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Argh this grinds my gears. It’s the education SYSTEM that is wrong. We are working with a 150 year old way of educating kids that does not apply to our cultur

Argh this grinds my gears. It’s the education SYSTEM that is wrong. We are working with a 150 year old way of educating kids that does not apply to our culture today. Kids aren’t going to work on the farm or in a factory. They need the math!!! For courses like algebra, etc. kids need support at home from parents. When that support isn’t available (for whatever reason), don’t water down the content for goodness sake. The kids need 1-on-1 tutoring help. Cut off the head of the problem—the school administration that continues to support our archaic system-and spend the money you will save on tutoring the kids. Or switch to mastery education. Fix the PROBLEM.

Dalewyn 4y ago
>Kids aren’t going to work on the farm or in a factory. They need the math!!! As someone who fucking hated and still hates academical math: No, kids do not need math. Not in the sense as taught in schools, anyway. That is a straight waste of precious time. What kids need is broader context and guidance for what math is, how it applies to the world around us, how we can use it, and why it's important. Fuck quadratic equations and counting slices of pie, none of that literal bullshit is useful as taught to kids today.
- thethirdone 4y ago
  > As someone who fucking hated and still hates academical math: No, kids do not need math. Not in the sense as taught in schools, anyway. That is a straight waste of precious time. Would you mind explaining why you still hate math? It seems like a strange thing to hate except for trauma from school. Are you referring to K-12 level math only? Math at the college level is very useful. Most of the math I was taught in K-12 was just how to calculate (which is mostly useless in a world with computers) and basic algebra. Basic algebra is useful, but only really as a building block to more powerful math. > What kids need is broader context and guidance for what math is, how it applies to the world around us, how we can use it, and why it's important. Fuck quadratic equations and counting slices of pie, none of that literal bullshit is useful as taught to kids today. I completely agree that math curriculum in the US needs a significant overhaul to be more useful, more interesting and a better base for learning advanced mathmatics. Actually coming up with a detailed curriculum that students can follow is pretty difficult. As someone who found K-12 math really easy and boring, I was very peeved when I found out in college that there is a bunch of fun math that I could have been learning throughout school.
  - starik36 4y ago
    > Math at the college level is very useful Useful to whom? I've been coding for 30 years and the most complicated math ever I used was for calculating distance between two lat/lon points and even that I looked up. Is it useful to an average worker sitting in front of a PC? I do not believe so.
    - stcroixx 4y ago
      25 years doing dev work, also never used anything more than basic arithmetic. I barely passed my college math requirements - still don’t understand what calculus is for, never came up writing CRUD apps.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    >Would you mind explaining why you still hate math? I apologize if I didn't make myself clear: I hate academical math. I love math, especially once I realized how truly relevant it is to quite literally everything around me. It was computer programming, long after and outside my academical times, that taught me what math really was about. Suddenly, all those numbers and letters had actual meanings and values to them, I learned I could manipulate them to store and mean literally anything. It was a mindblowing paradigm shift in my way of understanding and thinking everything. All the teachers and textbooks in the world failed to teach me the true value and purpose of math, and I loathe them for wasting my time with their absolute failure.
    - n4r9 4y ago
      I hope that some day you manage to let go of your hatred.
- samtho 4y ago
  I’m sorry you had a poor experience with math in an academic setting. I agree that this is what kids need, the problem with this particular failing of just nixing Algebra is that we’ve not actually innovated in the way we communicate the ideas and techniques used to solve problems. Perhaps the biggest failing with academic math is that it is geared towards a subset of students who can suspend curiosity in order to memorize equations and learn precisely the place to apply them. These are often the students who dislike word problems because it causes them to actually think about the work they are doing. That is to say, I don’t hold contempt for these students as they are just optimizing their academic experience - there is no room for actual rational thinking with how math is taught. My point here is that everyone loses: those who want to bring rationality and purpose into math are left behind because they cannot keep up due to pesky curiosity and those who can parrot equations and mechanically solve trivial problems are lured into the false sense of deep knowledge their grades would suggest. We need to do better for our students but nobody in a position to enact change actually cares enough to do the legwork in revamping how we teach and communicate mathematics or any other subjects for that matter.
- akomtu 4y ago
  How otherwise are you going to develop abstract thinking? There's a huge boulder in front of you and you need to hire a truck to move it. But to do that you need to know the weight of the boulder. How do you measure it? Or there is a very tall tree you need to cut down, but if the tree is too tall, it might fall on your house. How do you measure its height?
