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You can imagine the following perspective: - Most people don't need to learn calculus at all, and it's fine if the few weird students who do start when they ge

You can imagine the following perspective: - Most people don't need to learn calculus at all, and it's fine if the few weird students who do start when they get to college (maybe the advanced students can learn single-variable calculus in high school). - For pure signaling reasons, taking calculus in high school has become very important for college admissions. - In order to take calculus in high school, you need to at least take algebra I (and hopefully geometry) in middle school. Wealthier parents understand they are playing the college admissions game early on, so they make sure in elementary school that their kids will be able to get on the algebra track in middle school. - Getting on the algebra track is thus the first really consequential part of the college admissions game, it happens much earlier than the rest, and takes real scheming by parents to make sure their young kids are prepared. [actually true] - If you could just make this impossible, it will even the playing field in a huge way and knock down one of the biggest hurdles in college admissions for people from lower-SES backgrounds. [also probably true] - The only downside is that students will no longer have time to cover calculus in high school, which doesn't matter anyway because it's only a small number of unusual people who need to learn calculus (very advanced math!), and they can just learn it in college. This is my best guess about the line of thinking that motivates these "no advanced math" policies. It has elements of truth to it which are worth paying attention to. The problem is just that actually, it's really useful and important to learn calculus in high school, and more people need this opportunity. edit: I thought it was clear that I think a lot more high school students should be learning calculus as early as possible, and that "no advanced math" is a terrible policy, but I guess not...

