wouldn’t that tell you that there is a problem with the way teachers are trained? This is nothing but a red herring, and an appeal to people’s emotions because so many of them can relate easily. Please try again
Relevance means shit in the world of Academia, especially in the years leading up to their decision about what they want to do in life.
If Algebra was not a requirement, then students would not be exposed to Chemistry, Physics, or Computer Programming. leading to an even bigger shortage of students in those fields.
Wrong, read above statements.
I’ll make sure to look for this academic journal of yours with this finding.
Problem is math is “logic” and at times many science questions is solved with a math problem (hypothesis and theory).
You are aware that you have to “read” to solve word problems right?
You’re talking out of your ass. You’ll gain this “memorization” by actually practicing the problem and learn from your mistakes. It you cannot memorize the basics of solving from one fucking unknown then something is wrong with you. You know subtract/add the number from both sides of the equation then divide X into that number.
Of course once again when a person isn’t owning up to their responsibilities they’ll blame the teachers.
I didnt realize that sudoku can actually be a way for a person to have a successful career in accounting. I just might do that.
Like dont you want to know and make sure your checks were right based on the hours your worked? Um math at times already is paired with other subjects where have you been?
However probability without math is almost impossible.
This is a specious statement. If you expressed your opinion to a group of clinical psychologists, or teachers who don’t understand the difference between perperdicular and parallel, they might agree with you as well. It doesn’t make your opinion any more valid.
This is a specious premise. Things in working memory only last for a short period of time by definition. It doesn’t matter whether they are applicable or not. If you are retrieving them from long term memory, then you’ve already memorized it. If you rehearse info you’ve memorized at the appropriate intervals, it will remain in long-term memory regardless of whether a student knows how to use the info or not, or if it is applicable to their life. If you’re a Psychology major, you should be ashamed of yourself. This is something even a Psych 101 student would know.
No. You tell them that 2x + y/z - 3 is a number… It’s a number… What number it is depends on x, y, and z, which are also numbers… (although z has the restriction that it is not zero). When you add, subtract, divide, or multiply numbers, the result itself is also a number … (as long as you don’t divide by zero). You don’t say “Oh well if you’re in engineering or science you could use it,” you say “aside from this being a number, this equation could represent the behavoir of some phenomenon we wish to understand. You give me any input (represented by the numbers x, y, and z) you can come up with, and I can tell you where that comes into play in our model. By using variables, I can predict the behavoir of other things that follow this model” If somebody didn’t tell you that when you were younger, well, you’re welcome.
I’m going to guess you are a humanities/psych/sociology/social science major, because if you were a stat/math major, there is no way you would be saying that math is overemphasized (since it would in fact be required for your major). Actually understanding statistics requires Linear Algebra and Calculus (for continuous probability distributions and the real analysis you have to take in grad school) as well as probability (so you can actually understand why the area under that bell-shaped curve represents the probabilty you are looking for). Even converting raw scores to z-scores, as well as calculating means and SD’s requires elementary math. When you do all that stuff in a high school level stats course, you need to understand algebra and arithmetic in order to do this. I’m also going to guess that you didn’t take a high school stats course because if you did, you would already know that you need to understand algebra and arithmetic to do well.
You might claim to like stats and research, but I’m also going to guess that any stats courses you took were in behavioral statistics or some other humanities-taught stats course that required no more than grade school arithmetic. I am going to guess you liked this because it required virtually no math whatsoever. You just plug in numbers into a spreadsheet, hit a button, and then compare some numbers. Yes, probability is necessary to arrive at a likely conclusion about your data, but you didn’t really do any math to arrive at such a conclusion. The computer did. It was the computer that used linear algebra and probability formulas. All you do from there is compare numbers, but chances are the computer already did that for you as well and you just looked at an asterisk and said “statistically significant.”
That is the difference between behavioral/humanites statistics courses like PSY 201 and stats courses that emphasize math and have a label like STAT 301 or MATH 350: Whereas someone taking STAT 301 would actually be required to understand the probability and linear algebra behind the calculations they do, all someone taking PSY 201 is required to know is how to hit a button and look for an asterisk next to a number. Yes, you do need to understand how to interpret the data either way, but that doesn’t mean you understand why what you are doing works because you didn’t actually do any math. SPSS/SAS/R did it for you. That’s like a kid who uses a calculator to compute basic arithmetic because they doesn’t know their addition and multiplication tables saying that more kids should learn arithmetic because it’s useful. You might know how to get a computer to do it for you, but you don’t practice what you preach. Similarly, don’t come on here and say “Math needs to be paired with some other subject that makes it relevant to the lives of the student” when you didn’t do the work necessary to understand the mathematical foundations of statistics in the first place.
not quite, but you should get the point.
I see where Matriarch is coming from and I think her statements are being misinterpreted or exaggerated. I really don’t think your explanation would interest a 9th grader at all, as you still just kind of handwave and refer to “some phenomenon”. Why not just show them specific ones? Physics is a goldmine of interesting applications. I know you actually would do that, since you understand math, but it seems that’s all Matriarch is really saying. Give them interesting examples and applications and don’t divorce math from the sciences. Morris Kline would certainly agree.
Actually, it seems like almost everyone posting does agree more than we think. I don’t see any contradiction between saying that math is important but overemphasized and taught poorly. It’s overemphasized in the sense that there isn’t a scary nation with 6 year old algebraic geometers running around, so maybe there’s no need to push every kid to learn graph theory and symbolic logic and calculus and discrete math and fairly sophisticated statistics before they graduate high school. There are also plenty of people who would say that the shortage of phds in the hard sciences is a myth and there’s actually a glut, so I’m not sure what to make of that argument.
What’s wrong with only knowing geometry and algebra by the end of high school (of course, students who want to learn more should be able to)?? In our supposed golden age 50 or 100 years ago, this was typical. This fear mongering has just led to pedagogically questionable programs with no logical structure, way too many topics, and no motivation or application. But education departments, textbook publishers, and those making the latest technology fad for classroom use are loving it.
What the fuck is wrong with this thread?
So a country that is already behind in math should further hinder students who want to go into fields that need math? You can’t let kids graduate high school at a math level that is multiple years behind that of kids from other major countries and hope they catch up by the end of college.
In our supposed golden age jobs were done locally, business owners were confined by local talent and people willing to relocate, which wasn’t too bad when America was on top of things; now employers have no need to deal with this type of limitation, if Americans aren’t smart enough to do the job it will be outsourced to someone who is.
Schools already do this for English. Most college students write as if they were posting on SRK.
Let that sink in…
why must you say things like that Pertho, why!?
Actually, math isn’t applied logic. To say that seems to imply that math is derived from logic. The answer is “not really” because Whitehead and Russell failed trying to do this a century ago.
You actually cannot “rationalize” crap in a logic class either, because you would be wrong if you did.
You can learn the minimum required for Algebra from 2 years in high school to 2 semesters in a community college. If you want to be an engineer and only did the required minimum for math in highschool, it’s very possible to become one, it won’t take you forever, but you’ll be set back just a little.
The whole system is broken. I’ll have Ken Robinson say it for me: [media=youtube]zDZFcDGpL4U[/media]
Because I have read their writings, try to edit them into something legible and ended up rewriting their stuff in the end.
I can say that I write shitty at times because I choose to do so; some people don’t even get to the groove select screen. :shake:
Math is logic, and then you apply that logic to build systems/models to do what you need it to do. Then you use known logic to expand on that logic to build even more complex rules which you can use to explain more complex things like rate of change.
its something, but Math is built of logic.
:shake: this indeed.