  - eternityforest 4y ago
    Math is great, but examples like that are pretty unconvincing. The real value is in solving new problems that nobody has encountered before. I'm not good at math, so I have no idea what I'd use it for. I'd probably get a high end tech job working with advanced stuff, and whatever I was doing there would be stuff that made no sense to someone who doesn't already know math. It's exactly the kind of leap of faith that young people seem to be uninterested in. People have figured out by now that they will always have a calculator 99% of the time, and probably won't need math in the remaining 1%, Google can tell you how to do niche stuff that doesn't come up a lot, and lots of the stuff you use math for also requires specialist equipment, so you'll probably just hire someone. Perhaps if we had more of a DIY culture. But even then, I do a lot of DIY work and almost never encounter math, because I've got FreeCAD. And even though I'm vaguely aware of they Pythagorean theorem, I doubt I'd use it to find the height of a tree, I'd draw it as a sketch and use a constraint solver, actually seeing the triangle on the screen would make it a little clearer if there was a mistake, and it's one less calculation to mess up. Or, I'd just use the height feature on the laser measurement tool. I do have friends who use math in real life, but I rarely see them do anything they couldn't do with an understanding of what software can do, rather than an understanding of the actual physics. And yet everyone seems to say they are very happy to have learned it, and most of our big innovations are from people who know it. I think the important part is how do you convey the benefit of math without saying anything people will immediately recognize as kind of an exaggeration. Math isn't directly useful in an average person's life, it gives people the possibility of doing certain things average people don't do, and lets people understand things, that are not always obvious ahead of time why you would want to understand them.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mindcandy 4y ago
  Totally agree. AFAICT, our math curriculum has been set for a hundred years by mathematicians. People who by some quirk of their upbringing were extremely strongly motivated to dig deep into mathematics. Naturally, the mathematicians laid out for everyone the short path to deep competence in advanced math as fast as possible. Only seems obvious to them. This path ignores the obvious fact that 99.5% of students are not intrinsically motivated to persevere through the decade-long marathon to reach PHD level math. No one in the kids’ lives ever made it clear why this is a goal worth investing in. Even their teachers don’t know. Not well enough to explain it. It’s not even assumed you grok the fun puzzle game that is math. Instead, math is presented as an unending series of seemingly arbitrary rules that all strictly build on each other, eventually leading to an end goal of… … … You are simply required to memorize these rules because if you fail you are a failure. And, maybe if you are unlucky you will utilize something more advanced than basic arithmetic twice a year for the rest of your life. The reality is that math is tremendously interesting and useful and fun. But, all the life was sucked out of it from the beginning of public education. Before the common kids had a chance to even be presented with the idea that math can be fun. We gotta turn this around. Present math as the game that is it. Not a “gamification” to artificially push you into doing things you don’t want to do. But, something that’s actually fun to do in itself.
  - opportune 4y ago
    I don’t agree with this at all. I studied math way past high school and what you learn up until the last 2 years of a standard undergrad curriculum does not even approach what mathematicians do or care about. It’s not even putting you on the PhD track at all, to the contrary, the weird detour into calculus/statistics/non-theoretical linear algebra from an applied perspective sets you back a solid 2 years if you’re following a standard curriculum. The current math curriculum is about giving people a strong base for using math outside mathematics itself, in case they want to study physics or some other science, or engineering. Mathematicians do not generally give a shit about the computational aspect (it’s not what math is about, generally speaking) which you spend most of your time doing in math curricula until you’re at the point where further studying math suggests you are interested in math itself. The vast majority of people who struggle in math IME have at least one of two problems: one is they struggle with it and put up some mental barrier of being “bad at math”, the other is they fell behind at some point and the curriculum kept chugging along with no chance for the student to catch up (which just makes the subsequent material fail to stick and confusing). This has nothing to do with some nefarious mathematicians’ agenda and everything to do with the school system not allowing students to progress at different rates based on proficiency.
- hardware2win 4y ago
  Practicing Math means practicing logic This is the most powerful tool for making your life easier
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    I was only ever taught to rote memorize equations and ways to manipulate numbers, I was never taught the hows and whys. Therefore, there was nothing logical about academical math and it didn't help me think logically about anything.
    - hardware2win 4y ago
      You were never tasked with solving e.g equations? E.g x + 4 = 13 - 2x? Or using derivatives to find optimal material amount needed? Which would be tricky to memorize 100% Like how could you even manage thru a lot of years and exams purely on memory? You gotta understand somewhat this stuff. Just because you dont know how to reinvent derivatives and integrals then it doesnt mean that there is no logic involved
