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I have had to answer this question to my kids (one of whom abhors math). The explanation I gave is this: For many subjects, most kids will end up never using t

• twelvechairs 4y ago
  What we definitely should teach kids that isnt taught is discounted cash flow analysis as almost everyone has a loan at some point in life and few know how to calculate them
  • jakub_g 4y ago
    Also, understanding basics of statistics.
  • habnds 4y ago
    I definitely learned a present value calculation in high school at some point, it's not an actual DCF but does teach that fundamental principal about the time value of money.
  • alfnor 4y ago
    So why can't they use calculators for that?
• nicolashahn 4y ago
  I agree with this. A less tactful way of explaining it: "When am I ever going to use calculus in my life??" You? Probably never. But we're teaching everyone on the off chance that one of you goes on to do something useful with it. Enabling that one person to find a way to make rockets more efficient or something is well worth the tradeoff of wasting the rest of the class's time, from a societal point of view.
  • ackfoobar 4y ago
    https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-i-couldn39t-be-a-math-teacher https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-i-couldn39t-be-a-math-...
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    • tialaramex 4y ago
      Funny as that comic is, it's very unclear at a young age, and even when they're a bit older it's far from obvious. Even at first degree stage, some of the apparently best qualified teenagers who turned up for their first classes this week are going to flunk out anyway, and some of the kids who struggled and seemed like they'd be lucky to get their degree will be potential Fields Medal winners in 10-15 years. Their prior record, even now they're adults, is at best somewhat predictive and nowhere close to definitive.
  • pydry 4y ago
    Something like that did happen in one of my classes and the kids who didnt want to learn it said "why dont you just teach [ smart kid ] then? If anybody is gonna design rockets itll be him.
    • jjoonathan 4y ago
      Do you want to tell a parent that their kid has already decided not to design rockets?
      • alfnor 4y ago
        Colleges attract big fish from small ponds, but most small ponds have small fish. Realistically, only big fish will have the attitude and aptitude to become something as advanced as rocket designer.
        • jjoonathan 4y ago
• nickff 4y ago
  >"So we teach some of every subject to every kid. That way no matter which path they end up following, they are as prepared for it as we can make them." We tend to waste a lot of time teaching subjects which they're unlikely to use, and fail to teach them about the ones that they would really benefit from. A basic understanding of criminal and civil law, along with accounting and statistics would be extremely useful to almost everyone as individuals and as citizens. Music, history, and calculus are useful to some people, but not nearly as many.
  • MajimasEyepatch 4y ago
    I've never liked how people say that statistics is useful but calculus is not. I do not believe that you can actually understand statistics without understanding at least some calculus. So much of statistics is about areas under curves!
    • nickff 4y ago
      The problem with this is that the first classes in calculus are usually focused on continuous functions, which don't really exist in statistical datasets. The math has a lot in common, but most people don't really see or use that to their advantage, as evidenced by the literature on "transfer of learning".
      • galdosdi 4y ago
        Have you actually studied calculus based probability/stayistics though? Your comment seems characteristic of my own former thinking from when I had only taken an algebra based intro stats course (AP statistics) and hadn't yet learn it the calculus based way a few years later. There is a lot of cool stuff you miss out on in the basic stats course because of having to dumb it down to avoid the calculus. Some I remember off hand: - proof of the central limit theorem, which gives the shocking result that if you sum several uniform distributions you get rapidly more precise approximations of the normal distribution, which looks similar to exp(-x^2) if I recall. This central result is the foundation of all statistical sampling. This is why in real life if you see something follow a normal distribution you can guess it is probably caused by a moderate to large number of somewhat independent factors, and vice versa. This is genuinely useful, but if you don't know it you won't miss it - poisson distribution which relates the mean time between events to the probability of failures. Obviously very applicable to a lot of real life tbings
• striking 4y ago
  I think a lot of the time it is just too abstract to grasp. I think the first time in my life where I was really happy to have learned calculus for my own intrinsic benefit was a few weeks ago, when I set up Home Assistant in an effort to automatically minimize heat in my apartment. It wasn't enough to tell the shade to come down at a certain temperature, because the apartment would already be too hot. So instead I could take the derivative of the temperature of my apartment, allowing me to get out ahead of the worst part of the blast of sun. After all, if the temperature is increasing very quickly, we should act to stop it. I've used a decent amount of calculus in my life, but that was the first time I had been actually happy to have learned it.
  • FatCatsClub 4y ago
  • tomjakubowski 4y ago
    If you hadn't learned calculus or what a derivative is, do you suppose you would have eventually figured out to measure the change in temperature and respond to that? I wonder how much of the value of the course is just in the repeated observation that the rate of change (and so on) is useful to measure
    • Jensson 4y ago
      Humans has terrible intuition for these things, it was just 300 years ago humanity figured these things out but once we did we did all these things afterwards in just 300 years. Learning this one thing is the key to so many things. Basic math and physics education helps build intuition for it, but without people are really bad.
      • hutzlibu 4y ago
        "Basic math and physics education helps build intuition for it, but without people are really bad." Erm, in some abstract ways yes - but actually people are very good at extrapolating current physical events. "It is getting hot fast? Oh not, it might even get hotter, lets look for shade." Or throwing a ball. You would need calculus to correctly calculate the flight path of the ball, yet we can do so, without and very fast. Where our intuition fails often, is understanding the reason why things happen. For this physics and math should be taught from very early on.
