Posted on 03/13/2023 1:30:37 PM PDT by grundle
I D I O C R A C Y
more than it was
cracked up to be
I took it in high school, but dropped it midway. Retrospectively, I’ve come to think that math at the secondary school level isn’t taught particularly well, or at least didn’t use to be. And I grew up in an upper middle class suburb. In less affluent places, it’s no wonder that most kids don’t do all that well with it. I remember a great many of the very smart kids in my algebra, geometry, pre-calculus and calculus classes also struggled to follow and learn the material.
Nevertheless, I’ve had a strong interest in math, reading about it quite a bit over the years, and recently read one of the “Dummies” books on calculus. It was very well-written, and I feel like I learned a lot from it. If I’d had that book back in high school, I think I would have completed the class with a good grade.
“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.”
You are absolutely correct.
Leibnitz fans differ in that!
Garfinkel is an idiot, of course.
Can’t calculate infusion rates without understanding the partial pressures first. That’s differential equations, and highly dependent on Calculus. You can either understand how that’s done and then build trust in the tools, or think it is magic and trust the black box.
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