Posted on 02/09/2024 11:05:13 AM PST by grundle
In high school the algebra "teacher" was so incompetent that another student and I taught the course.
The science wasn’t top notch, but they taught what they knew at the time. In those days, the education was taught from the point of really educating people even if what was taught wasn’t completely accurate.
I do agree with your assessment that too much might be being taught and definitely too much waste of time crap. Wokeism is taking the place of real math and science and engineering.
In regard to taking algebra in freshmen year. It was the same with me. Geometry was a sophomore subject. Not sure of logic for changing it.
That was awesome. And unsettlingly true.
Algebra was part of my 6th grade class at Rolling Valley Elementary School in Springfield, VA. It was the first year the school was open. Fall 1967. 7th grade at Washington Irving Intermediate in Fall 1968 continued the pattern with algebra. In January 1969, my family moved back to San Diego. Frankly, the math class was behind the one in VA, but the teacher, Byron Goodman, made a huge difference in my math skills. Better quality first principles made algebra, physics and chemistry classes much easier going forward.
In Việt Nam that is certainly true. There is nothing like DEI there. Very few children are unable to keep. They do not attack the teachers or each other. In the lower grades there is much recitation. Those young data banks are stuffed with data and later grades teach reasoning about the data. Here we pretty much dispense with the data input and try to teach how to think about things before most brains are developed enough for that. When they get old enough to begin o extrapolate from the data there is no data to extrapolate. They learn how to use calculators. They do not learn math. math education teaches reasoning from data and it teaches cause and effect.
What do you need algebra for to do drugs, and poop on the sidewalk?
I had to take it in high school, and a semester of it in college.
Algebra in 9th, geometry in 10th, algebra 2 in 11th, trigonometry in 12th. That was my Catholic high school in the mid to late 1980’s. Seems pretty solid.
Struggled with it myself, and had to take it twice in both high school and college in order to keep GPA in acceptable zone. Can’t say why, but it just didn’t click. IQ is (or at least was) OK, clocking in at 128 my junior year at college. Study habits a bit lazy. Curiously, enjoyed and did surprisingly well at Geometry (took intro and advanced courses), Physics, and Statistics. It was during my first week in Physics that Algebra finally made sense. I recall (literally, to this day) sitting in class and realizing “Holy Crap! Algebra is just a language for the sciences!” I would have been much better off starting with Physics (where you get to solve puzzles), and being taught Algebra in that context.
There was an interesting passage in the biography John Adams, by David McCullough, where Adams writes of teaching (home-schooling!) his son John Quincy, who was seventeen:
If you were to examine him in English and French poetry, I know not where you would find anybody his superior... He has translated Virgil's Aeneid... the whole of Sallust and Tacitus' Agricola... a great part of Horace, some of Ovid, and some of Caesar's Commentaries... besides Tully's [Cicero's] Orations...Letter from John Adams to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, former tutor to John Quincy Adams, pp. 324-325In Greek his progress has not been equal; yet has he studied morsels of Aristotle's Politics, in Plutarch's Lives, and Lucian's Dialogues, The Choice of Hercules in Xenophon, and lately he has gone through several books in Homer's Iliad.
In mathematics I hope he will pass muster. In the course of the last year... I have spent my evenings with him. We went with some accuracy through the geometry of the Preceptor, the eight books of Simpson's Euclid in Latin,.. We went through plane geometry... algebra, and the decimal fractions, arithmetical and geometrical proportions... I then attempted a sublime flight and endeavored to give him some idea of the differential method of calculations...[and] Sir Isaac Newton; but alas, it is thirty years since I thought of mathematics.
-PJ
Why not just teach basic math and leave Algebra to college level studies. You don’t need it until you get into the sciences anyway.
I had algebra in junior high (8th grade). Math each year of high school. 4 years of math in college for my BSEE degree. That all said, I think a knowledge of algebra is just about essential for anyone including those not in the sciences. I use it just about every day without even thinking “hey, this is algebra” in making basic computations.
I signed up for Spanish in my first semester of 7th grade. The class was conducted using Castilian Spanish. I was doing OK, then we moved to San Diego. Spanish was mandatory. It was the Mexican variant. The teacher was so uninvolved that he literally put his head down on the desk and napped. I didn't sign up for more Spanish.
I chose German in high school. My teacher was a native German raised in Karlsruhe, Germany. Her father was killed in WWII and her mom married a US soldier. I learned German from her and speak with a Karlsruhe dialectic accent to this day. I did take more German classes at UCSD and passed the SAT II in German as well as a live oral proficiency exam. That was required to graduate from Revelle, UCSD. I try to maintain some proficiency using Duolingo now.
Clearly, it is possible to be planted in classrooms where the material is poorly presented and you "get by" anyway. Such is the travesty of modern compulsory K-12 schooling tainted by the teacher's unions. If the teachers are really wasting your time, then get even by doing it better. Many of them are just seat warmers with no expertise beyond a general "teaching" degree.
I had two years of algebra in high school and one year of geometry. No calculus. In college I had to take one math class and the instructor chose to make it a logic class which suited me fine. I still made 740 on the GRE Math exam (which indicates they are testing high school math). Have never used any math other than arithmetic.
It was one of the few classes I learned anything practical from. Use it ALL THE TIME in real life.
College Algebra was harder than Caclulus, iirc.
We had algebra and advanced math in the 7th grade, 1972
I left the band for a chemistry class in 10th grade. I was 9 weeks into the Fall semester. My dad insisted that I dive into the chemistry text to ensure I caught up with the 9 week delay. It took 3 1/2 weeks to read the text cover-to-cover and do all of the exercises at the end of each chapter. The reward for that effort was not only an A in the chemistry class, but also being far ahead by the time I took a chemistry class at UCSD.
Holding back on learning advanced skills is not a win for the student population. You should drive them as hard as possible to tease out a distribution of ability and continue pushing the highest performers to excel. Dumbing down the curriculum to the point where everyone "passes" with a very low level of achievement is a disservice to all.
Algebra was a 9th grade high school subject for college bound kids until the 2000s as far as I know
When I was young there was algebra for the whizzes, the regulars, and the dumbs. All worked on it and made their goals.
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