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What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?

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Re: What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who loves math, I do think math education would benefit from making the primary focus be probability and statistics for high school. In addition, financial math instead of algebra. I would replace trigonometry and geometry with discrete math as electives. And have calculus as another elective but taught without a focus on calculation.

As someone who went to economics school and had roundabout the math curriculum you suggested, I think it was a terrible idea. It leaves one with the wrong idea that math is mostly about handling money. Only later, when I got to study math for the computer science degree, I realized that financial math is only a small part of this marvelous huge pie of knowledge.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I do think it’s more important for most students to understand money than most of what is currently taught with algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus. My main point though was to focus on probability and statistics. Right now, most students barely understand and remember what is currently taught and also lack knowledge to understand important matters that directly affect them.

Re: What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?

#182

The UCSD report shows some of the questions they asked incoming students. 39% got this right: Round the number 374518 to the nearest 100 34% got this right: Find 13/16 ÷ 2. 2% got this right: If a=-2 and b=-3, evaluate ab² - a/b https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio... page 49

To be fair, the ÷ symbol for division must be abolished.

What is the correct order of operations there? I'm treating both representations of division as equivalent, so just running the whole thing from left to right. But there's no reason that because both operators indicate division, that they must have the same precedence.

Re: What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?

#183
post #174
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the GP post might have been downvoted because "what the math is useful for" frames it in the wrong way, making it sound like every lesson needs to be immediately applicable to your everyday life. An honest answer might be "this lesson in fractions is one step on a difficult 15-year journey that culminates in a junior developer position at OpenAI," but most 10-year-olds aren't ready for that conversation, so "…

The math I was taught had a lot of practical applications. Fractions for cooking, calculating tips, finance, taxes, etc. Not even that was justified to us, let alone the more advanced stuff.

My recollections of finding math & physics interesting were simply a reflection of finding the world as a whole interesting - it (the world) was obviously full of stuff, stuff that had dimensions & mass & quantities and it seemed very clear that being able to relate such figures to each other would be always be very useful.
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