In Oklahoma, the requirement usually is up to “algebra 2” - this is mostly domain and range, finding roots of polynomials, and logarithms.
IMHO, the world would be better if calculus was a required part of the high school curriculum. Like yeah, most people aren’t going to need the product rule in day to day life, but the fundamental ideas about rates of change seem like they’re something that everyone human deserves to be exposed to.
When I was in school in North Carolina, you could be on different “tracks.” Almost like a college major.
“University Prep” was for the AP kids who were going to graduate with a 5.0 GPA and half a semester of college credit. They took up through Calc 1, sometimes at the local community college, they did two extra semesters of English class (11th and 12th grade English were full year courses) and such.
“College Prep” was the “Hope you get good SAT scores” tier. A bit more room for electives, you were usually in “honors” classes, and graduated with no college credit to your name but ready to start in the fall as a Freshman at a state school. You typically took up through pre-calculus Algebra in college and Trigonometry or Calc 1 would be in your first semester of college. Two semesters of a foreign language were required, which is why I can kinda sound out French.
“College Tech Prep” was “Sew your name to your shirt because you’re going to trade school.” They had their own math classes which I think got most of the way through Algebra 1 and 2. They took shop classes, which didn’t trust the student to have ever been awake in a math class in their lives, hell I’ve gone to trade school at a community college, the first week they spent “teaching” us addition of whole numbers. Or, you were in JROTC.
“Career Prep” was the “You’re gonna be a parent before the end of high school, knock over an Advanced Auto Parts when you’re 20 and spend the rest of your life in and out of prison” tier. These were the kids that did eight semesters of PE, some of them could read.
Algebra, 1 and 2nd semester at least. calculus is too much for HS these days, when thier math skill is so low as it is. geometry as well. trig maybe you can negotiate with a COMMUNITY college. they had classes in CC where people were struggling with arithmetic.
I think statistics is far more important for people to know than calculus.
Nah, I already know the odds. Each time I lose, the chance of winning the next time goes up! Never fails!
I mean, who needs both their kidneys?
If i recall from the long long ago that was high school I think they required Algebra 2, Geometry, Calculus, and then i took Trig but it wasn’t required.
. . . the fundamental ideas about rates of change seem like they’re something that everyone human deserves to be exposed to.
People understand the idea of instantaneous speed intuitively. The trouble is giving it a rigorous mathematical foundation, and that’s what calculus does. Take away the rigor, and you can teach the basic ideas to anyone with some exposure to algebra. 6th grade, maybe earlier. It’s not particularly remarkable or even that useful for most people.
When you go into a college major that requires calculus, they tend to make you take it all over again no matter if you took it in high school or not.
Probability and statistics are far more important. We run into them constantly in daily life, and most people do not have a firm grounding in them.
I don’t think you can know when it will be useful, but you could need it 25 years after you leave school suddenly. Better to have the best foundation possible. So if there is a way, a method, that can teach the highest math to the youngest group then that’s the one I support, but I don’t know what that is myself I’ll admit
You could use that same argument for any other type of math. Boolean logic. Linear algebra. Hyperbolic geometry. You have to pick something for high school, and you should pick what’s most likely to be useful to anybody.
What do you propose we cut in favor of calc?
edit: core class, because calc is already an elective
I don’t think rates of change or approaching a limit are things that an average person would find useful. I do think that some sort of statistics should be a requirement though, especially applied statistics.
No, and while I took calc in high school, I did fantastically bad at it.
When my brother had to do some word problems for his business classes, they were talking about coming up with splitting supply chains between products I realized some uses for it.
I think there are better ways to show it’s application than “if you are filling a pool and have two hoses, one that fills at x gallons and another that fills at y. How long would it take to fill with both hoses?”
For me, if they talked about using it for drag racing and comparing the time accelerating to top speed and time at top speed to complete a quarter mile the fastest, I might have cared.
It’s certainly possible to make it easier to understand and relatable, but I’m just saying that as far as useful things to know for all students, I think calculus is at the bottom of the list. On the other hand, nearly every single person will encounter some sort of statistics in their daily lives, and it is important to know how to interpret them.
I agree. Stats, z-scores, and significance would be way more useful. If only to offset how easy it is to lie with statistics.
I feel like perhaps you don’t know enough people from the entire range of human abilities to understand why requiring calculus might be going too far.
