WickedLiquid said:
danielrbischoff said:
Green_Lantern said:
Back when I was taking calc we didn't have these new fangled websites that helped with homework like this or wolfram alpha...
Thisssssssss. I took the minimum requirements for math in high school which was up to grade 11. And I barely passed by the skin of my teeth. I really could've used this website to help turn my D into a B (you were thinking I would say A? Hey I still had to take the final exam.)
Math is essential, don't get me wrong. But there's a difference between being able to figure out how much to tip your waiter and figuring out at what time the waiter will be returning to pick up his tip if he's walking at 5.5 km from the kitchen that's 20 feet away and the time now is 7:21pm and 39 seconds.
LinksOcarina said:
We need to change the math curicculum. WE need to add finance and budget management into that again.
As a Bachelor of the Arts and a mathtard, hear hear. Teach me enough math so I can make a budget, tip my server, calculate a down payment and monthly payments, not be misled by graphs, and understand why a politician is lying when he says that eliminating taxes for the wealthiest Americans will make everyone richer.
On a related note, do you guys think that there should be more math in schools? Watch literally
any TED talk about education, or read
any think piece from New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, Salon, etc. about education, and you will see the same thing:
America/The West is suffering from a brain drain and losing our technological edge over the rest of the world. Nobody wants to grow up to be an engineer. We are going to be buried by those Asian countries by the next generation. In China, Korea, and Japan they're teaching algebra to frickin' fourth graders! And look at how many engineers they churn out! That's why we gotta eliminate standardized testing and start teaching algebra to grade schoolers, and everyone will want to be an engineer and we will be on top of the game technologically and economically speaking.
Uh, no.
The reason American don't want to be engineers isn't because they aren't totally jazzed about Calc II by puberty. Its because American kids watch a zillion hours of TV every year, and whenever they turn it on, they see millionaire football players, millionaire pop stars, millionaire "real housewives," and millionaire Tony Montana and say "
That's what I want to be when I grow up."