pwthornton 3y ago
There is a way to have time to cover Calculus in high school while still taking it slower: Block scheduling. My high school shifted to it. It's like a college day where you have four longer classes instead of eight shorter ones. Courses are semester-long, not year-long. This means you can take two math classes in one year (algebra in the fall and geometry in the spring). This also enabled my high school to offer AP Calculus B, which is part-two of AP Calculus. The other advantage of this type of schedule is that it is also easier to offer other kinds of math that may be more critical to most students, such as a dedicated class on statistics.
- mikepurvis 3y ago
  My Toronto high school was like this, back in the early 2000s.
  - anthomtb 3y ago
    My Colorado high school was also like this, same time frame.
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  Eight different classes in one day? How can that work?
  - gwoplock 3y ago
    When I was in high school, IIRC we did 55 minute classes with 5 minutes between classes, 4 core classes 2 or 3 electives + lunch. It doesn't work, by time you start, the class settles, late arrivals show up, homework is collected, questions asked and whatnot, there's probably only 30 mins of real instruction. Class would boil down to either teaching or worksheets but not both.
    - pwthornton 3y ago
      Yes, this is the rub, it's not very efficient. For deeper activities, block scheduling is radically superior. Hell gym is way better too!
    - kneebonian 3y ago
      So my school did block schedule of 90 minutes classes on alternating days. But I am wondering if 30 minutes of instruction is about right? I mean a lot of evidence point to people having difficulty focusing on a single thing or learning for more than 20 minutes at a time? 30 minute bite-sized lessons might be perfect.
  - BeFlatXIII 3y ago
    Not well.
cbeach 3y ago
Algebra is fundamental to problem solving. Learning to code would have been much harder if I hadn't grasped algebra. Calculus is important for understanding science (especially physics) and statistics. These are not niche subjects for "the few weird students." They are really important to grasp for many roles in the knowledge economy. Your kids will enter a world of robotics and automation. They're going to need to use their brains if they want to succeed. I'm 100% against a dumbing down of the education system to achieve ideological leftwing aims.
flappyeagle 3y ago
The problem is that this point of view ignores reality: motivated parents will just have their children learn calculus in outside classes. The reality is for these students, "standard" middle and high school math is mind-numbingly boring. The best outcome would be that the best schools and teachers use the surplus time to teach stuff that's off-curriculum like logic, discrete math, stats, programming, etc.
- lotu 3y ago
  Maybe true but that won't get them a calculus credit on their transcript. > The reality is for these students, "standard" middle and high school math is mind-numbingly boring. >The best outcome would be that the best schools and teachers use the surplus time to teach stuff that's off-curriculum like logic, discrete math, stats, programming, etc. This is also true I was one of these students. My middle school did almost exactly this. They had a per algebra class that explored all sorts of random topics. We did things like clock math, and observed how these other mathematical systems did or did not observe things like the associative property. It was amazing because it made math more than just doing calculations. This class is still one of my fondest educational memories.
  - mcphage 3y ago
    > This is also true I was one of these students. My middle school did almost exactly this. They had a per algebra class that explored all sorts of random topics. What textbook / textbooks did your class use for this?
  - guidoism 3y ago
    As far as I can tell you don't need an official transcript from an accredited school to get into college. We are homeschooling our kids and what I've read is that homeschoolers write their own transcript, the kids themselves write it, and they describe what they've accomplished and learned during their schooling career and admission depts in colleges tend to favor these kids over traditionally schooled kids. I'm guessing that a traditionally schooled kid could just do the same. Especially since there's so much that they are probably learning outside of school. It would be a shame to ignore all of those skills and knowledge just because they weren't taught during the hours of 8 and 3, M-F.
fooker 3y ago
Students from the rest of the world learn calculus when they 15-18. It’s interesting to see how quickly America is being dumbed down by stupid policies. College level science and engineering education doesn’t make sense without a understanding of at least basic calculus.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Not really. Students in other countries in the world (for this assumption India, China, Canada, UK, Germany given my experience with the following) are tracked and/or calculus is optional. We've traditionally had tracking within the US system (hence why AP and Honors classes matter) which helped filter students accordingly. The issue is our "Hail Mary" pipeline - community colleges - are unnecessarily viewed as negatively, even though they help students remediate any knowledge gaps they might have.
  - fooker 3y ago
    ‘Tracked’ is doing some heavy lifting here. A vast majority of students in these countries end up learning calculus in school to keep college options open.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      Most students in these countries don't end up college track. 1. College Matriculation rates are low. Only 36% of Germans aged 25-46 have attended Tertiary Education (University as well as Vocational School) [0]. This is a similar story in the UK and Canada as well. 2. In countries like Germany and UK, college track HS admissions are competitive. Attending a Gymnasium or a uni track independent school or public school requires having a mix of high scores in grades 6-8 or competitive exams. 3. Calculus is not in the default curriculum. For example, in Canada Advanced Functions only teaches a bit of Calculus for a semester. The course is optional, only allowed at Grade 12, and sometimes isn't offered in HS. This is a similar case in the UK with "Further Maths" as an optional A-level and Germany with the Maths curriculum in Realschules. [0] - https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?primaryCountry=DEU&treshold=10&topic=EO https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?primaryCountry=...
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> it's only a small number of unusual people who need to learn calculus Any STEM career. Finance and economics. Data science--the component they're replacing middle-school algebra with, the CMF's authors know as much about data science as about math. Californians whose parents can't afford tutors have been effective gated from these careers.
- chociej 3y ago
