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I hated math until I got to calculus. I never knew why, but I might as well quite this mathematician... They took an exciting topic that interested me as a yo

I hated math until I got to calculus. I never knew why, but I might as well quite this mathematician... They took an exciting topic that interested me as a youth and killed it with rote repetition. The question I struggle with is... How do you really get by without math as a mandatory topic? How can you teach science? How can you teach someone to balance a checkbook? The current system is awful, but do we push the subject to electives as a result?

saraid216 13y ago
This is one of my current problems in curriculum design. I agree fully with Lockhart, and I strongly feel that requiring math is a mistake. But at the same time, you do need significant math skills in order to appreciate science with any meaningful depth, and I feel that science is a requirement. The proper next step, it seems to me, is to figure out what bits of science we really want to teach and then figure out how to explain math through that. > How can you teach someone to balance a checkbook? Outside of America, no one uses checkbooks anymore. There's no reason to use exact change for tipping, either: just estimate a percentage and then round up. Or splitting the bill: the servers virtually always have a calculator at their disposal.
ef4 13y ago
> The question I struggle with is... How do you really get by without math as a mandatory topic? That's the wrong question, because "mandatory learning" is a contradiction in terms. It very clearly doesn't work. Beyond the most primitive pavlovian conditioning, you can't force people to learn if they don't want to. Intrinsic motivation is the dominating factor in how well a person can master an intellectually demanding task. The right question is, how do you inspire people to want to learn?
- mathattack 13y ago
  True enough. And that's a tough question too. I waited from 4th grade to calculus to get inspired again. And then I think it was the material more than the teaching method.

saraid216 13y ago

This is one of my current problems in curriculum design. I agree fully with Lockhart, and I strongly feel that requiring math is a mistake. But at the same time, you do need significant math skills in order to appreciate science with any meaningful depth, and I feel that science is a requirement. The proper next step, it seems to me, is to figure out what bits of science we really want to teach and then figure out how to explain math through that. > How can you teach someone to balance a checkbook? Outside of America, no one uses checkbooks anymore. There's no reason to use exact change for tipping, either: just estimate a percentage and then round up. Or splitting the bill: the servers virtually always have a calculator at their disposal.

ef4 13y ago

> The question I struggle with is... How do you really get by without math as a mandatory topic? That's the wrong question, because "mandatory learning" is a contradiction in terms. It very clearly doesn't work. Beyond the most primitive pavlovian conditioning, you can't force people to learn if they don't want to. Intrinsic motivation is the dominating factor in how well a person can master an intellectually demanding task. The right question is, how do you inspire people to want to learn?

mathattack 13y ago
True enough. And that's a tough question too. I waited from 4th grade to calculus to get inspired again. And then I think it was the material more than the teaching method.