Proposal: replace Algebra II and Calculus with "Statistics for Citizenship"

I’m about to start a PhD in veterinary epidemiology and animal science/animal welfare. I was never taught calculus, as I dropped the last year of optional math in high school (in Norway). No idea what it is. Basic algebra has been very useful to me as a veterinary nurse though, and of course stats is vital in the sciences. Most of the advanced math I was taught at 17 has been completely useless.

Edit: I was taught some calculus, it was just never named as that. Still, it’s been completely useless and was one of the reasons I dropped math. I didn’t get it at all. Got a decent grade by following the rules blindly, dropped the rest.

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Honest question: Couldn’t you just use simple division? What algebra do you need for this problem?

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Why not both?

I don’t get picking on the lottery. There are reasons to dislike it*, but rational people sometimes (maybe even often?) do irrational things on purpose, for fun. So I don’t really see it as tracking rationality.

The thing that I’m not sure about is the idea that this will somehow lead to better governance. As the saying goes, you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. When given a choice between fear and statistics, fear wins most of the time. I would posit that the mindset one is raised with is more important than subjects one is taught in school. The parents I know that are raising their kids in a “free-range” kind of way are not necessarily more statistically literate than the fear-filled bubble wrap parents about the dangers kids face; it’s just their personality and how they want to raise kids. Given that most of the electorate views the political parties with no more subtlety than “Democrats are nice, Republicans are big bad meanies” (or “Democrats tax and waste, Republicans are for the free market”), I’m not sure we would get better candidates by the people having more numerical literacy. We’d need an entire couple of generations of people raised in a culture where critical thinking and questioning everything is more important than feelings to get that.

*I think it’s unconscionable that our government relies on taxes from vices that it routinely moralizes against. Then complains when revenue goes down, even though that’s what sin taxes are for. But hey, revenue for the state and for-your-own-good moral grandstanding all in one package? Politicians see that as a win-win. Meanwhile, budgeting is fungible so don’t kid oneself that any of this is going towards specific good things like education.

I don’t understand the state wanting a monopoly on gambling. Running a numbers game is apparently a compelling state interest? Yeah, right. Meanwhile they find the time to bust household poker games and have congressional hearings on sports betting. Hypocrites.

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Unless you are doing engineering/physics work it may not be totally intuitive. Even then for what most people need for basic physics it breaks down to simple algebraic equations as the things where you need to take in the effects you need it for don’t happen till you get really really big or really really small. The actual fundamental theory of calculus (really just a fancy way to find the area under a function curve) is actually quite elegant but you have to build up to it and just jumping into it from algebra without a good teacher to show what is going on and why it can be kind of a problem but it is useful if you want to study the motion of atoms or planets.

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I’ve always been a math-phobe and had a very hard time retaining math skills. It’s not something I’m proud of. I’ve tried in the past to boost my skills “just because”, but I have a poor attention span and unless I have a practical use for something I find it really hard to retain much of it.

I never really excelled at algebra; I learned it because it was required but I never really enjoyed it (other than Cartesian plotting). I certainly don’t remember much of it. Statistics on the other hand I really enjoyed and it’s something I can apply to my daily life as a software developer. I do find my lack of a traditional maths education to be a disadvantage at time but I manage to work with it.

I find I do best when I learn about something because it’s a skill I need, not because it’s something a curriculum requires. I feel confident if I have a need to learn trigonometry or geometry I can do so. I’ve been slowly starting to pick up calculus as I’ve started getting more into electronics as a hobby.

I will say thank goodness for Khan Academy making all levels of math education accessible.

To get back on topic for the post, as a self-professed math-phobe I would have probably enjoyed learning math using an approach like that. That certainly works better for me than being assured “you’ll need to know this as an adult” or “you’ll never get into computers unless you know this”. All bullshit. Learning and applying using practical and interesting examples is a winner.

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Of course you can use simple division, but that’s sort of the point. If you know how to process that information, you know and are using algebra.
3x = 40
X = 40/3 (there’s your simple division)

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Obama did not campaign by appealing to racial fears, but rather on a platform of hope, as Americans at the time had just witnessed a massive wealth transfer during the bailout which appeared as if the government was rewarding banks for producing foreclosures.

Also, I’m not sure if the “Mr. T” in question is actually popular or if the bottom of the vessel we call the GOP fell out and we are merely observing the foamy orange residue.

Calculus is algebra with changes? or calculus is algebra on speed (velocity if you add vectors).

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In high school, I think we only had to complete Geometry (which was, generally, 10th grade). Algebra II (11th grade) and trigonometry/analytical geometry (1 semester each; 12th grade) were electives. When I signed up for them, I still had some kind of delusion about being an architect or engineer. When I had ruled those out, I tried to believe that Algebra II would prime my brain for something bigger. To my own great surprise I did better on the math part of the SAT than the verbal (I also discovered that I had measles the morning of the test, and I think my semi-panicky state gave me a boost).

