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Why don't we use the math we learn in school?

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Re: Why don't we use the math we learn in school?

#51

Post by Gigachad »

bell-cot wrote: post #39

Why don't we use the [History|English Lit.|Chemistry|etc.] that we learn in school? As a generality, isn't the math taught to most teens in public schools aimed pretty squarely at preparing them to take the standard calculus courses in their first couple years of college? If so, hardly surprising that most ex-students don't notice much use for that stuff in the real world. And since the social function of that is usu…

English is critically important to help you understand complex written works and to write in a way that is clear and doesn't make you look dumb. Advanced chemistry might be useless, but basic chemistry/physics is useful. And I feel that people would understand what they are doing a lot more if they understood physics a little better. For example a lot of people think a cone makes amplifies noise rather than understanding that it simply directs them in to a smaller space. Chemistry helps you understand why oils stick to your hands and don't wash off until you use soap.

Basic math is very useful but highschools go so far off basic math that they teach massive amounts of seemingly useless stuff.

Re: Why don't we use the math we learn in school?

#52

Post by arvinsim »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #45
paulpauper wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What we really need is for every student to realize why math is useful -- so that if they want to, they can go learn it so that they can make some kind of technological contribution to the world. That is what word problems try to instill.

Poorly. Many word problems I had were't actually reflective of real world, everyday living. You know, the sort of things folks working a minimum wage job might encounter. I find it absolutely amazing that we haven't done this better since it has been an issue for literally decades.

I enjoyed math in my Physics classes because of the real life context it is used in.

Re: Why don't we use the math we learn in school?

#53

Post by sumedh »

In school back in India, I quickly learned that I dont like Math, I just find it too difficult specially concepts like polynomials, trigonometry etc but I had very strict parents and they would not be happy if I failed in Math so I had to come up with a plan.

So I used my superpower, turns out I had good memorisation skills, so my plan was to memorise all the questions (and their answers) which were asked in exams for the last couple of years because most of the questions are randomly picked from the same set of questions which were asked in the last couple of years.

My plan worked and I got good scores in my Math exam, my parents were happy.

Re: Why don't we use the math we learn in school?

#54

Post by eternityforest »

jfengel wrote: post #34

My answer: because most of the math we learn in school is useless. I see a lot of math homework questions on Quora, because students copypaste their homework all the time: What is log (3x +2)- log2 =1? How do you prove that X^2-3 is irrational? What are the roots of the equation x4−4x3+6x2−4x+4=0? When on earth are you ever going to use any of that? The word problems are no better. In a group of 20 adults, 4 out of 7…

Maybe they should get engineers to teach math courses the way they wish they had been taught them, rather than math people who sometimes still seem to think we will be doing this without a calculator?

Re: Why don't we use the math we learn in school?

#55

Post by legitster »

The failure is with story problems.

Story problems are perhaps the most important part of math education. A story problem requires using math to actually problem-solve. But they are often terribly written and introduced too little too late.

In some of my classes, they were nearly ripped out of the curriculum entirely because students struggled so hard with them.

Re: Why don't we use the math we learn in school?

#56

Post by unethical_ban »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #45
paulpauper wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What we really need is for every student to realize why math is useful -- so that if they want to, they can go learn it so that they can make some kind of technological contribution to the world. That is what word problems try to instill.

Poorly. Many word problems I had were't actually reflective of real world, everyday living. You know, the sort of things folks working a minimum wage job might encounter. I find it absolutely amazing that we haven't done this better since it has been an issue for literally decades.

I had an eastern European physics teacher in the 2000s. Our classes had word problems about baseballs thrown from the top of buildings to calculate acceleration/speed. I remember him saying "back home all our kinetic physics problems like this were about artillery".

Seemed like some good real world application. Heh.

Re: Why don't we use the math we learn in school?

#58

Post by owlbite »

aweofjwef wrote: post #16

So much of modern math education, especially once you get into high school, is centered around _computation_ instead of _reasoning_, so you get a lot of kids who spend an entire year doing random integration problems or charting a bunch of useless functions/conic sections instead of really understanding fundamental structures, reasoning, problem solving, etc. It's just rote computation, but we have computers for that…

cynically: computation is easier to mark than reasoning.

Re: Why don't we use the math we learn in school?

#59

Post by uejfiweun »

I would really love it if there was some type of Leetcode for math. I grew up in a very liberal artsy environment and was actually warned against taking advanced math for most of my life. It wasn't until college, taking requirements for my CS major, that I realized I actually find it fascinating and have an aptitude for it - but then college ended and I just have barely done any math since.

If anyone has any resources on this or general advice I'd love to hear it. It seems to me like all the coolest cutting edge stuff in Tech right now requires a lot of math so I'd love to start grinding at it.

Re: Why don't we use the math we learn in school?

#60

Post by rossdavidh »

The reality is, people need to know how to use spreadsheets well and accurately, more than they need to be able to do algebra in their head. Math class should be focused more on how to set up a spreadsheet to solve your problem, something like income tax or household budget or home mortgage that nearly everyone will need to do at some point.

There are still programmers who can program in Assembler. Most programmers do not, even if they had to learn how in college. If most people knew how to use a calculator (their phone) and a spreadsheet (their laptop), they could do all of the math they need to do (except for the few of us who need something more, or who just enjoy it).

The problem is, we evaluate people on how well they know their school math, but we don't evaluate school math by how well it serves most of the people who had to sweat through it. I like math, most people don't, we should focus our education system more on how they can use the tools today to do what will come up often in their life.

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