  It also depends heavily on how you define "need". Calculus changed the way I view many, many concepts and phenomena. I think we present things like calculus as dryly as possible, and only to those blessed few who we perceive as able to understand it, and in doing so, we deprive so many people of a useful new way of considering problems. Whether it ends up being critical to their chosen career seems like a really narrow and poor criterion.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    > I think we present things like calculus as dryly as possible A lot of this is because the hiring pipeline has dried up. I went to a top hs here in the Bay Area and had teachers who were very knowledgeable and invested in STEM education. Because of extremely low salaries when factoring in CoL, a replacement pipeline hasn't formed. I had 4-5 of my classmates in HS end up majoring in STEM and minoring in Education at the big 3 UCs, but all of them decided to become Data Analysts or SWEs instead because they would be provided a living wage without having to go get a masters for an additional $30-40k and/or a formal teaching credential for an additonal $12-15k. They were looking at a $150k bill just to earn $70-80k starting AT BEST in Silicon Valley.
    - cmh89 3y ago
      I have friends who are/were teachers. I can't imagine why anyone would subject themselves to that. Low pay, spoiled out of control children, their evn worse parents, active shooter drills/real active shooters, fucking TikTok. I wouldn't do that job if it paid double what I make now.
eftychis 3y ago
With that kind of thinking though we can reach logical results like: - writing prose and composition is unnecessary, as at best one will write on slack and social media; - doing pushups, calisthenics, or running is unnecessary: few jobs require that; - learning about how the government works, civics or sociology or psychology should be skipped: all these are taken care by the employer that is not going to let you go vote anyways (still don't understand how/why it is not a mandatory holiday, but what do I know); - debates should be banned: promotes arguing against cops and employers both having detrimental outcomes; - art is for the rich and private schools: poor populous should not be dreaming; I suggest -- my 2 humble cents -- the writers of this abomination take a class in logic. Unfortunately, that is math and requires fundamentals they don't want covered. P.S. My grad school anecdote: our perception and experiences as "international" grad students of the math understanding of incoming undergrads was abysmal to put it lightly. I don't want to be in any future TA shoes.
- mangodrunk 3y ago
  I don’t see how that is a logical conclusion. There’s such a thing as opportunity cost and interests. If someone wants to learn something, they should, but the problem is forcing those to learn something when they would rather learn something else. There are basic things that everyone should know, like reading. Instead of calculus, logic would be better, and especially probability and statistics.
  - lacrimacida 3y ago
    I agree. Though I loved calculus (and took it in HS and college) my brother hated math in general and forcing him to take it or other advanved math class and get a bad grade is unfair.
  - tnecniv 3y ago
    Probability and stats requires calculus
    - mangodrunk 3y ago
mikepurvis 3y ago
As someone who did all of it and ended up majoring in engineering, in my opinion calc is the least practical of the senior high school math courses— geometry and data management (stats/probability) are both much more likely to be useful to normal people doing their taxes, understanding elections, fitting furniture into rooms, whatever. That said, I think calculus is helpful in the way that learning a niche programming language is helpful: it teaches you about new kinds of abstractions, how to think in a different way, and gives particular language with which to talk about that kind of thing.
AlanYx 3y ago
>This is my best guess about the line of thinking that motivates these "no advanced math" policies. You've explained the thought process of the "reformers" fairly well, but there is another additional element that's important as well: a sizeable contingent of people believe that advanced math itself is intrinsically bad or negative. Usually this is either because math is fundamentally exclusionary in some core way, or because it's somehow inextricably tied to ways in which equity-seeking populations are oppressed, or used as a tool of oppression. O'Neill's Weapons of Math Destruction is so popular in academic circles partly because it plays to this mindset. This viewpoint dovetails with some of the points you've highlighted, for example many believe that everyone is equally capable, but the reason they're not all getting competitive scores with good shots at college is because advanced math (being intrinsically negative/evil) is ruining it. So in their view it is rational to get rid of it, replacing it with something (the data science course) that's not advanced math. For these people, the goal is not to improve equity by getting everyone up to speed in advanced math. It's to bypass it.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  At it's very foundation liberal ideology cracks pretty badly if "Everyone is born equally capable" is false.
  - candiodari 3y ago
    But the only way to make people equal is to sabotage, sabotage and sabotage. And, of course, if parents have the means, this won't work. This is just robbing a lot of lower class kids from any chance of getting higher, just because not everyone will make it. That's stupid. Of course sabotaging kids is also slightly cheaper, and creates the need for more administrators, the ones making these decisions, to decide exactly what is "equitable".
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    I suspect that 'liberals believe "Everyone is born equally capable"' is a strawman. I hang out with pretty liberal people and no one actually believes anything like this. Interestingly, the article actually lists out a more nuanced, realistic version of this idea (with a link to research): > But whatever you think about the morality of this idea, it simply will not work. The reason is that the strong hereditarian hypothesis is wrong; practically all kids are educable, with the proper investment of resources. And we're talking about high school educational attainment here, not world-class achievement. To use a fitness analogy, not everyone has the anatomy to be a world-class deadlifter. But pretty much everybody can get to deadlifting 1x/1.5x their (healthy) bodyweight with some training.
DSMan195276 3y ago
You've gotten a whole lot of replies that seem to miss your point, but I'd say that I've experienced that exact thing - to get to Calc in your senior year you needed to have gotten on a very specific track of math courses back in middle school, and likely your parents needed to know about it to make sure you got in. Otherwise, what appeared to be a very inconsequential choice at middle school actually decided your entire math track. Getting back on the track after you get off basically doesn't happen. I definitely think we should teach more advanced math (and other) courses, but that particular way of doing it is just not very good - plenty of people who probably could have managed Calc just fine didn't get to take it, due to choices made for them years past probably by parents who didn't understand the significance. The structure and order of classes needs to be redone, which is hard. I will say though I find it funny how much people are coming to Calc's defense. I'm in software development and it's a pretty common joke how virtually inapplicable calc is to us. I'm still happy I learned it but for software development it's definitely less useful than the other advanced math you'll learn.
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  I like to call it "the math ladder" for this reason. Math is uniquely cumulative, so being shoved off the ladder prematurely precludes future advancement in a way that gaps in knowledge of the US Civil War have minimal impact on learning East Asian history.
- feoren 3y ago