• vlunkr 4y ago
  I don't really agree with this. It seems to be based on the assumption that the entire purpose of school is to prepare you for a job. Obviously that's important, but education also simply enriches your life. Some of the electives I took in high school and college have had a great impact on the way view things, or the way I live my life, despite having nothing to do with my career. Also, lots of math is optional (depending on your school and career.) You may not use calc or trig regularly, but most people use some algebra and geometry.
  • ethanbond 4y ago
    Problem with this is that it’s not very comforting to someone who feels extremely frustrated (not enriched at all) by the experience they’re going through. That’s true even if you know with certainty they’ll feel enriched by it later on.
  • agalunar 4y ago
    > Obviously that's important, but education also simply enriches your life. You should read the Aims of Education speech given by Abbott; you might really enjoy it. https://college.uchicago.edu/student-life/aims-education-address-2002-andrew-abbott https://college.uchicago.edu/student-life/aims-education-add...
  • munificent 4y ago
    Imagine if I'd said "life path" instead of "career path" and the rest of my comment still holds true. We all have a finite time on Earth and we're going to spend it doing something. Most of us seem to want to spend that time doing something meaningful and interesting.
  • runlevel1 4y ago
    > Some of the electives I took in high school and college have had a great impact on the way view things "Electives" is an important word there. By high school, I think you're ready to explore the things you already know you might be interested in. Much more so than what high schools typically have on offer. I was bored out of my mind for my first two years of high school. I went to a HS at a community college for the second two, and it made a world of difference. We had English and History classes taught by HS teachers, but for all our other credits we had the whole college's course list to choose from. Being able to choose makes learning so much more engaging.
• misterprime 4y ago
  Perhaps also/instead: These lessons help bring you up to speed with foundational concepts and ways of thinking that took humanity a very long time to discover and develop. Learning these things while you are young will, at a minimum, help you keep up with others and avoid being scammed, or at best, help you quickly reach the current limit of our understanding and possibly expand our capabilities. You can also think of it like stretching and exercising your brain. You may not need to actually do that work, but it's still good for you and helps make other work easier.
• tshaddox 4y ago
  It seems like what you're arguing for is to identify the most generalized, broadly applicable subjects possible. And that makes sense. Learning to read and write is probably the most obvious example, because it's about as broadly applicable a skill as one can imagine. The argument doesn't seem to apply very well to calculus though, does it?
• bee_rider 4y ago
  I think this is a much more honest answer. We don't know who is going to be an electrical engineering student, and of those folks even many of them might manage to get through the degree without needing calc (you can memorize lots of answers and then get a career plugging in discrete components I guess), but we do know somebody is going to have to design the antennas.
• jonnycomputer 4y ago
  I like this answer better. It also fits with my experience, mostly in the absence of training I could have received in my college days but did not because I was studying something else, but which would be very applicable to what I do now. It's hard to know where you'll end up. Also, it's hard to know when people will need background information necessary to understand what someone is saying. I'm often blown away by what others do not know, only to turn around and find myself completely at a loss about something else.
• magicalhippo 4y ago
  I absolutely agree. However at least here in Norway, I think we spend too much of the time focusing on useless details. For example, non-trivial part of our Norwegian classes was filled with language history, like the art periods and when various authors lived and so on. I get that it's nice to know a bit about this, to be able to place them in roughly the right period, but giving a 14 year old a "wrong answer" on a test because the kid doesn't know the exact year some author was born, or failing to list all the authors in some romantic-period clique, is frankly stupid. Meanwhile, far to little time was devoted to practical writing. Like, say, an email. We spent just a few hours writing reports and similar non-prose, compared to several semesters full of language history, learning about the romanticism and realism periods etc. I see so many of my colleagues and customers who couldn't write a coherent email if their life depended on it, and can't help but wonder if some of that history time at school had been better spent on practical matters. If a kid wanted to really study language history, they can very well learn this later.
  • arolihas 4y ago
    Do your colleagues and customers still grasp the finer points of language history? Even if school spent more time on how to write basic emails, I'd suspect it still wouldn't sink in for many children because many of them wouldn't care to apply it. It should only take a couple hours for an educated adult to learn how to write a coherent paragraph. If your coworkers still can't be bothered, then I don't see how forced education would help anyway.
    • magicalhippo 4y ago
      Fair enough, but language history certainly didn't make them any better at it. And memorizing details can be a lot harder and thus more demotivating. It surely can't get much worse if they actually tried teaching kids to write better non-prose.
      • arolihas 4y ago
        I'm not familiar with the Norwegian education system but didn't you have classes that required writing essays or at least short answers? If kids go through over a decade of schooling and still cannot write a coherent message well into adulthood, something is fundamentally flawed.
• brightball 4y ago
  I try to get my kids interested in math by showing them how it can help win games. When we see those “guess how many jellybeans” contests, I let them guess and then show them how to work out the formula for volume of the container. I once made them do an entire ROI analysis of the Monopoly board to figure out which spaces were the best and how many houses were worth building. They’re really good at Monopoly now. :) It helped some.
• deleted 4y ago
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• onos 4y ago
  It’s a good answer. Another is that the goal of education is not always for practical application. This is one of the most important discoveries of mankind ever, and it would be a pity not to be exposed to it.
• jimbob45 4y ago