      - Dalewyn 4y ago
        >You were never tasked with solving e.g equations? E.g x + 4 = 13 - 2x? Sure I was, but what does "x + 4 = 13 - 2x" actually mean? That sheer lack of context is what I hate about academical math. WTF is the point of it all? The answer is there is no point, other than scoring adequately on tests so teachers can collect their paychecks and schools their funding. >You gotta understand somewhat this stuff. I was never taught to understand, I was only ever taught to do. That is meaningless and, as far as I've experienced, still irrelevant in my life to this very day.
        hardware2win 4y ago
        >WTF is the point of it all? Practice of math and logic. >That sheer lack of context is what I hate about academical math. Isnt this beautiful? Math doesnt need context, especially cultural context. We dont need examples with apples, cars or money to do the math. Sure, they are helpful for kids, but at some point they are so used to abstract concepts that theres no need for that. So not only logic is being practiced, but also abstract thinking. >still irrelevant in my life to this very day. We dont do math just to apply some random ass formulas. As ive said it improves logical and abstract thinking. Both of them can make significant impact on someones life. It can be seen everywhere in real life, especially during arguments.
macspoofing 4y ago
What’s the fix? It’s not the system. If you have parents that are involved in education and engage in the kind of child-rearing, that is conducive to education - it doesn’t matter the kind of system you’re operating under (keep in mind, our bar for success is very low - we want kids that graduate high-school to be functionally literate with basic arithmetic and basic general knowledge). Put another way, if a child graduates and they are functionally illiterate, I don’t care how bad California’s public education is, the fault lays with the parents for letting their child be illiterate.
- pigsty 4y ago
  My parents were straight D/F students and never helped me with classes at all. I would’ve appreciated help that would’ve let me go farther, but that’s at a point well past algebra. Parents are part of the problem, but it seems like we’re just desperately trying to pin the responsibility on one specific person in the child’s life and put it out of their personal responsibility. That’s not the case. Some kids get everything they need to succeed provided for them and have plenty of assistance and choose to fail. Some have nothing but barriers put all around them and they still bust their ass to succeed.
  - macspoofing 4y ago
    Today we are graduating an unacceptably large numbers of functional illiterate kids from high school. If a kid graduates high school and they are functionally illiterate, that illustrates neglect by parents over many years. It has nothing to do with the academic background of said parents or whether they themselves can read or write. It has nothing to do with the state of public education, or the quality of teachers - the public system is good enough to teach literacy over 15 years of schooling. The quality of the public system may be important for the last mile of education (where you’re trying to provide kids a richer educational experience), but our bar for success is much much lower. Put another way, you cannot convince me that the parents are not at fault when a kid can’t read or write after 15 years of education (after having sampled many many teachers and teaching styles, including summer school and remedial education, during that time).
jerojero 4y ago
I mostly agree with you, except on one aspect. We cannot rely on support from parents, the system we design needs to be thought of with parents out of the equation because in the case of the most vulnerable of kids they will not have parents that can help them. Special tutoring needs to be a part of the system, outsourcing the work will make things cheaper but it will complicate things for those struggling. Kids in need should be our priority, because the ones that have supportive parents are really going to receive that support regardless. I agree on everything else though. Content shouldn't be watered down, school needs to be a safe haven for kids in need. We should be having our most capable people thinking on how to improve the educational system so that we can truly bring everyone forward as we progress.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Or use school funding to pay students who volunteer to tutor the previous year. In addition to being a continually renewing supply of teachers, it provides an income stream for those who might really need it and financially incentivizes academic excellence.
  - em-bee 4y ago
    Or use school funding to pay students who volunteer to tutor the previous year. why pay students to tutor? make tutoring younger kids part of the curriculum. teaching a skill is the best way to practice and internalize the skill for yourself. montessori is already doing this very effectively.
- suchire 4y ago
  Honestly, it doesn’t really work without the parents. The issue is that the biggest problems with schooling discrepancies are poverty. Kids can’t eat, need to take care of siblings or their own kids or go work two jobs, have no homes, don’t get medical care, have no internet, etc. There is no way to really fix those problems by changing the school system. You can have bandaids, like providing free food at school, but that’s fixing the problem at the wrong level.
  - 4y ago
NoMoreNicksLeft 4y ago