  > it's a pretty common joke how virtually inapplicable calc is to us If you think calculus is not important to software development than you are not bothering to look. Just a few examples: - Calculus was the first math class I took that gave a clear definition of what a "function" really is. Do you use functions? - Analyzing the properties of functions to see what operations made sense to do or not (e.g. continuous vs discontinuous). - The concept of taking a function at various points and adding a small value to it to see how it changes is extremely important in sensitivity analysis and optimization. - Anything involving non-uniform probability distributions, like sampling a random number from various distributions, requires understanding the relationship of PDFs and CDFs, which is one of derivative/definite integral. This means any form of realistic simulation, any estimations of time to failure, performance of anything, etc. - Gradient descent and backpropagation in neural networks are completely opaque if you don't understand derivatives. - Most games or simulations deal with rates of change. - The concept of infinitesimals applies to finding tangents to curves, showing up in vector graphics all the time. - Anything involving elevation in GIS, analysis of water flow, even topographic maps I'm honestly sick and tired of seeing these crazy anti-learning comments like "I'm in software development and I literally never use calculus / linear algebra / type theory / lambda calculus / algorithms and data structures / boolean logic / binary trees / linked lists / stacks / queues / geometry / algebra / arithmetic" <-- then you're artificially limiting yourself and you're a much worse software developer than the ones who actually do use those things. What do you do all day, copy code from StackOverflow and hope it works? Don't discourage other people from learning just because you were too lazy: in fact that's literally what this entire post is about. You're part of the problem.
ghaff 3y ago
(A) problem is that, if you're going to start getting very specific about what math kids need to learn if they're not going into STEM, you end up with a pretty short list and you end up, in practice, with not really learning math or developing numerical intuition at all. (And let's ignore the fact that I directly used very little of what I learned in university engineering either.) When was the last time I did a geometry proof? Used trig? OK, I use some algebra now and then though probably not simultaneous equations. Not calc. But I'm pretty sure the path is not to make numerical literacy basically optional. Why know how to multiply in a world with calculators? Well... Though I wouldn't argue with more emphasis on things like basic stats and probability early on.
- jonfromsf 3y ago
  Everyone needs to understand probability and statistics maybe 10X better than they currently do. That should be the focus!
  - guidoism 3y ago
    Yes, this! It’s crazy that we spend a decade of a person’s life forcing them to learn a skill that is so completely irrelevant to their lives and yet we ignore skills that could help them from being manipulated or forced into debt slavery. I need to come up with a better analogy, but it’s like we were still forcing our children to manipulate a cotton gin and know the ins and outs of maintaining and repairing one. I mean, I’m sure it’s interesting and now I want to look up a YouTube video about cotton gins, but do we really need to force this upon everyone? And then we decide that if you didn’t memorize how to change out the plumbus in the cotton gin perfectly then you aren’t allowed to do further study in marine biology. If I believed in conspiracy theories then I would think that Big Scary Corporations are in cahoots with The Government to keep the public from knowing how not to be manipulated and forcing them to work for low wages for their entire lives. But I don’t believe this because I think the reality is a lot more mundane and stupid. I think it’s just like the story you hear about why your mom learned to cook the ham by cutting off the end and finding out after some investigation that the only reason was because her grandmother had a small pan and we all just tend to continue doing what has sorta kinda worked without thinking about it. But in this case we can’t just make individual decisions to do something different because we’ve decided that the API between secondary school and college is an admissions test that includes certain irrelevant things that we can’t change because of history and the API between college and a job is something completely different.
Hermitian909 3y ago
This is a good analysis, but you're missing another angle: quite a few kids are not developmentally ready[0] for algebra in 8th grade but most are ready in 9th grade. By forcing kids who are not developmentally ready into algebra you generally do more harm then good (most of those kids will hate math for the rest of their lives). This problem also occurs earlier in school life with fractions. When I was in education I saw pushing students too early like this do a lot of damage that had to be cleaned up by tutors at a later date and was totally unnecessary. I even think Calculus could still be achieved by the end of high school with the right curriculum choices - you can teach a lot of calculus concepts to grace schoolers if you elide the actual mechanics of computation. Anecdotally, students who were pushed through that sort of curriculum earlier in middle school tended to breeze through high school calc. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive...
somethoughts 3y ago
I like this effort to understand/summary of the other side in good faith (even though one can believe math education is important). I think way of rationalizing it is that there are some parents that feel that orchestra, art exploration, debate, sports or <insert subject/extracurricular of choice> at the collegiate level. After all, many students excel at these and could get into an Ivy league/Big 10 college based on their performance in these subjects. At one point a district may decide to offer collegiate level coursework to students. Then funding dries up and cuts need to be made. Which courses should be kept and which should be cut and how should resources be allocated is a real question. Perhaps competitive math courses or multivariate calculus should be considered an "after school extracurricular" similar to the many after school extracurricular sports programs and schools should just focus on providing basic "PE level equivalent" math.
- Der_Einzige 3y ago
  I made a whole career out of publishing NLP research based on the evidence from competitive debate. 11/10 would recommend. Debate is also the best and most robust pipeline there is to getting into law school, and good law schools at that. Model UN and mock trial don’t even hold a candle to it in rigor.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>For pure signaling reasons, taking calculus in high school has become very important for college admissions. I mean, it really depends on the school and the major. If you're taking a STEM major in college, having calculus on your resume is the equivalent of having a degree on your resume. You may not need it to succeed (I do not use calculus in my day to day job), but you can see why it makes you stand out. But sure, if you're more on a medical/law/humanities track, calculus shouldn't really matter for your admissions. It only matters in that calculus makes you understand math better, and math is one of the core subjects used by the SAT/ACT. Naturally, knowing calculus makes those tests much easier to reason about. Maybe we should revisit why Math is weighed so heavily in national tests if we feel this way about math in the curriculum. I can see the intents, but it feels like it sweeps the core problems under the rug. As usual for education.

