Certainly there could be a better way to do it, though.
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Oh man, now youāre talking. Thatās my dream high school experience. I was intensely curious about higher math, but struggled so badly with Algebra II that I didnāt want to risk my GPA by bombing out on it, knowing Iād be tied into it for a year. Being able to audit and drop classes in college was so freeing and amazing. Itād be wonderful if we found ways to give high school kids ways to explore different avenues without punishing them.
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Precalc != calc
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I loved calculus too. I guess I was lucky to have a curriculum in which it neatly built off of everything that came before, especially when it came to integral calculus.
Now, linear algebra ā vectors and matricies and so on ā that was a nightmare. I never even found it particularly useful in all the science classes I subsequently took. All manually calculating derivatives and products via tedious arithmetic ā it was the great leveler that drove a lot of people away from the sciences.
On that note, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-science-majors-change-their-mind-its-just-so-darn-hard.html?_r=0 seems relevant.
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The insanity that is pre-calc is the reason I went to into the legal profession instead of studied biology. What a mistake!
I would much rather be knee deep in assorted animal entrails in a lab right now (with grant money) than parsing insurance statutes.
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Seriously. I just(like 5 minutes ago) helped my wife with, gasp, an art project. She needed to know what spacing she needed for the mounting brackets. āOh sure honey thatās easy, 2.25x.ā
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Oh such bad memories. The first one was okay annoying and fiddly. But the the 300 level one where we did all theoryā¦ I dropped that 3 times because the university had a shit book and TAs that just recited the book back at us which doesnāt help when you donāt grok the book. The fourth time I took it there was an actual professor who was great at teaching and he got a new (and way cheaper) book for us to use that was so much better at explaining things.
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Iām using Algebra II and Calculus right now!
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Could you be more specific? I would like to check out some of those requirements.
Another element of this is that Trump chastised Jon Stewart (of The Daily Show) for dropping his last name (Leibowitz). I think the Drumpt thing was started by John Oliver (a The Daily Show alumni), so thereās that connection.
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Thatās about the OBGYNās overhead. Her practice bills the patient a hell of a lot more than the doula does.
Perhaps. Here where the government pays the bills, a doula gets about $80K pa for up to 10 patients / month. An obstetrician gets paid about $200K - $250K pa for 30-50 patients per month.
I took Linear Algebra freshman year in college because I did well on the AP test in high school. (Didnāt know I could have switched classes, college aināt like high school but I hadnāt learned that yet.)
Taught by a professor with a very thick accent. āMath without Numbersā. The week before the final he asked the class how many of us were going to be continuing with the 7 semester core math curriculum course to which this was apparently the introduction. Two hands went upā¦ frownā¦ āHow many of you are engineering students?ā The rest of the class raised our hands. His face fell, like in that scene in Edward Scissorhands when Vincent Price dies. āoh.ā
I do love regular algebra (even though itās āTerrorist Mathā¢ā!) It is a fundamental core skill for solving problems. I tell people that trigonometry is algebra with angles, geometry is algebra with pictures, calculus is algebra where the numbers approach zeroā¦ (statistics is algebra with fuzzy numbers? Anybody got any others?)
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Iām 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, itās been completely useless and was one of the reasons I dropped math. I didnāt get it at all. Got a decent grade by following the rules blindly, dropped the rest.
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Honest question: Couldnāt you just use simple division? What algebra do you need for this problem?
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Why not both?
I donāt 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 donāt really see it as tracking rationality.
The thing that Iām not sure about is the idea that this will somehow lead to better governance. As the saying goes, you canāt reason someone out of a position they didnāt 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 āfree-rangeā kind of way are not necessarily more statistically literate than the fear-filled bubble wrap parents about the dangers kids face; itās 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 āDemocrats are nice, Republicans are big bad meaniesā (or āDemocrats tax and waste, Republicans are for the free marketā), Iām not sure we would get better candidates by the people having more numerical literacy. Weād 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 itās unconscionable that our government relies on taxes from vices that it routinely moralizes against. Then complains when revenue goes down, even though thatās 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 donāt kid oneself that any of this is going towards specific good things like education.
I donāt 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 donāt 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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Iāve always been a math-phobe and had a very hard time retaining math skills. Itās not something Iām proud of. Iāve tried in the past to boost my skills ājust becauseā, 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 donāt remember much of it. Statistics on the other hand I really enjoyed and itās 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 itās a skill I need, not because itās something a curriculum requires. I feel confident if I have a need to learn trigonometry or geometry I can do so. Iāve been slowly starting to pick up calculus as Iāve 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 āyouāll need to know this as an adultā or āyouāll never get into computers unless you know thisā. 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 thatās sort of the point. If you know how to process that information, you know and are using algebra.
3x = 40
X = 40/3 (thereās 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, Iām not sure if the āMr. Tā 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.