What percentage of children are capable of learning "the math" under ideal conditions and circumstances? What percentage of children are capable of learning "the math" in practical conditions and circumstances? What is the distribution of ideal ages for children to learn "the math" in practical conditions and circumstances? What happens when those ages (for most) don't line up with the various social factors that will contrive to make certain they permanently lose the opportunity to learn "the math"? Should my children have to wait years to learn it because your children aren't ready yet but the education system can't afford to teach it twice to two separate smaller groups? What if that means pushing it to the point where my children would age out of the education system, and they never get to learn it, even if they'll be better at it then yours will be? The education system is wrong. You get that right. But what you fail to see is that it can't ever be made non-wrong. What you want out of it isn't the same thing I want out of it. Or that the other guy wants out of it. If we look at how the education system functions, it only ever had political goals. Those have shifted over the years as various factions found new uses for it. At first it was just a jobs program of sorts. And maybe a little ethnic homogenization program. Little snippets of cultural genocide here and there in problematic geographic regions. Then it became a unionized voting bloc. And now it's just a treadmill to keep children busy and stupid so they don't ever quite figure out what was done to them. It's government-funded daycare in an economy that increasingly can never afford for even one parent to be home during the day in the early developmental years. And it has done all those things remarkably well, and reasonably cheap too. What's broken that you really need to fix? Sure, I'm a little sarcastic there... but why can't you see that this system doesn't have any mechanism that will allow for non-superficial reform? Those with the power to do that don't use the public education system anyway.
- staunton 4y ago
  You seem to be saying that schools are bad. Do you really think modern society can function without schools? Or that countries that don't have schools shouldn't build any?
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 4y ago
    You ask two questions that are at odds with each other. If schools were bad, but modern society can't function without them, which would you pick? If you say it can't function without them, then are they good regardless because you want it to continue to function? Like, no matter how bad they are? Or do you draw some line or another? "It's ok if they make kids dumb and compulsive consumers, but they can't go torturing them!" Asking questions like this seems to be more about dogma and status quo than anything else.
mdorazio 4y ago
> They need the math!!! Serious question: for what? Basic algebra, yes. And basic geometry is handy in many jobs as well. But beyond that?
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Failing to understand compound interest leads to a lifetime of poor financial management.
  - voidfunc 4y ago
    Compound interest can be taught in about 5 minutes.
    - HKH2 4y ago
      If only we had ideal conditions...
- froh 4y ago
  where do we draw the line what's "basic"?
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    Being able to take an arbitrary word problem and turn it into an algebraic equation (or series of equations) and be able to solve it. That a huge percentage of kids graduate high school being unable to do that means several people (mostly parents but likely the school system too) failed them.
    - froh 4y ago
      that hat is quite a bit higher than the basic algebra to just solve given equations. that's why I was asking. I think there are vastly different views on what's "basic". wrt who has failed on them iirc countries like Finland figured how to largely lift the dependency from home, family, parents.
bigbacaloa 4y ago
Kids don't need "support at home from parents". Very few parents are competent to teach kids math properly (even those who think they are). Kids do better learning from someone else, better still if the someone else is a professional. Tutoring rarely helps anyone learn as it almost always consists in heavily guided spoon-feeding. Also there are very few good tutors as those who are adequately trained in math to tutor it have much better employment alternatives (including teaching). In 25 years teaching math in universities I've never seen a student who used a tutor and learned math at the same time. I don't teach my kids math and I don't help them with their homework. What kids need is teachers who know math.
- WillAdams 4y ago
  >What kids need is teachers who know math. I would add, "and how to teach it." to that. My final "Advanced Math" course in high school was a young teacher just out of college who apparently knew math, but failed completely at teaching anything meaningful to anyone in the class --- this may have been the fault of the textbook being used, but the fact that the school board chose to replace Calculus with this class because they couldn't find a teacher competent to teach it, speaks volumes to my mind.
- horns4lyfe 4y ago
  If the problem was kids showing up, trying hard, and not getting it then sure. But the problem is kids not showing up and putting no effort in when they do, and that’s on parents.
winwhiz 4y ago
I bet farmers use waaay more algebra than I do as a fullstack web programmer. I love it I just don't use it. On the other hand farmers are thinking about slopes all day, every day: irrigation rates; fuel, fertilizer, seed rates; growth rates. They don't get paid once or twice a month like I do so their finance maths are much more sophisticated than mine. I know, I know what about video game programmers? Okay, you got me there.

