I can hardly wait for young graduating engineers who cannot do math.
They will design future bridges, buildings, ships, vehicles, submarines and airliners only a fool would accept as safe.
The “new math” is NO MATH.
America is a country heading for widespread Darwin awards and its own destruction.
You don’t learn algebra in order to do math. You learn algebra in order to learn how to think when solving a problem. That is why the leftists want to dumb down the college program and take out the algebra, because people who think do not become leftists, and if they do they don’t stay there for long.
Leftists love Plato: they want to be the Guardians, with the rest of us stuck in the cave, watching the entertaining shadows and working our a$$es off so they can be rich. There are only two antidotes: Aristotle (or Confucius) and Jesus. It’s no accident that Aquinas tried putting the Aristotle and Jesus together in his Summa Teologica, or in Momoyama era Japan Takayama Ukon tried putting Confucius and Jesus together in his practice of chanoyu.
I don’t suppose it’s occurred to them to require students to rise to the standard...
My college math professors would rip anyone that failed tests. Their favorite slam was asking if their major was hotel/motel/ restuarant management!
(X - Y)/X = graduation rate
Where X is enrolled students
Y is students failing math
that's all this country needs...more comm and poly sci and sociology majors......
It is a proven fact that people are naturally split between those who grasp “abstracts” in their brains, and those who do not, and cannot. For the former group, things like more complex maths and even sheet music are only normally hard; but for the latter group, they are just not mentally ‘wired’ to understand them. It is likely a genetic difference, and one or both mental wiring can happen even in the same family.
So trying to “beat” the understanding of abstracts into those not wired for them is just painful and cruel to them.
A good comparison are those people who have the gene that makes cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli, taste horribly bitter to them. You cannot force them to like or appreciate such vegetables, even if they are made to eat some with every meal. G.H.W. Bush is one of them, and whether or not you like his politics, he was so traumatized by being forced to eat broccoli that he eventually banned it from the White House menu.
So what about requiring success in Algebra or Calculus in school to even graduate? It is just fine for those students who have the wiring for abstracts, but for those who don’t, though they might learn an instrument and music “by ear”, setting them down with sheet music they don’t know and asking them to read it and play it won’t work either.
Ironically, they might play their instrument very well, and there have been several top musicians who were blind, but they still can’t read the abstract of sheet music.
As someone who always had a hard time with math, it seems to me that for the people who are likely to have careers in math and science, higher math is at least do-able, if not easy. And for the rest of us, algebra and calculus are simply useless in real life, so why make us suffer? At 71, I can’t think of a single time when I wished I’d taken calculus in college.
Meanwhile, my son - who graduated from MIT with a degree in Chemical Engineering - was doing calculus in grade school and it was a piece of cake for him (a good thing, as I was no help at all...)
I think brains are just different, and we tend to gravitate toward subjects and careers that align with our innate abilities.
Kansas is supposedly a solid red state, but it’s mostly a RINO state.
I couldn’t get into the pre med Calculus with my schedule. So, I thought I’d take a second year engineering calculus that I could use for the calculus requirement. I got out with a “C” and was damn proud I got that. Most of the engineering students in the class handled it well but there were some having a harder time than I with it.