pwthornton 3y ago

There is a way to have time to cover Calculus in high school while still taking it slower: Block scheduling. My high school shifted to it. It's like a college day where you have four longer classes instead of eight shorter ones. Courses are semester-long, not year-long. This means you can take two math classes in one year (algebra in the fall and geometry in the spring). This also enabled my high school to offer AP Calculus B, which is part-two of AP Calculus. The other advantage of this type of schedule is that it is also easier to offer other kinds of math that may be more critical to most students, such as a dedicated class on statistics.

mikepurvis 3y ago
My Toronto high school was like this, back in the early 2000s.
- anthomtb 3y ago
  My Colorado high school was also like this, same time frame.
kwhitefoot 3y ago
Eight different classes in one day? How can that work?
- gwoplock 3y ago
  When I was in high school, IIRC we did 55 minute classes with 5 minutes between classes, 4 core classes 2 or 3 electives + lunch. It doesn't work, by time you start, the class settles, late arrivals show up, homework is collected, questions asked and whatnot, there's probably only 30 mins of real instruction. Class would boil down to either teaching or worksheets but not both.
  - pwthornton 3y ago
    Yes, this is the rub, it's not very efficient. For deeper activities, block scheduling is radically superior. Hell gym is way better too!
  - kneebonian 3y ago
    So my school did block schedule of 90 minutes classes on alternating days. But I am wondering if 30 minutes of instruction is about right? I mean a lot of evidence point to people having difficulty focusing on a single thing or learning for more than 20 minutes at a time? 30 minute bite-sized lessons might be perfect.
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  Not well.

cbeach 3y ago

Algebra is fundamental to problem solving. Learning to code would have been much harder if I hadn't grasped algebra. Calculus is important for understanding science (especially physics) and statistics. These are not niche subjects for "the few weird students." They are really important to grasp for many roles in the knowledge economy. Your kids will enter a world of robotics and automation. They're going to need to use their brains if they want to succeed. I'm 100% against a dumbing down of the education system to achieve ideological leftwing aims.

flappyeagle 3y ago

The problem is that this point of view ignores reality: motivated parents will just have their children learn calculus in outside classes. The reality is for these students, "standard" middle and high school math is mind-numbingly boring. The best outcome would be that the best schools and teachers use the surplus time to teach stuff that's off-curriculum like logic, discrete math, stats, programming, etc.

lotu 3y ago
Maybe true but that won't get them a calculus credit on their transcript. > The reality is for these students, "standard" middle and high school math is mind-numbingly boring. >The best outcome would be that the best schools and teachers use the surplus time to teach stuff that's off-curriculum like logic, discrete math, stats, programming, etc. This is also true I was one of these students. My middle school did almost exactly this. They had a per algebra class that explored all sorts of random topics. We did things like clock math, and observed how these other mathematical systems did or did not observe things like the associative property. It was amazing because it made math more than just doing calculations. This class is still one of my fondest educational memories.
- mcphage 3y ago
  > This is also true I was one of these students. My middle school did almost exactly this. They had a per algebra class that explored all sorts of random topics. What textbook / textbooks did your class use for this?
- guidoism 3y ago
  As far as I can tell you don't need an official transcript from an accredited school to get into college. We are homeschooling our kids and what I've read is that homeschoolers write their own transcript, the kids themselves write it, and they describe what they've accomplished and learned during their schooling career and admission depts in colleges tend to favor these kids over traditionally schooled kids. I'm guessing that a traditionally schooled kid could just do the same. Especially since there's so much that they are probably learning outside of school. It would be a shame to ignore all of those skills and knowledge just because they weren't taught during the hours of 8 and 3, M-F.

fooker 3y ago

Students from the rest of the world learn calculus when they 15-18. It’s interesting to see how quickly America is being dumbed down by stupid policies. College level science and engineering education doesn’t make sense without a understanding of at least basic calculus.