Dalewyn 4y ago

>Kids aren’t going to work on the farm or in a factory. They need the math!!! As someone who fucking hated and still hates academical math: No, kids do not need math. Not in the sense as taught in schools, anyway. That is a straight waste of precious time. What kids need is broader context and guidance for what math is, how it applies to the world around us, how we can use it, and why it's important. Fuck quadratic equations and counting slices of pie, none of that literal bullshit is useful as taught to kids today.

thethirdone 4y ago
> As someone who fucking hated and still hates academical math: No, kids do not need math. Not in the sense as taught in schools, anyway. That is a straight waste of precious time. Would you mind explaining why you still hate math? It seems like a strange thing to hate except for trauma from school. Are you referring to K-12 level math only? Math at the college level is very useful. Most of the math I was taught in K-12 was just how to calculate (which is mostly useless in a world with computers) and basic algebra. Basic algebra is useful, but only really as a building block to more powerful math. > What kids need is broader context and guidance for what math is, how it applies to the world around us, how we can use it, and why it's important. Fuck quadratic equations and counting slices of pie, none of that literal bullshit is useful as taught to kids today. I completely agree that math curriculum in the US needs a significant overhaul to be more useful, more interesting and a better base for learning advanced mathmatics. Actually coming up with a detailed curriculum that students can follow is pretty difficult. As someone who found K-12 math really easy and boring, I was very peeved when I found out in college that there is a bunch of fun math that I could have been learning throughout school.
- starik36 4y ago
  > Math at the college level is very useful Useful to whom? I've been coding for 30 years and the most complicated math ever I used was for calculating distance between two lat/lon points and even that I looked up. Is it useful to an average worker sitting in front of a PC? I do not believe so.
  - stcroixx 4y ago
    25 years doing dev work, also never used anything more than basic arithmetic. I barely passed my college math requirements - still don’t understand what calculus is for, never came up writing CRUD apps.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  >Would you mind explaining why you still hate math? I apologize if I didn't make myself clear: I hate academical math. I love math, especially once I realized how truly relevant it is to quite literally everything around me. It was computer programming, long after and outside my academical times, that taught me what math really was about. Suddenly, all those numbers and letters had actual meanings and values to them, I learned I could manipulate them to store and mean literally anything. It was a mindblowing paradigm shift in my way of understanding and thinking everything. All the teachers and textbooks in the world failed to teach me the true value and purpose of math, and I loathe them for wasting my time with their absolute failure.
  - n4r9 4y ago
    I hope that some day you manage to let go of your hatred.
samtho 4y ago
I’m sorry you had a poor experience with math in an academic setting. I agree that this is what kids need, the problem with this particular failing of just nixing Algebra is that we’ve not actually innovated in the way we communicate the ideas and techniques used to solve problems. Perhaps the biggest failing with academic math is that it is geared towards a subset of students who can suspend curiosity in order to memorize equations and learn precisely the place to apply them. These are often the students who dislike word problems because it causes them to actually think about the work they are doing. That is to say, I don’t hold contempt for these students as they are just optimizing their academic experience - there is no room for actual rational thinking with how math is taught. My point here is that everyone loses: those who want to bring rationality and purpose into math are left behind because they cannot keep up due to pesky curiosity and those who can parrot equations and mechanically solve trivial problems are lured into the false sense of deep knowledge their grades would suggest. We need to do better for our students but nobody in a position to enact change actually cares enough to do the legwork in revamping how we teach and communicate mathematics or any other subjects for that matter.
akomtu 4y ago
How otherwise are you going to develop abstract thinking? There's a huge boulder in front of you and you need to hire a truck to move it. But to do that you need to know the weight of the boulder. How do you measure it? Or there is a very tall tree you need to cut down, but if the tree is too tall, it might fall on your house. How do you measure its height?
- eternityforest 4y ago
  Math is great, but examples like that are pretty unconvincing. The real value is in solving new problems that nobody has encountered before. I'm not good at math, so I have no idea what I'd use it for. I'd probably get a high end tech job working with advanced stuff, and whatever I was doing there would be stuff that made no sense to someone who doesn't already know math. It's exactly the kind of leap of faith that young people seem to be uninterested in. People have figured out by now that they will always have a calculator 99% of the time, and probably won't need math in the remaining 1%, Google can tell you how to do niche stuff that doesn't come up a lot, and lots of the stuff you use math for also requires specialist equipment, so you'll probably just hire someone. Perhaps if we had more of a DIY culture. But even then, I do a lot of DIY work and almost never encounter math, because I've got FreeCAD. And even though I'm vaguely aware of they Pythagorean theorem, I doubt I'd use it to find the height of a tree, I'd draw it as a sketch and use a constraint solver, actually seeing the triangle on the screen would make it a little clearer if there was a mistake, and it's one less calculation to mess up. Or, I'd just use the height feature on the laser measurement tool. I do have friends who use math in real life, but I rarely see them do anything they couldn't do with an understanding of what software can do, rather than an understanding of the actual physics. And yet everyone seems to say they are very happy to have learned it, and most of our big innovations are from people who know it. I think the important part is how do you convey the benefit of math without saying anything people will immediately recognize as kind of an exaggeration. Math isn't directly useful in an average person's life, it gives people the possibility of doing certain things average people don't do, and lets people understand things, that are not always obvious ahead of time why you would want to understand them.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mindcandy 4y ago
