A. Hacker
Posted on 05/01/2016 11:46:48 AM PDT by JimSEA
Mathematician Edward Frenkel was promoting his New York Times bestseller “Love and Math.”
Social scientist Andrew Hacker, on the other hand, caught my attention immediately after the New York Times published his article arguing for the elimination of algebra from our education system. We don’t need it anymore, he claimed,. It does us far more bad than good.
Hacker is a hit now. His anti-math book, “The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions” is holding its own against “Love and Math,” despite Frenkel’s book being translated into more than a dozen languages and Frenkel’s indefatigable popularization of the power, passion, and beauty of math.
Is Hacker a doublethinking Orwellian demonizer, or does have a point?
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One of the biggest problems for math is that very few us get shown the big picture by master mentors when we’re young the way Edward Frenkel was. Demonstrating an innate talent and passion for mathematics early on, Frenkel recounts in his book how world-class mathematician Israel Gelfand took him in. Every Monday night for nearly 50 years on the 14th floor of the Moscow university building Gelfand “would welcome all undergraduates, talented graduate students and brilliant professors… These meetings, which often lasted well into the night, were more like a social event than a traditional seminar, where a speaker would go to a blackboard and talk for an hour. He [Gelfand] would walk the aisles, stop and chat with people, interrupt and ask questions, pull a member of the audience to the blackboard and ask them to repeat what had just been said or to find a mistake in it. His interest was always in the development of the next generation of mathematicians." Not surprisingly, many of Gelfand’s former students and seminar participants are now prominent mathematicians.
(Excerpt) Read more at science20.com ...
TRANSLATION: “I can’t do algebra, so nobody should be allowed to do algebra.”
Hard to even begin to imagine how training minds with algebra could be bad thing.
Maybe check out Danica Mckellar books on math.
Lets us all just be STOOPID and sit on our a$$es collecting our gummint bennies.
Sad.
I simply tell the young ‘uns that the more math they know, the less that people will be able to trick them.
I was chatting yesterday with a math teacher. She had a terrible time in grade school learning math and now she teaches it. hmmm. I remember having an aptitude. In 6th grade, I was the only one who “got” long division. Probably they don’t even teach it any more. When I say I was the only one, I’m including the teacher. It was also the only class where I experienced corporal punishment. I think that there might have been a connection. Even so I ended up maxing out my private high school’s math classes when I was a junior - trig and pre-calc. Sadly, no one encouraged me to continue with math and I quizzed out of having to take any in college.
A. Hacker
That would certainly keep the population as stupid as possible so that socialism becomes easier. And with the freed up time in school kids could learn more about socialism and homosexuality.
Algebraic methods are key to electrical engineering equations....
If you put in minimal effort and as a result don’t do well in math, it migh damage your self esteem. No kidding, that’s the Social “Scientist’s rational.
No AlGebra = No SelfConfidence for Islam
I loved math until I hit calculus. It was years before I finally figured it out on my own, and realized that my math professor sucked. Good math teachers are crucial.
Electrical engineers didn’t like mathematicians teaching partial differential equations.
Bingo. Weird how the commies think nobody should learn how to write (cursive) and do math. Gotta keep ‘em stupid, I guess. They’ve dumped civics and history, so what do they do in the schools these days now that “reading and writing and ‘rithmatic” have been thrown out?
“TRANSLATION: “I can’t do algebra, so nobody should be allowed to do algebra.”
That’s pretty much it. Let’s get rid of English too because i have to press 1 now for English..
Algebra trains the mind to think logically. Even something like “if a=b and b=c then a=c” causes headaches for the “no right or wrong, just choices” community. Theorems are anathema to their utopia.
this is idiotic algebra is the basis of going on to learning Computer logic and code the concept of a variable placeholder
I know when I was first exposed to Algebra I was completely perplexed by the concept of something like A=1.
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