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.
What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?
181–183 of 183 posts
Re: What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?
#182The 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.
Re: What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?
#183Earlier 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.