Totally agree. AFAICT, our math curriculum has been set for a hundred years by mathematicians. People who by some quirk of their upbringing were extremely strongly motivated to dig deep into mathematics. Naturally, the mathematicians laid out for everyone the short path to deep competence in advanced math as fast as possible. Only seems obvious to them. This path ignores the obvious fact that 99.5% of students are not intrinsically motivated to persevere through the decade-long marathon to reach PHD level math. No one in the kids’ lives ever made it clear why this is a goal worth investing in. Even their teachers don’t know. Not well enough to explain it. It’s not even assumed you grok the fun puzzle game that is math. Instead, math is presented as an unending series of seemingly arbitrary rules that all strictly build on each other, eventually leading to an end goal of… … … You are simply required to memorize these rules because if you fail you are a failure. And, maybe if you are unlucky you will utilize something more advanced than basic arithmetic twice a year for the rest of your life. The reality is that math is tremendously interesting and useful and fun. But, all the life was sucked out of it from the beginning of public education. Before the common kids had a chance to even be presented with the idea that math can be fun. We gotta turn this around. Present math as the game that is it. Not a “gamification” to artificially push you into doing things you don’t want to do. But, something that’s actually fun to do in itself.
- opportune 4y ago
  I don’t agree with this at all. I studied math way past high school and what you learn up until the last 2 years of a standard undergrad curriculum does not even approach what mathematicians do or care about. It’s not even putting you on the PhD track at all, to the contrary, the weird detour into calculus/statistics/non-theoretical linear algebra from an applied perspective sets you back a solid 2 years if you’re following a standard curriculum. The current math curriculum is about giving people a strong base for using math outside mathematics itself, in case they want to study physics or some other science, or engineering. Mathematicians do not generally give a shit about the computational aspect (it’s not what math is about, generally speaking) which you spend most of your time doing in math curricula until you’re at the point where further studying math suggests you are interested in math itself. The vast majority of people who struggle in math IME have at least one of two problems: one is they struggle with it and put up some mental barrier of being “bad at math”, the other is they fell behind at some point and the curriculum kept chugging along with no chance for the student to catch up (which just makes the subsequent material fail to stick and confusing). This has nothing to do with some nefarious mathematicians’ agenda and everything to do with the school system not allowing students to progress at different rates based on proficiency.
hardware2win 4y ago
Practicing Math means practicing logic This is the most powerful tool for making your life easier
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  I was only ever taught to rote memorize equations and ways to manipulate numbers, I was never taught the hows and whys. Therefore, there was nothing logical about academical math and it didn't help me think logically about anything.
  - hardware2win 4y ago
    You were never tasked with solving e.g equations? E.g x + 4 = 13 - 2x? Or using derivatives to find optimal material amount needed? Which would be tricky to memorize 100% Like how could you even manage thru a lot of years and exams purely on memory? You gotta understand somewhat this stuff. Just because you dont know how to reinvent derivatives and integrals then it doesnt mean that there is no logic involved
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      >You were never tasked with solving e.g equations? E.g x + 4 = 13 - 2x? Sure I was, but what does "x + 4 = 13 - 2x" actually mean? That sheer lack of context is what I hate about academical math. WTF is the point of it all? The answer is there is no point, other than scoring adequately on tests so teachers can collect their paychecks and schools their funding. >You gotta understand somewhat this stuff. I was never taught to understand, I was only ever taught to do. That is meaningless and, as far as I've experienced, still irrelevant in my life to this very day.
      - hardware2win 4y ago
        >WTF is the point of it all? Practice of math and logic. >That sheer lack of context is what I hate about academical math. Isnt this beautiful? Math doesnt need context, especially cultural context. We dont need examples with apples, cars or money to do the math. Sure, they are helpful for kids, but at some point they are so used to abstract concepts that theres no need for that. So not only logic is being practiced, but also abstract thinking. >still irrelevant in my life to this very day. We dont do math just to apply some random ass formulas. As ive said it improves logical and abstract thinking. Both of them can make significant impact on someones life. It can be seen everywhere in real life, especially during arguments.

