It's maybe people don't take Math seriously. They should realize that Math isn't just for professionals but can be utilized in real life.
Why don't we use the math we learn in school?
131–140 of 158 posts
Re: Why don't we use the math we learn in school?
#132Math is incredibly useful; probably everyone here knows that. But it's actually fine that most people don't use it. 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. The fact is, you need to be good at math to make some new fundamental breakthroughs in technology. Those bre…
> What we really need is for every student to realize why math is useful We need to do this for science education as well. The foundation of science that we need the population at large to be educated in is not the steps of the scientific method, how to dissect a pig, or the difference between a covalent and an ionic bond. It is instead logic, critical thinking, rationalism and empiricism, and why science is superior…
I’m just curious, but what do you think is the difference between “critical thinking” and “common sense”? Ostensibly, they both seem to mean something like effective thinking done outside the boundaries of predefined dogmas. On the other hand, “critical thinking” often appears to be Orwellian-Newspeak for “accept the dogma I am telling you”. Granted, maybe “common sense” plays the same role, but for a different audience, and the principle distinction is a class divide.
Re: Why don't we use the math we learn in school?
#133Once in 5th or 6th grade we had a math homework of a few dozen problems multiplying 3 or 4 digit numbers together. Totally tedious. Instead of mindlessly doing it, I spent a few hours making a BASIC program that did the multiplication, but importantly showed all the intermediate steps that we were required to show (eg multiplying by 634 shows the multiplication by 4, 30, and 600 separately). Writing that program took…
Exactly. And that's why teaching programming to kids is important. Because nothing teaches you the fundamentals of something like having to explain it to a computer.
Re: Why don't we use the math we learn in school?
#134Math is incredibly useful; probably everyone here knows that. But it's actually fine that most people don't use it. 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. The fact is, you need to be good at math to make some new fundamental breakthroughs in technology. Those bre…
> it's drivel, no better than "find the perimeter given a=5, b=6." Not only no better, but actually worse - if you add a word problem around the problem that doesn't fundamentally add anything or make the problem easier to understand [0] all you've added is another layer of text to parse through. [0] Sometimes it can be helpful. Adding a relevant layer of physicality to help reason about the problem can be nice, espe…
> [0] Sometimes it can be helpful. Adding a relevant layer of physicality to help reason about the problem can be nice, especially in calculus.
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. I had tremendous difficulty with Calculus in High School. Everything was introduced via mathematical derivation an proof. I'd gone over halfway through the year with Cs and Ds and, even though it was almost 30 years ago, I remember the moment it clicked. I was sitting the library working on some problem about pools draining and "OMG, it's just about how fast things are changing" popped into my head. That made derivatives, area under a curve, and all of those things make sense to me.
Ironically, I ended up being the only person in my class to get a 5 on the AP test and then ended up as a EE major, which was very calculus heavy.
Re: Why don't we use the math we learn in school?
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 doubt even the "real world" ones will make much impression or sense for kids of that age. The farmer Bob example for the fence? Definitely real world. Minimum wage farm hand might not be the one doing the buying of fencing material that's true. 10 year old kid learning that math? Doesn't care one bit about fences, even if you make it "Your family has a dog and you just moved into a new house and there's no fence ..…
> Figure out how high your school building is with math and without going to the roof and a loooong "tape measure"? That was cool! Especially since we actually went outside and did it.
I still find it incredible that "Daumensprung" [0] is apparently not an international concept (I learned about this in Math class growing up in Germany).
Unfortunately the Wikipedia link is only in German, but the short explanation is:
* Extend your arm horizontally in front of you, and raise the thumb to point upwards.
* Close one eye and align the thumb with the edge of a large object in the distance (e.g. a building).
* Close the other eye and note how far the thumb virtually "jumped" across the large object.
Now, knowing the distance between your eyes and the length of your arm, you can use trigonometry to either
* knowing the distance to the object, deduce the width of it
or
* knowing the width of the object (e.g. using a window, doorframe, or car as a reference size), deduce the distance to it.
Re: Why don't we use the math we learn in school?
#136Doing maths properly with a computer... can become very quickly very tough.
See the various and connected numerical analysis topics on wikipedia.
Re: Why don't we use the math we learn in school?
#137> Few people make use of fractions
Huh this is probably the main thing outside arithmetic I find myself using all the time.
Re: Why don't we use the math we learn in school?
#138I can remember failing math class hard throughout my entire academic career. I never passed a math class past primary school, and ended up dropping out of high school. The concepts simply never made sense to me, and as they were presented were just meaningless rote exercises of memorization. Math was something I had completely written off as ever being able to understand. Then I took calculus and trig classes in coll…
Having a real world problem to apply it to makes learning math far easier. I spent a lot of time in 2020-1 tutoring kids in math and the first thing I did was find out what they were into and then worked math into helping them do that thing.
Re: Why don't we use the math we learn in school?
#139Math is incredibly useful; probably everyone here knows that. But it's actually fine that most people don't use it. 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. The fact is, you need to be good at math to make some new fundamental breakthroughs in technology. Those bre…
> "how many meters of fence does Farmer Bob need to keep the sheep inside the pen" is not inspiration -- it's drivel
I recently had to do a line integral to figure out how much coiled pipe I could fit inside a trench of a given width (trying to lay out geothermal loops in my yard to see if they fit (they don't)). I came up with a parametric formula that approximated the coiled pipe shape and integrated to get a length formula.
Advanced math comes up in the weirdest ways.
Re: Why don't we use the math we learn in school?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you that math is pretty much useless in most people's lives. However I disagree that teaching it to everyone is useless. The whole point of making kids learn a whole bunch of different things is that it gives them a chance to figure out if they are, in fact, interested. If you don't provide lots of different topics of learning to children in school, where are they going to find out that one of those topi…
You don't need 12 years "figuring out" that you hate some field. That can and should be done in 2 weeks.
Eh, took me a couple years to figure it out with software.