Well, presumably they’re not doing something anymore.
they could give it more than 80 pixels
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One time, my daughter was suspended from school because her calculator was the wrong shade of green.
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I agree. Phyck fusics. We don’t need them.
I didn’t take a whole lot of math and science courses because I quickly figured out that in college those classes were for the people who wanted a career in that field and were into research, not people like me who were more liberal arts types. My daughter says she wants to go into Biology but I suspect once she sees what college science courses are like she’ll switch to something else. That’s why I’m trying to find a college with a good Bio department - and a good everything else department too.
There we go, ftfy.
I was taking computer science, which is a Math degree at my university, and thus required a shitload of mandatory math classes. Some of them useful for my degree, sure, but not very many. I kinda wish they would separate out their Comp Sci department into its own, separate faculty.
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Here’s the two departments:
Math for People who Need to Use Math for Calculating Shit
Math for People who Want to Explore New Dimensions in Reality
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Thanks! That “nonsense” almost got to me. I have always leaned towards pure math, but I have to agree that it is probably not all that necessary for the average person. It has proved, however, incredibly useful in advancing science.
The thing I find appalling is that the average person (at least in the USA) has a terrible understanding of science and almost no clue about math. That includes the majority of the teachers I have met there.
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Well put!
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Yup. While I found calculating intersections of a plane and a 3 dimensional parabolic curve (or whatever) fascinating, I can honestly say I haven’t used it in the 20 years since I took Calc 3. 
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I managed to not take any math at all during college – I only needed 1 semester, and I managed to test out of that. I got up thru trigonometry and analytical geometry in high school, and never used any of it again (that I’m aware of), except that it got me out of college math.
Though by the time I graduated, I was kind of wishing I’d gone for an EE degree.
Me, too - wished I’d even remotely considered EE as it has been my field. Engineering was not even on my radar screen. Weird, huh, as most of my male friends were engineers.
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Yup- to pretty much everything you’ve said here.
The education system needs to move from being fact-driven to being skill-driven. It’s about teaching about the tools students can use and how they might use them. So, for example: I was a high school english teacher. I needed to teach students to cite references in MLA format. Most teachers spent time going over what that form was and where the semicolons went. I refused.
Instead, I focused my time on why students needed to cite, what they needed to cite- and where to go look for the specifics of that citation format. The MLA changes (I swear!) every 4.5 hours. Memorizing it is a waste of time- every time you’re going to need it, you’ll have to double check it anyway. KNOWING you need to use it is the important part.
And the math that most people (let’s say, non-mathematicians) deal with is always Applied Math. Indeed, teaching math in the vacuum of “Pure Math” removes it from all the neat interactions it can have with the real world.
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Thanks for agreeing nothingfuture, but I’m afraid it’s a little more complicated than that. I understand that English changes (I actually taught English too), but Math … not so much.
While I agree with the concept of teaching skills, it’s pretty hard to apply those skills if you don’t know basic facts. In Math at least, a certain amount of memorization is necessary. For example, factorization is a hugely important concept, but if you don’t know that 3 x 7 = 21 you won’t get very far.
I no longer teach. I am now into computational neuroscience. I still like Pure Math, but I’m always amazed when I see applications in the real world. Many years ago, I was really inspired by the beauty of the Mandelbrot set. There was a program called Fractint that generated amazing images. I pursued the subject all the way through graduate school, and found the groundwork was laid by Gaston Julia and Pierre Fatou before 1920. It’s hard to believe they could ever have imagined how beautiful the visualizations of their work were. Were they seeing these things in their heads? And just now, I opened a paper sent to me by another neuroscientist titled, “Extraction and restoration of hippocampal spatial memories with non-linear dynamical modeling.” To translate, scientists and engineers have figured out how to model the neural encoding of memory in the hippocampus using non-linear dynamical systems. You know, chaos, fractals, the kind of things started by those “Pure Mathematicians” way back about 100 years ago. They’ve actually done hundreds of trials now with human patients and can predict memory output from the hippocampus with 90% accuracy. They are now designing a prosthesis that can be inserted into the brain.