What I did get out of all that extra math, was that I avoided taking any math whatsoever during college – my major only required one semester of math and I tested out of that. I could’ve substituted a semester of science with a semester of math, had I chosen to do so, but the placement test said my next recommended class would be pre-calculus.

By the time I finished college, I was interested in stuff like Ohm’s law and visiting the engineering library more and more often, so I wonder if I should’ve stuck with it.

You could, or use proportions. What if it is 3 shirts for $40 and 2 pairs of pants for $50 and you only have $60? How many of each can you buy to make the most outfits? We could try every combination.

You don’t have to set up an algebra problem to make these decisions but it is a way to be more sure you have the definitive answer rather than an estimate. Maybe the estimate is good enough and I could show you some algebra and calculus that would let you include the cost of the time of estimating into how long you should take to answer.

It’s all around us…

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Yeah, which is why it doesn’t make much sense to learn in high school I guess, unless it’s tied with physics. I remember asking why something worked the way it did, and being told that that was just the way it was and if I went on to study math I’d understand. Not very conductive to learning. I need to understand, not just memorize. Not the teacher’s fault though. I had her for chemistry too and she was demanding but not a bad teacher.

I found it much easier to study calculus in the Khan Academy than at school - you can work at your own speed and it took much less time before I understood it and could practice with examples. The whole gamifying aspect works with me too, so I can stay interested for longer and progress faster, while having a visual idea of how it all fits together.

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I would counter that it’s actually the instant internal understanding that “3 shirts for $40 means 1 shirt for $40/3” that the “numeracy literacy” folks want, and not the “how do you turn this into an algebra equation?” question.

“Let’s think of this question in terms of x” is exactly what turns millions of kids off math every year.

There was a study on kids who sell things and handle money, who can trivially do the kind of arithmetic you describe, who completely failed to understand math classes, even though the operations they needed to do were the same. But that’s fine: what we should be aiming for is that kind of intuitive mathematical understanding, not “Algebra II.”

So, sure, you can say “well, you happen to be using algebra.” But when a 3-year-old says “Drive faster so we can get there quicker,” it’s kind of pointless to say that they “happen to be using calculus,” because of their apparent understanding that a steeper distance-time graph will integrate to more miles for the same amount of time.

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3x = 40, solve for x.

Yep, that’s algebra… :wink:

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From the Slate article: algebra “mostly useless in real life.”!?

Wha? Maybe if you’re a poli-scientist. I use it all the time, idiot.

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The big game-changer for me in high school wasn’t my proper math classes, but Chemistry. At some point I decided I wanted to be a bio-chemist and got really into science stuff, and our Chem II classes were split into two halves. The first half of the year was all labs, and it was non-stop playtime, mixing and boiling and titrating. We made plastic and beer and vodka. So much fun. But the second half was all theory: molarities, Avogadro’s number, etc, and it just killed me; I had such a hard time getting my head around this stuff. This was at the same time as Algebra II and pre-calc. A rough year.

But at the same time I was taking a required art class, and unexpectedly loved it. By the end of that year I was applying to design schools and was able to test out of all but one semester of math requirements.

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My point is that it should cut the other way too. Some people don’t learn how to apply math when they are taught algebra or calculus. People propose “fixing” this math problem by eliminating algebra/calculus and teaching some kind of statistics class, rooted in “reality”, but unmoored from the logical fundamentals that these classes teach. This is great for the folks who “don’t get” math, but it’s terrible for those who do in the same way that English (English Lit.? Literature? Writing? That shitty course with that bullshit by Tennyson?) classes are terrible for some people.

Yet we don’t see people calling for a change in the way English is taught, now do we? Even though about as many people are terrible at making arguments, conveying opinions or making interesting presentations as there are people who can’t comprehend how having a five dollar coffee at Starbucks every working day costs them over a thousand dollars a year. This is a kneejerk attempt to address a societal problem and while it will benefit many people, I posit that it will be to the detriment of many others.

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I agree. I don’t think we should eliminate higher math from high school any more than we should eliminate AP Literature or Chemistry III. But I think that having higher math as an across-the-board requirement makes little sense, especially in senior years, when kids are already looking to college majors and their math requirements. Higher math should be an option, not a requirement. I mean, realistically, it helps to have awesome teachers who can show you how calculus could be applied to daily life or why a quadratic equation is a cool thing to do, rather than be told “read this chapter. Do these equations. Move along.”

I was probably on track to take Calculus in high school anyway, but this wonderful series* from Annenburg/CPB/Cal Tech was on PBS during lunchtime after morning football practice one summer and I got totally hooked. Physics was the hook to learn calculus, curiosity about how the world and the universe works was enough to keep my interest. And getting a year head-start on he concept of derivatives and shrinking-to-zero really helped once I actually got to calculus class. My high school physics class was calculus-less, which I understand from an inclusionary point of view, but let’s face it, that’s pretty weak, so this series helped with that as well.

https://www.learner.org/resources/series42.html

And just to prove that being a fancy prestigious institute doesn’t mean you have taste in web design, another page about it:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~tmu/