What’s wrong with this picture?
You, uh, “teach” algebra by giving each student in your junior high school class a little workbook. They’re supposed to work out the problems in their notebooks and hand in the answers.
Each workbook has a plastic slide on the right-hand half of the page, concealing the answers to the questions. This is where it gets rather silly.
All we had to do was slide the plastic sheet and copy the correct answers into our notebooks. Voila! We all got A’s! Ain’t we smart!
I racked up A’s because I wasn’t strong or mature enough to resist the temptation. This landed me in Advanced Math in high school, where I paid for my sins. End result: I didn’t learn any higher math at all.
Look to the top of this page. That’s a basic algebra problem. I can do them now; but I couldn’t do them in high school, I was hopeless. I learned NOTHING by cheating.
But the “educators” should have foreseen this problem, and planned accordingly. They shouldn’t have made it so easy to cheat.
Our educational system, in its efforts to make everyone exactly the same as everyone else, has reduced what they call teaching into something more along the lines of memorizing just enough to come up with the right answers for the Final, and no more.
I was forced to take a second language, in 7th and 8th grade, and like most everyone else who wasn’t really into learning a second language, I took Spanish, and we memorized some strict Castilian, which bears about as much resemblance to the everyday Spanish one might hear in these parts as the formal English of the Royal Family would bear to the vernacular English one would hear in West Texas. In other words, what tiny amount of these classes I remember, is all but useless, although I could order green chile tamales and beer, or find a restroom in Spanish, but only with great effort.
Algebra teaching strikes me as making little sense at all. At its very root, algebra is simply the logic of problem solving; literally the art of reduction and cancellation. I frustrated math teachers and turned their faces red, because I couldn’t show my work. The answers were obvious, and intuitive.
I’ve come to the conclusion that algebra is taught the way it is taught, because somewhere along the line, a decision was made that everyone needed to pass algebra, so, as with any business, they simply changed their method of operation to make this possible. Algebra, broken into nice little bite-sized, easy to memorize chunks, and the school can boast about how many algebraists they produce, when in fact they are likely hindering the very people who will actually use this in their lives.
I deal in some engineering math, mostly learned in my aviation studies, and it informs all that I do. The head of the Finance department, where I used to work was a highly skilled accountant. When he and I worked on my budget spreadsheet, every year, the difference in how we approached the math was significant, and even somewhat humorous. He had lengthy calculations and I would reduce my calculations to very small, succinct formulae. Both of us were “good at math”, but in very different ways.
The crux of this comes down to why the math was learned, and how it is to be used. In aviation, and in my current career, we deal in square roots, cube roots, logarithms and Pi likes to show up, here and there. The motive to learn this was simple, I wanted to be able to fly an airplane, and had to understand these things. It was fun to learn, because it had a real world application.
An accountant has to learn what to measure, but once the measuring is done, the math stays simple: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division cover a lot of ground.
So as I see it, the real question come down to; who needs to know what? The various math classes I took tended to be gadflies which annoyed me, until I saw how they applied in aviation, at which time, I couldn’t get enough. For many people, higher math will never be a part of their day to day life, and while I strongly believe that everyone needs basic math skills, not everyone needs higher math.
While I am a critic of the education system, as wasn’t particularly impressed with it in even my younger years, I do believe in education, but I believe that education has to fit the individual and the plans/needs of that individual. Instead of an education system based upon the assembly line model, it strikes me that people need to adapt to new circumstances and update their education over the course of their lives. It can no longer be a simple, one size fits all package.
I believe the ruling purpose of today’s public education is to enrich teachers’ unions and train voters for the Democrat Party.
The same with our Walmart Supercenters – they make it so easy to steal.
When I was taking grade 10 physics, we had a test. I got 10%. I looked over my answered and as far as I could tell, I did the equations right, but got the wrong answers. So I went to the teacher and asked him to explain where I went wrong. I have no memory of his explanation, other than I left still not knowing what I did wrong.
Years later, while considering taking a college course (Canadian college, which is more technical school), I had to take a physics test, since it had been so many years since I’d graduated high school, along with a dozen or so others. This test was completely different than anything we covered in physics class, and far more real world, rather than abstract equations.
I got 94%. When the guy running the test gave me my test score, he told me almost nobody got a score that high on their physics test.
Clearly, what we were taught in school would have done absolutely nothing for me had I gone on to “higher” education.