alephnerd 3y ago
Not really. Students in other countries in the world (for this assumption India, China, Canada, UK, Germany given my experience with the following) are tracked and/or calculus is optional. We've traditionally had tracking within the US system (hence why AP and Honors classes matter) which helped filter students accordingly. The issue is our "Hail Mary" pipeline - community colleges - are unnecessarily viewed as negatively, even though they help students remediate any knowledge gaps they might have.
- fooker 3y ago
  ‘Tracked’ is doing some heavy lifting here. A vast majority of students in these countries end up learning calculus in school to keep college options open.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    Most students in these countries don't end up college track. 1. College Matriculation rates are low. Only 36% of Germans aged 25-46 have attended Tertiary Education (University as well as Vocational School) [0]. This is a similar story in the UK and Canada as well. 2. In countries like Germany and UK, college track HS admissions are competitive. Attending a Gymnasium or a uni track independent school or public school requires having a mix of high scores in grades 6-8 or competitive exams. 3. Calculus is not in the default curriculum. For example, in Canada Advanced Functions only teaches a bit of Calculus for a semester. The course is optional, only allowed at Grade 12, and sometimes isn't offered in HS. This is a similar case in the UK with "Further Maths" as an optional A-level and Germany with the Maths curriculum in Realschules. [0] - https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?primaryCountry=DEU&treshold=10&topic=EO https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?primaryCountry=...

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

> it's only a small number of unusual people who need to learn calculus Any STEM career. Finance and economics. Data science--the component they're replacing middle-school algebra with, the CMF's authors know as much about data science as about math. Californians whose parents can't afford tutors have been effective gated from these careers.

chociej 3y ago
It also depends heavily on how you define "need". Calculus changed the way I view many, many concepts and phenomena. I think we present things like calculus as dryly as possible, and only to those blessed few who we perceive as able to understand it, and in doing so, we deprive so many people of a useful new way of considering problems. Whether it ends up being critical to their chosen career seems like a really narrow and poor criterion.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  > I think we present things like calculus as dryly as possible A lot of this is because the hiring pipeline has dried up. I went to a top hs here in the Bay Area and had teachers who were very knowledgeable and invested in STEM education. Because of extremely low salaries when factoring in CoL, a replacement pipeline hasn't formed. I had 4-5 of my classmates in HS end up majoring in STEM and minoring in Education at the big 3 UCs, but all of them decided to become Data Analysts or SWEs instead because they would be provided a living wage without having to go get a masters for an additional $30-40k and/or a formal teaching credential for an additonal $12-15k. They were looking at a $150k bill just to earn $70-80k starting AT BEST in Silicon Valley.
  - cmh89 3y ago
    I have friends who are/were teachers. I can't imagine why anyone would subject themselves to that. Low pay, spoiled out of control children, their evn worse parents, active shooter drills/real active shooters, fucking TikTok. I wouldn't do that job if it paid double what I make now.

eftychis 3y ago

With that kind of thinking though we can reach logical results like: - writing prose and composition is unnecessary, as at best one will write on slack and social media; - doing pushups, calisthenics, or running is unnecessary: few jobs require that; - learning about how the government works, civics or sociology or psychology should be skipped: all these are taken care by the employer that is not going to let you go vote anyways (still don't understand how/why it is not a mandatory holiday, but what do I know); - debates should be banned: promotes arguing against cops and employers both having detrimental outcomes; - art is for the rich and private schools: poor populous should not be dreaming; I suggest -- my 2 humble cents -- the writers of this abomination take a class in logic. Unfortunately, that is math and requires fundamentals they don't want covered. P.S. My grad school anecdote: our perception and experiences as "international" grad students of the math understanding of incoming undergrads was abysmal to put it lightly. I don't want to be in any future TA shoes.

mangodrunk 3y ago
I don’t see how that is a logical conclusion. There’s such a thing as opportunity cost and interests. If someone wants to learn something, they should, but the problem is forcing those to learn something when they would rather learn something else. There are basic things that everyone should know, like reading. Instead of calculus, logic would be better, and especially probability and statistics.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  I agree. Though I loved calculus (and took it in HS and college) my brother hated math in general and forcing him to take it or other advanved math class and get a bad grade is unfair.
- tnecniv 3y ago
  Probability and stats requires calculus
  - mangodrunk 3y ago

mikepurvis 3y ago

As someone who did all of it and ended up majoring in engineering, in my opinion calc is the least practical of the senior high school math courses— geometry and data management (stats/probability) are both much more likely to be useful to normal people doing their taxes, understanding elections, fitting furniture into rooms, whatever. That said, I think calculus is helpful in the way that learning a niche programming language is helpful: it teaches you about new kinds of abstractions, how to think in a different way, and gives particular language with which to talk about that kind of thing.