macspoofing 4y ago

What’s the fix? It’s not the system. If you have parents that are involved in education and engage in the kind of child-rearing, that is conducive to education - it doesn’t matter the kind of system you’re operating under (keep in mind, our bar for success is very low - we want kids that graduate high-school to be functionally literate with basic arithmetic and basic general knowledge). Put another way, if a child graduates and they are functionally illiterate, I don’t care how bad California’s public education is, the fault lays with the parents for letting their child be illiterate.

pigsty 4y ago
My parents were straight D/F students and never helped me with classes at all. I would’ve appreciated help that would’ve let me go farther, but that’s at a point well past algebra. Parents are part of the problem, but it seems like we’re just desperately trying to pin the responsibility on one specific person in the child’s life and put it out of their personal responsibility. That’s not the case. Some kids get everything they need to succeed provided for them and have plenty of assistance and choose to fail. Some have nothing but barriers put all around them and they still bust their ass to succeed.
- macspoofing 4y ago
  Today we are graduating an unacceptably large numbers of functional illiterate kids from high school. If a kid graduates high school and they are functionally illiterate, that illustrates neglect by parents over many years. It has nothing to do with the academic background of said parents or whether they themselves can read or write. It has nothing to do with the state of public education, or the quality of teachers - the public system is good enough to teach literacy over 15 years of schooling. The quality of the public system may be important for the last mile of education (where you’re trying to provide kids a richer educational experience), but our bar for success is much much lower. Put another way, you cannot convince me that the parents are not at fault when a kid can’t read or write after 15 years of education (after having sampled many many teachers and teaching styles, including summer school and remedial education, during that time).

jerojero 4y ago

I mostly agree with you, except on one aspect. We cannot rely on support from parents, the system we design needs to be thought of with parents out of the equation because in the case of the most vulnerable of kids they will not have parents that can help them. Special tutoring needs to be a part of the system, outsourcing the work will make things cheaper but it will complicate things for those struggling. Kids in need should be our priority, because the ones that have supportive parents are really going to receive that support regardless. I agree on everything else though. Content shouldn't be watered down, school needs to be a safe haven for kids in need. We should be having our most capable people thinking on how to improve the educational system so that we can truly bring everyone forward as we progress.

ethbr0 4y ago
Or use school funding to pay students who volunteer to tutor the previous year. In addition to being a continually renewing supply of teachers, it provides an income stream for those who might really need it and financially incentivizes academic excellence.
- em-bee 4y ago
  Or use school funding to pay students who volunteer to tutor the previous year. why pay students to tutor? make tutoring younger kids part of the curriculum. teaching a skill is the best way to practice and internalize the skill for yourself. montessori is already doing this very effectively.
suchire 4y ago
Honestly, it doesn’t really work without the parents. The issue is that the biggest problems with schooling discrepancies are poverty. Kids can’t eat, need to take care of siblings or their own kids or go work two jobs, have no homes, don’t get medical care, have no internet, etc. There is no way to really fix those problems by changing the school system. You can have bandaids, like providing free food at school, but that’s fixing the problem at the wrong level.
- 4y ago

