Posted on 03/13/2023 1:30:37 PM PDT by grundle
Successful completion of high school calculus has long been an unofficial must-have for those seeking admission to the nation’s top colleges: The course has, for decades, served as a signal to admissions officers that a student’s coursework has been robust.
But some in education say it’s time to reconsider this de facto requirement: Many schools — particularly those serving large numbers of Black, Hispanic or low-income students — don’t offer the course. And even when they do, it’s of dubious value, they say.
“High school calculus is a complete waste of time and a form of torture,” said Alan Garfinkel, professor of integrative biology and physiology and medicine at UCLA. “The view … that math is a bunch of symbolic expressions, and you bang on them with tricks to get other symbolic expressions, is a bankrupt concept of math, dating from the 19th century.”
The course, as it’s often taught at the high school level, is inaccessible and often perceived as irrelevant to students’ interests, critics say. Just 16% of high school graduates earned credit for calculus in 2019, according to data culled by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a statistic no doubt shaped by its unavailability.
Only 52% of schools with high student of color enrollment offered the course in 2017-18 compared to 76% of schools with low student of color enrollment, according to a 2021 report from the Learning Policy Institute.
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
All you need is ganas.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A2yqIm58ULo
That's funny!
I seem to recall using it quite extensively in my profession.
We drove to the local junior college at 6:30a.m. for college Calculus, and then we drove to high school at 7:30. 1965-66.
What an idiotic idea!
When my kids complained about their math homework, with the typical, “I’m never gonna use this in real life,” excuse, I countered with this.
Higher mathematics teaches you to think abstractly. It develops synaptic connections and pathways in your mind that will give you an advantage in problem solving, textual comprehension, cognition, and thinking speed in adulthood.
The only reason I can imagine to minimize, dismiss, or eliminate mathematics is that more and more teachers have degrees in crap like Gender Studies than in classical liberal arts: mathematics, surveys of history, the sciences, and literature, ethics, rhetoric, logic, Greek, Latin, and at least one other language.
Next will be algebra.
Then multiplication and division.
Then reading and writing.
All professions must be accessible to the stupid.
Civilizational suicide.
Engineers don’t need calculus. That’s what computers are for. /S
I told my kids it was weightlifting for the brain ...
It is the ability to think abstractly and solve problems symbolically that sets us apart from apes. Such ideas have given us freedom from disease, complex construction, and the ability to fly. Anyone who doesn’t appreciate that is a moron.
I’ll leave it at that.
Don’t need calculus to carjack-—rob-—& other activities.
And when POCs don’t get jobs as engineers they can blame racism.
No calculus, no modern society. It is that simple.
It is a selector. If you don’t have the smarts to pass calculus, you will not do will in most technical or analytical majors in a rigorous school (then again, these days, how many schools are still rigorous?).
In fact, Calc is a lot older than that. And I'm sure there's many a electrical, mechanical, aerospace and many other engineers who would dispute such a silly claim of it being "bankrupt", whatever that is even supposed to mean. Someone has to make the engines run and the rockets keep from exploding on the pad. Obviously, it's isn't this biology professor.
Right. Let’s use African math instead.
‘It develops synaptic connections and pathways in your mind that will give you an advantage in problem solving, textual comprehension, cognition, and thinking speed in adulthood.’
yes, it may do all of that for a select few; it also has caught thousands of otherwise bright students in a vortex of failure, rendering any thought of academic excellence, well academic...
I failed miserably at algebra, and was thus deemed dim and shunted into the dustbin of low profile college application; my friends, in my estimation no smarter than I, passed the course and were used by my parents to shame and humiliate me...and as far as fostering abstract thought, coursework in logic and rhetoric would serve far better than distant mathmatical concepts...
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