AlanYx 3y ago

>This is my best guess about the line of thinking that motivates these "no advanced math" policies. You've explained the thought process of the "reformers" fairly well, but there is another additional element that's important as well: a sizeable contingent of people believe that advanced math itself is intrinsically bad or negative. Usually this is either because math is fundamentally exclusionary in some core way, or because it's somehow inextricably tied to ways in which equity-seeking populations are oppressed, or used as a tool of oppression. O'Neill's Weapons of Math Destruction is so popular in academic circles partly because it plays to this mindset. This viewpoint dovetails with some of the points you've highlighted, for example many believe that everyone is equally capable, but the reason they're not all getting competitive scores with good shots at college is because advanced math (being intrinsically negative/evil) is ruining it. So in their view it is rational to get rid of it, replacing it with something (the data science course) that's not advanced math. For these people, the goal is not to improve equity by getting everyone up to speed in advanced math. It's to bypass it.

Workaccount2 3y ago
At it's very foundation liberal ideology cracks pretty badly if "Everyone is born equally capable" is false.
- candiodari 3y ago
  But the only way to make people equal is to sabotage, sabotage and sabotage. And, of course, if parents have the means, this won't work. This is just robbing a lot of lower class kids from any chance of getting higher, just because not everyone will make it. That's stupid. Of course sabotaging kids is also slightly cheaper, and creates the need for more administrators, the ones making these decisions, to decide exactly what is "equitable".
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  I suspect that 'liberals believe "Everyone is born equally capable"' is a strawman. I hang out with pretty liberal people and no one actually believes anything like this. Interestingly, the article actually lists out a more nuanced, realistic version of this idea (with a link to research): > But whatever you think about the morality of this idea, it simply will not work. The reason is that the strong hereditarian hypothesis is wrong; practically all kids are educable, with the proper investment of resources. And we're talking about high school educational attainment here, not world-class achievement. To use a fitness analogy, not everyone has the anatomy to be a world-class deadlifter. But pretty much everybody can get to deadlifting 1x/1.5x their (healthy) bodyweight with some training.

DSMan195276 3y ago

You've gotten a whole lot of replies that seem to miss your point, but I'd say that I've experienced that exact thing - to get to Calc in your senior year you needed to have gotten on a very specific track of math courses back in middle school, and likely your parents needed to know about it to make sure you got in. Otherwise, what appeared to be a very inconsequential choice at middle school actually decided your entire math track. Getting back on the track after you get off basically doesn't happen. I definitely think we should teach more advanced math (and other) courses, but that particular way of doing it is just not very good - plenty of people who probably could have managed Calc just fine didn't get to take it, due to choices made for them years past probably by parents who didn't understand the significance. The structure and order of classes needs to be redone, which is hard. I will say though I find it funny how much people are coming to Calc's defense. I'm in software development and it's a pretty common joke how virtually inapplicable calc is to us. I'm still happy I learned it but for software development it's definitely less useful than the other advanced math you'll learn.

BeFlatXIII 3y ago
I like to call it "the math ladder" for this reason. Math is uniquely cumulative, so being shoved off the ladder prematurely precludes future advancement in a way that gaps in knowledge of the US Civil War have minimal impact on learning East Asian history.
feoren 3y ago
> it's a pretty common joke how virtually inapplicable calc is to us If you think calculus is not important to software development than you are not bothering to look. Just a few examples: - Calculus was the first math class I took that gave a clear definition of what a "function" really is. Do you use functions? - Analyzing the properties of functions to see what operations made sense to do or not (e.g. continuous vs discontinuous). - The concept of taking a function at various points and adding a small value to it to see how it changes is extremely important in sensitivity analysis and optimization. - Anything involving non-uniform probability distributions, like sampling a random number from various distributions, requires understanding the relationship of PDFs and CDFs, which is one of derivative/definite integral. This means any form of realistic simulation, any estimations of time to failure, performance of anything, etc. - Gradient descent and backpropagation in neural networks are completely opaque if you don't understand derivatives. - Most games or simulations deal with rates of change. - The concept of infinitesimals applies to finding tangents to curves, showing up in vector graphics all the time. - Anything involving elevation in GIS, analysis of water flow, even topographic maps I'm honestly sick and tired of seeing these crazy anti-learning comments like "I'm in software development and I literally never use calculus / linear algebra / type theory / lambda calculus / algorithms and data structures / boolean logic / binary trees / linked lists / stacks / queues / geometry / algebra / arithmetic" <-- then you're artificially limiting yourself and you're a much worse software developer than the ones who actually do use those things. What do you do all day, copy code from StackOverflow and hope it works? Don't discourage other people from learning just because you were too lazy: in fact that's literally what this entire post is about. You're part of the problem.