It should certainly be an option, and it should be a requirement for certain career paths, but making it a high school graduation requirement would just unnecessarily result in more people dropping out of school.
I’m certified in special education and spent two hours of my day today teaching an adult how to do subtraction. I’ve worked with kids with Down syndrome. I entirely believe that it would be possible for 95% of students, if given the appropriate support, to learn how to take a simple derivative and have some vague understanding of what they did. It just takes visuals, good use of real world examples and metaphor, and patience.
I have family working in Special Education, most of them with kids under 12, some through early adulthood. All your points are correct. But from what I know of US Education, most schools - or schools in certain states - will not receive appropriate support and the students will ultimately be hurt for it. Think of the implementation of Common Core in the mid 2010s.
Students with proper support and encouragement can accomplish amazing feats, but most students don’t have the resources to do that on their own (or with limited support and instruction.)
Looking at the state of the US right now, calculus wouldn’t be where I’d devote my energy.
Let me ask you this, do you know how to budget?
We over provision for higher level arithmetic but don’t teach fundamental arithmetic for living successfully in our society.
We had a class called Consumer Math in High School which taught all of that stuff, like how to make a budget, buying a first car, taking out a mortgage, doing taxes. It was a remedial class for the “dumb” kids. Everyone else took the standard Pre Algebra > Algebra > Trig > Calc path. So dumb.
Budgeting and more probabilities/statistics are where I think it should be.
Both of those directly relate to improving your life.
When I got to college, I had to take two math course, which I dreaded. Because I was a music major, one of the math classes had to be Acoustics. For the other, I was terrible at Algebra, and didn’t want that dragging me down, so I chose Statistics, since I was interested in politics, and would learn about polls.
I actually liked the class a lot, and to this day I track political polls closely. But I’m not a person who just accepts raw numbers. I want to know the sample size, the margin of error, etc. I know when a candidate is cherry picking his data, or leaning on a partisan poll, etc. It’s been very helpful through my life.
BTW, it was standard procedure for every music major to procrastinate on the Acoustics class until their senior year, and we got a cool math professor who was also a pretty decent amateur trumpet player. He didn’t want to be the guy to destroy our graduation prospects in our senior year by flunking us all, so he made the class interesting and challenging but not really difficult.
I learned a LOT in that class, and later I ended up working in sales for an audiophile classical record company, and my knowledge of sound and acoustics from that class allowed me to weasel myself into an additional part-time job helping out at recording sessions, some of which went on to win Grammys.
So Statistics and Acoustics were the math that worked for me, and I posted elsewhere that Business Math is something that I have also used a LOT, but picked it all up mostly on my own. NOT ONCE, have I ever said “I wished I paid more attention in Algebra.” Those two quarters of high school Algebra might have been the two most painful quarters of my educational career.
The emphasis on advanced math at the high school level is detrimental to many people. It instills a sense of failure and stupidity early on, reinforced by parents and teachers, and often develops a sense of hatred toward those who are good at it. People who struggle with advanced math would be far better served by teaching them Business Math. First week lesson: put up a pay stub, and start figuring out all the percentages of all the withholding on that paycheck. Every kid in that class will be riveted on the screen, even the thugs, who will want to know who FICA is, and why is he taking all their money?
And fucking Excel. Better yet teach budgeting and spreadsheet courses in one.
If people had stats, budgeting and excel it would be an incredible improvement.
Budgeting also only gets you so far in our dystopian age when you need 2 full time jobs to pay rent.
Budgeting and filing taxes, please!
*And understanding credit card debt
“The most powerful force in the Universe is compound interest.”
No banking corporation wants people to understand this.
I just posted a similar take, but used a lot more words. Yours was much more succinct.
My final year of high school (not in the US) had a finance class that had recently been split off from one part of the “current events” class into it’s own thing. We were taught how to budget and handle interest, loans, taxes, savings, ect…
Also a bunch of BS about how big corpos are great and awesome because the teacher made money on the stock market.
I do think it should be a standard class everywhere though, it’s ridiculous to not teach that stuff.
I tutor high school students in math and science. They’ve all taken a budgeting class. One of my students is taking calculus and I genuinely feel he has a better understanding of it than I do!
I am glad he has the option to take calculus, he’s one that gets bored at the place other students need. But I really don’t think many students need it or can fit it in their graduation tracks.
