my entire math life
This is basically the problem with the entire modern educational system.
Time to do unpopular opinion? Time to do unpopular opinion.
Balancing a checkbook is applied addition and subtraction, stuff of the third grade. Okay, yeah, it is a failure of the modern educational system if he hasn’t learned it by now.
Imaginary numbers interact with real numbers (1, 2, π, 1.5, etc) for complex numbers, and are useful if you want to get into engineering or science — you know, high paying jobs.
Remember Tomb Raider? How they make her turn? Quaternions, which use THREE sets of imaginary numbers.
Like how your cell phone gets reception? That requires resonance, the understanding of which can be aided by complex numbers.
And don’t even get me started in the more exotic physics like fluid dynamics or quantum mechanics. That is, the forefront of how planes fly and how computer chips work.
There’s this term, innumeracy, that is to math what illiteracy is to english. One thing that bugs me is when ignorance is paraded about, when one acts as if math is an optional knowledge. Doubly so when it’s the very thing holding them back.
The failure is not in teaching these things, but the lack of teaching about why we should care about these things.
Thank you maths side of tumblr
The failure is not in teaching these things, but the lack of teaching about why we should care about these things.
Come to think of it, that’s applicable to how a lot of subjects are taught.
But I’m afraid maths gets the worst of it, really. I mean, how often have you heard people complaining about history? Social sciences? Even chemistry, which is more specialised than maths? No, maths gets the worst of it by far, and everyone demonises it because no one ever tells them that maths is a language, and a quite difficult one at that, because it’s the language of the Universe (of god, if you will).
Not only that, but it’s also the only language that’s truly universal (we’re certain aliens will arrive at the same maths we have) and that can truly explain everything that’s in principle conceivable. Human language can describe the stuff we see, and some extrapolations we imagine; maths can describe everything that is, was, will be, has never been, and could ever be.
Everything is maths.
I completely agree with your point, though I have seen many, many people complain about history courses, both when I was in high school (soo long ago) and now on tumblr. ”Why bother remembering all these dates?” “Why bother? They’re all dead, they have no impact on me.”
Which gets back to the “teach them why they should care about these things”: the way things were are responsible for the way things are, the past shapes and molds the present. Misogyny and racism and all those other -isms didn’t just happen overnight, it took centuries to put them in place, and studying how they got put into place, and how/why they perpetuated for so long, is (I think) vital to figuring out how to tear them out of society now.
This is something I always try to keep in mind for if/when I get back into teaching. I want my students to understand that I’m not teaching them literary analysis and composition to be mean or because of the Man or something like that.
I mean, shit, the whole point of any course you take in college or in high school isn’t the course material itself. No one cares if you can recite a list of dates and figures. What they do care about is that you understand how societies function, how we got to where we are today, how to work through problems logically, how to analyze language, how to express yourself in writing, how to support your arguments, all so that you can be a functioning member of society.
And the sad thing is that even when teachers do say, “I’m teaching you this because XYZ,” you’re still going to have students being like “I’ll never use this, why don’t you teach me something useful?”
Can I be the first to say that balancing a chequebook isn’t actually a thing anymore?
Back when people still wrote cheques they’d typically jot down how much it was for and to whom they wrote it, then at the end of the month or whenever they’d see if the amount of money they made minus the amount they’d written out in cheques equaled the amount of money in the bank. It’s an archaic practice that I still see old folks do, but nobody writes cheques anymore, and you can get bank statements online.
(Source: dermit)