NoMoreNicksLeft 4y ago

What percentage of children are capable of learning "the math" under ideal conditions and circumstances? What percentage of children are capable of learning "the math" in practical conditions and circumstances? What is the distribution of ideal ages for children to learn "the math" in practical conditions and circumstances? What happens when those ages (for most) don't line up with the various social factors that will contrive to make certain they permanently lose the opportunity to learn "the math"? Should my children have to wait years to learn it because your children aren't ready yet but the education system can't afford to teach it twice to two separate smaller groups? What if that means pushing it to the point where my children would age out of the education system, and they never get to learn it, even if they'll be better at it then yours will be? The education system is wrong. You get that right. But what you fail to see is that it can't ever be made non-wrong. What you want out of it isn't the same thing I want out of it. Or that the other guy wants out of it. If we look at how the education system functions, it only ever had political goals. Those have shifted over the years as various factions found new uses for it. At first it was just a jobs program of sorts. And maybe a little ethnic homogenization program. Little snippets of cultural genocide here and there in problematic geographic regions. Then it became a unionized voting bloc. And now it's just a treadmill to keep children busy and stupid so they don't ever quite figure out what was done to them. It's government-funded daycare in an economy that increasingly can never afford for even one parent to be home during the day in the early developmental years. And it has done all those things remarkably well, and reasonably cheap too. What's broken that you really need to fix? Sure, I'm a little sarcastic there... but why can't you see that this system doesn't have any mechanism that will allow for non-superficial reform? Those with the power to do that don't use the public education system anyway.

staunton 4y ago
You seem to be saying that schools are bad. Do you really think modern society can function without schools? Or that countries that don't have schools shouldn't build any?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 4y ago
  You ask two questions that are at odds with each other. If schools were bad, but modern society can't function without them, which would you pick? If you say it can't function without them, then are they good regardless because you want it to continue to function? Like, no matter how bad they are? Or do you draw some line or another? "It's ok if they make kids dumb and compulsive consumers, but they can't go torturing them!" Asking questions like this seems to be more about dogma and status quo than anything else.

mdorazio 4y ago

> They need the math!!! Serious question: for what? Basic algebra, yes. And basic geometry is handy in many jobs as well. But beyond that?

WalterBright 4y ago
Failing to understand compound interest leads to a lifetime of poor financial management.
- voidfunc 4y ago
  Compound interest can be taught in about 5 minutes.
  - HKH2 4y ago
    If only we had ideal conditions...
froh 4y ago
where do we draw the line what's "basic"?
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  Being able to take an arbitrary word problem and turn it into an algebraic equation (or series of equations) and be able to solve it. That a huge percentage of kids graduate high school being unable to do that means several people (mostly parents but likely the school system too) failed them.
  - froh 4y ago
    that hat is quite a bit higher than the basic algebra to just solve given equations. that's why I was asking. I think there are vastly different views on what's "basic". wrt who has failed on them iirc countries like Finland figured how to largely lift the dependency from home, family, parents.

bigbacaloa 4y ago

Kids don't need "support at home from parents". Very few parents are competent to teach kids math properly (even those who think they are). Kids do better learning from someone else, better still if the someone else is a professional. Tutoring rarely helps anyone learn as it almost always consists in heavily guided spoon-feeding. Also there are very few good tutors as those who are adequately trained in math to tutor it have much better employment alternatives (including teaching). In 25 years teaching math in universities I've never seen a student who used a tutor and learned math at the same time. I don't teach my kids math and I don't help them with their homework. What kids need is teachers who know math.

WillAdams 4y ago
>What kids need is teachers who know math. I would add, "and how to teach it." to that. My final "Advanced Math" course in high school was a young teacher just out of college who apparently knew math, but failed completely at teaching anything meaningful to anyone in the class --- this may have been the fault of the textbook being used, but the fact that the school board chose to replace Calculus with this class because they couldn't find a teacher competent to teach it, speaks volumes to my mind.
horns4lyfe 4y ago
If the problem was kids showing up, trying hard, and not getting it then sure. But the problem is kids not showing up and putting no effort in when they do, and that’s on parents.

winwhiz 4y ago

I bet farmers use waaay more algebra than I do as a fullstack web programmer. I love it I just don't use it. On the other hand farmers are thinking about slopes all day, every day: irrigation rates; fuel, fertilizer, seed rates; growth rates. They don't get paid once or twice a month like I do so their finance maths are much more sophisticated than mine. I know, I know what about video game programmers? Okay, you got me there.