We also need to consider how difficult algebra was for some, to the point that a lot of adults think they hate math. I like the comment in the op that Applied Calculus skills (real-world story problems) are useful, and I think that would have more impact than two-three semesters of calculus.
if he can get that far into calculus, he wouldnt be having problem with math skills. its the people struggling with aritmetic, or early algebra thats problematic. i think the early books in ALG1 and 2 and geo, are just a little to convoluted for people to learn, because its mostly abstract word problems. plus the teachers in our HS dont even teach the subject properly at all, they expect you to know how to do it already in the early 2000s. same went for chemistry, and adv algebra, just poor teaching skills at least in our school. hence why alot of hs comes out with such poor math skills.
I think he doesn’t need math tutoring. He needs someone to sit with him while he does his homework, and he needs encouragement. Our education system just marches people through to graduation without giving them the chance to breathe.
But I agree, our teachers have been struggling for decades.
I would include statistics. So much everyday information is presented using statistics, often in ways that are misleading or deceptive. A bit better understanding would make people harder to trick.
In terms of utility for the average person, statistics >>>>> calculus.
I work in an engineering field, and can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had to do an integral in the last year. But I run into glorified statistics problems virtually every day both in personal and professional situations.
Having to constantly remind people of error bars, statistical significance, and the difference between correlation and causation, it would have been nice if those things were hammered home more thoroughly in school.
In my fourth semester im Uni I could choose whether to take numerical analysis or probability theory.
Most students took numerical analysis, even if the exam typically had a 80% failure rate. (Yes, one of five successed)
It was a completely different with probability theory (Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung). Oh, having chosen it due to these reasons now I know why: The prof loved teaching and was really good at explaining.
Ultimately this shows, people have no idea about probabilities.
Edit: fixed the nunerical typo. No it was not about catholic nuns.
Especially political polling which samples a fraction of a percent of the voter population, and is consistently wrong.
In order to change the degree so that it allows studying in many universities abroad (such as Germany), this would be needed:
- functions and graphs, mostly R->R
- general analysis, continuity, function as a specific type of relation
- series, sums, limits
- derivatives
- integration
- numerical
- basic approaches and when to use which
- a few common “tricks”
- proofs: very basic direct, induction, contradiction will do
- set theory
- Vectors, limited to R³, line, plane, rotation. Very basic matrices
- introduction to imaginary numbers
- stochastics & probability
It’s based on my subjective impression of weaknesses in the few Americans studying in Germany that I know.
stochastics & probability
statistics.
If everyone understood statistics and probability, no one would gamble.
- functions and graphs, mostly R->R
I would follow the guide laid out by Lockhart’s Lament. Basically, teach math as an art.
That dream aside, I wouldn’t mind aiming at statistics as a target, instead of calc… specifically to lessen the impact of people who lie using statistics, and also demonstrate that not ALL statistics are lies.
I’m on page 3 and already sold.
If you can’t solve differential equations by the 4th grade, are you even learning?
I don’t think the question is what level math to end on, but rather how math is taught. I teach psych statistics at University and the average student does the math parts mostly fine (it’s just algebra) but their critical thinking and application of the math is usually what is sorely lacking regardless of their ending math course. And in the real world where we do everything with computers, the application is 99% what matters.
I’ve had people in middle age who dropped out in 6th grade in Mexico do better than fresh-from-US-high school calculus experienced students, and that’s not even taking into account this more recent COVID-survivors generation that feels like they skipped a year of education. It’s very… grim.
Here, stochastics and statistics are the key student filters in psychology.
Yep, critical thinking enhances all other intellectual pursuits. It is so easy to fail at the critical thinking stage and go down a blind hole pursuing something absolutely nonsensical because you didn’t check your basic assumptions.
I would want kids to learn about the Monty Hall problem, do a little Bayesian analysis, etc. I think they could learn through trying to smuggle some lies into a paper and then peer reviewing each others papers and finding the flaws. Kids are way more creative than they are given credit for and they would find ways of sneaking things through we wouldn’t ever consider. Making it adversarial would prepare them for interacting with the huxters and frauds that make up a huge amount of modern life.
The people that tell you that you will never need it are the ones too stupid to understand it.
Math is a universal language. It is the most important thing to know. Even more than the local spoken language.
I agree… Simple way of putting it is that it just makes you smarter. The same way that solving puzzles as a kid (well, at any age) makes you smarter.
Maths is really just a series of puzzles. I think people mainly despise it at school when they haven’t engaged enough with puzzles as a youngster.