ghaff 3y ago

(A) problem is that, if you're going to start getting very specific about what math kids need to learn if they're not going into STEM, you end up with a pretty short list and you end up, in practice, with not really learning math or developing numerical intuition at all. (And let's ignore the fact that I directly used very little of what I learned in university engineering either.) When was the last time I did a geometry proof? Used trig? OK, I use some algebra now and then though probably not simultaneous equations. Not calc. But I'm pretty sure the path is not to make numerical literacy basically optional. Why know how to multiply in a world with calculators? Well... Though I wouldn't argue with more emphasis on things like basic stats and probability early on.

jonfromsf 3y ago
Everyone needs to understand probability and statistics maybe 10X better than they currently do. That should be the focus!
- guidoism 3y ago
  Yes, this! It’s crazy that we spend a decade of a person’s life forcing them to learn a skill that is so completely irrelevant to their lives and yet we ignore skills that could help them from being manipulated or forced into debt slavery. I need to come up with a better analogy, but it’s like we were still forcing our children to manipulate a cotton gin and know the ins and outs of maintaining and repairing one. I mean, I’m sure it’s interesting and now I want to look up a YouTube video about cotton gins, but do we really need to force this upon everyone? And then we decide that if you didn’t memorize how to change out the plumbus in the cotton gin perfectly then you aren’t allowed to do further study in marine biology. If I believed in conspiracy theories then I would think that Big Scary Corporations are in cahoots with The Government to keep the public from knowing how not to be manipulated and forcing them to work for low wages for their entire lives. But I don’t believe this because I think the reality is a lot more mundane and stupid. I think it’s just like the story you hear about why your mom learned to cook the ham by cutting off the end and finding out after some investigation that the only reason was because her grandmother had a small pan and we all just tend to continue doing what has sorta kinda worked without thinking about it. But in this case we can’t just make individual decisions to do something different because we’ve decided that the API between secondary school and college is an admissions test that includes certain irrelevant things that we can’t change because of history and the API between college and a job is something completely different.

Hermitian909 3y ago

This is a good analysis, but you're missing another angle: quite a few kids are not developmentally ready[0] for algebra in 8th grade but most are ready in 9th grade. By forcing kids who are not developmentally ready into algebra you generally do more harm then good (most of those kids will hate math for the rest of their lives). This problem also occurs earlier in school life with fractions. When I was in education I saw pushing students too early like this do a lot of damage that had to be cleaned up by tutors at a later date and was totally unnecessary. I even think Calculus could still be achieved by the end of high school with the right curriculum choices - you can teach a lot of calculus concepts to grace schoolers if you elide the actual mechanics of computation. Anecdotally, students who were pushed through that sort of curriculum earlier in middle school tended to breeze through high school calc. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive...

somethoughts 3y ago

I like this effort to understand/summary of the other side in good faith (even though one can believe math education is important). I think way of rationalizing it is that there are some parents that feel that orchestra, art exploration, debate, sports or <insert subject/extracurricular of choice> at the collegiate level. After all, many students excel at these and could get into an Ivy league/Big 10 college based on their performance in these subjects. At one point a district may decide to offer collegiate level coursework to students. Then funding dries up and cuts need to be made. Which courses should be kept and which should be cut and how should resources be allocated is a real question. Perhaps competitive math courses or multivariate calculus should be considered an "after school extracurricular" similar to the many after school extracurricular sports programs and schools should just focus on providing basic "PE level equivalent" math.

Der_Einzige 3y ago
I made a whole career out of publishing NLP research based on the evidence from competitive debate. 11/10 would recommend. Debate is also the best and most robust pipeline there is to getting into law school, and good law schools at that. Model UN and mock trial don’t even hold a candle to it in rigor.

johnnyanmac 3y ago

>For pure signaling reasons, taking calculus in high school has become very important for college admissions. I mean, it really depends on the school and the major. If you're taking a STEM major in college, having calculus on your resume is the equivalent of having a degree on your resume. You may not need it to succeed (I do not use calculus in my day to day job), but you can see why it makes you stand out. But sure, if you're more on a medical/law/humanities track, calculus shouldn't really matter for your admissions. It only matters in that calculus makes you understand math better, and math is one of the core subjects used by the SAT/ACT. Naturally, knowing calculus makes those tests much easier to reason about. Maybe we should revisit why Math is weighed so heavily in national tests if we feel this way about math in the curriculum. I can see the intents, but it feels like it sweeps the core problems under the rug. As usual for education.