Posted on 09/27/2022 9:25:40 AM PDT by LibWhacker
One of the things I teach my kids about math, is that people who are GOOD at math are ALWAYS looking for ways to simplify, not ways to make things more complicated.
In order to get thru college math I did every piece of home work I could get my hands on and spent 8 hours a week in the math tutoring lab but I passed and I was so proud of myself. I’d been a lousy student in high school but I proved to myself that I could get this done.
I’ve known carpenters that used geometry without ever being taught geometry. And they didn’t know they were using it.
I'll bet he did over his lifetime, just not in his specific choice of work. The things is, we may never use many of the things we learned in school, but the point of an education wasn't to remember everything you learned, it was to build a foundation of knowledge for you to continue to build on.
How many people today are scammed into believing things that are untrue simply because they don't have the educational foundation to question dubious things? Carbon dioxide is bad, mmkay? No. Carbon dioxide is life. Carbon is life. There is male, there is female, and there are abnormalities of both, but they're still base male or female. Child molesters in church or the Boy Scouts are bad, but groomers in schools are good. It's all in how the foundation is laid.
Looks like the respondents have a problem with the English language as well. How many times did they use “like” in their answers?
He’s a real keeper. I’m happy to still be friends after all these years. One of few that applied all that schooling and did something with it.
I went through elementary, middle and high school 4 times.
One time for me and again for each of my 3 kids.
Homework was IMPORTANT in our house. If the parents value education the kids have a chance. If the parents don’t, then its all up to the kid.
How stupid. Cry me a freaking river.
Some kids have bad genes. Half the people in any class are in the lower half. Lower half parents usually make lower half children. Thus it has always been. Nothing is going to change that.
Two things:
1. Let survival of the fittest take its natural course
2. Stop having more lower half of the class children.
12 Billion more to Ukraine?
Local Kid in trouble with school work, and $12 Billion to Ukraine?
What chance does this kid have?
Another generation lost.
So those students who are fortunate to have educated parents should be penalized so they will learn no more than either the students without educated parents or the stupid students.
That’s called equity.
There you go!
You use algebra every day. We all do!
Algebra is the manipulation & combination of meaningful symbols from which we form more meaningful complex symbol groups that also have meaning subject to a set of rules.
That is alphabet (symbols) builds words, words build expressions and meaning\information is conveyed.
Language with its grammar is an algebra. There are many algebras!
Money isn’t the problem, we spend way more on education per student than any other industrial country and it’s not even close.
“He would be the first to tell you that on his job he never used the algebra, geometry, chemistry, and biology he excelled at in high school.”
Had he not taken those subjects in high school it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to choose to become a doctor, engineer, pharmacist, chemist, mathematician, scientists, or any other career in the STEM fields later in life. Do you want to narrow your career choices at age 14?
Just go the Khmer Rouge route, just kill the parents, then everybody will be equal.
Oddly enough, I never had math homework as a kid. And I still took calculus in the 12th grade! So why is it MY teachers taught me math, but now they need to have the parents do it for them?
The answer is and always has been “tracking” or ability grouping in classes.
PS: Most of my teachers never met my parents, either! Yet they still managed to teach me. Maybe it was because my PARENTS taught me discipline, so my TEACHERS could focus on math? What a concept...
the authors apparently don’t understand that outcomes for children a mix of nature and nurture. America has a caste system of a very porous sort. Offspring of low IQ parents are less likely to be intelligent by nature, likely to live in poverty, likely to receive scant encouragement or resources for learning, have no educated people in their lives, etc. This leads to generations of low performers. Whodathunkit?
I’m all for trying to identify the specific things that hold kids back, and doing something about them. Something as simple as requiring the foundering, unsupported students to attend a 45 minute “homework” session after regular school, with teachers giving one on one help and encouragement would turn some lives around (especially for elementary students — older than that and the habits are likely set).
I’ve messed with kids’ heads when they couldn’t do simple math. They apparently weren’t even pressured to learn multiplication tables by rote. If 7x5 was a problem for them I’d ask them what 3+4 was. They can usually get that. So (3+4)5=15+20=35. They’ll give you a blank stare. Then you move on to integral calculus...the integral from 0 to 5 of the function f(x)=7.....
Getting good grades by studying and working hard is “acting White”.
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