It’s amazing stuff, but it wouldn’t be possible without “Pure Math.” After all, “Applied Math” is just “Pure Math” applied to the real world. Maybe most people always deal with applied math, but I hate to use that word, “always.”
No calculus?
Of course there’s a base layer of knowledge (facts). I can’t argue that.
But for the vast majority of people, math exists as applied math- which is, as you point out “pure math” being applied. Yes, pure math is the base of all applied math, but teaching math in isolation ignores the story we can tell with it.
The more time I spend in education, the more I know these two things:
1. Humans are about pattern recognition.
2. Humans are fascinated by narratives.
We can better education as a system by acknowledging this and exploiting these two traits. And I see precious little of that happening.
The prof’s perspective is one of “incessant needling.” Undergrad is universally worse than grad school for this. Most grad students actively, consciously desire to be there. Undergrads at typical undergrad ages don’t have that perspective. Many undergrads learned that improving their grades seems to require playing tricks and constantly needling their profs to extend deadlines, award just one more point for a technicality, let them do things this way rather than that way, etc. Good profs can get worn down. Bad profs were just bad to begin with and stay bad. Many of these student behaviors get carried over into grad school, but it is markedly less. Some profs incite it by their ineptitude.
Generally, though, my perspective is that all school is less about being the passive recipient of teaching from the prof, and more about how I can motivate myself to auto-didactically absorb and assimilate as much as humanly possible during this term. It’s an uncommon grad student with that perspective, and a rare undergrad. Typically the older ones with more life perspective, as I said.
So I am not in favor of a huge blame game for who is the source of the Great Lame in education. It can be annoying students, and it can be bad profs, and a whole pile of awful bs comes down from administration. However, my original statement that education is “babysitting, mostly, with occasional flashes of brilliance” stands, because that’s how the weeks tend to play out. It’s not implying that education is devoid of value. Those flashes of brilliance, on both my part and the students’ part, are wonderful to experience! I live for those! I wish they were more often! What I find myself doing, in order to maintain those periodic flashes of brilliance is acting as an inspirer to good deeds, academically.
What I truly want all of my students to do is embrace that spirit of endless discovery that causes you to individually seek out the knowledge-treasures that exist in every field of inquiry. About 1 in 10 of my students gets this concept and produces fantastic work at a very high level of functioning. The other 9 consist of 5 people who just want their degrees and to get through the course without personally imploding, 1 or 2 who are on the verge of brilliance but just need to get their shit together, and 1 or 2 who are a bad fit for grad school and just can’t hack it.
This is possibly true. I am not sure that students operate on this conscious level, though. I think a lot of behaviors are learned at earlier ages, especially the needling. You should teach someday. You’ll come into contact with the pathological needlers who just can’t stop themselves, and you’ll know precisely what I mean here about this.
That is, sincerely, TOO BAD. And I mean that not one bit sarcastically/ironically. I mean it empathetically. It means you DID have a poor prof, or a poorly structured course or outdated course, or a sucky group of student peers, or a combination of some or all of the above. I was an English major for undergrad and I did have my share of awful classes. But I also had some exceedingly lovely English profs who knew their niche of material, loved teaching and lecturing, and it poured forth in such a wonderful way that you couldn’t help but be osmotically infused with some of their passion for Shakespeare or Dryden or Pope or Milton. I remember those professors, and will cherish their memories as long as I live, since many of them have passed on. I am sorry that you did not have a great experience, and I hope that you give English lit, or a sub-genre, another chance at some point. Use word-of-mouth and online prof reviews to find a good teacher and go there, instead of just picking a topic and hoping the prof is good.
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Nope, it said that based on my results, the next math class I could register for would be pre-calculus – but I didn’t need it.
Guess I’m biased because, i took a bs degree, which required physics, which diesn’t make sense without calculus, which was pitched as first semester class anyway, for those unlucky enough to not have taken it in high school.
There should be nothing in freshman physics that requires calc. Everything you do there will break down to algebra and everything in calc 1,2,3 should break down to algebra as well. For anyone not a math major the main reason for taking calculus is to cement the algebra into your head.
