He said intelligent people.
lmfao
He said intelligent people.
I never understood why in college you are burdened to take all these classes that most of the time don't really affect your degree
If your an Engineer, of course math and all the sub classes attached to it should be taken, but why the hell is Literature 101 or Comprehensive Writing 101 necessary too?
Why on earth does a degree in Accounting require me to take electives that may not benefit the degree overall. Hey take a computer class, oh most easy ones filled up, here take Visual Basics, for what purpose does a an Accountant need VB for?, CS I get, but business management or economics?
One of my electives I took was World Geography, wanted to enjoy getting to know the world, little did I know this is a major class for people looking to get into travel industry and were confused to as why an accountant major was here
I was like damn, y'all have cliques in here?
Also Community College really is High School+
Dang this is sad. People really should know how to do algebra. We are in a time where we are going to colonize mars and we still have a vast majority of people who can't do...algebra. I think I learned algebra in 9th grade, so I'm assuming a vast amount of people didn't take it?
A complete waste of time.
This is my position on it. People in non-math majors have one math requirement for graduation, while everyone else with majors involving math would get a much harder one.
Considering that a college degree is necessary to secure a job good enough so you're not in crushing poverty, I'm not comfortable dooming people to misery because Academia has a hard on for a certain level of algebra.
The change has to start from those who teach math. Someone earlier in the thread that it's significantly easier to get lost on the steps of understanding a mathematical concept than any other subject. Someone else brought up the fact that instructors rarely, if ever, try to offer practical real world examples in which to ground what they're teaching.
Knowing how to do algebra is not important
Going through the process of learning how to do algebra is what's important.
I never understood why in college you are burdened to take all these classes that most of the time don't really affect your degree
If your an Engineer, of course math and all the sub classes attached to it should be taken, but why the hell is Literature 101 or Comprehensive Writing 101 necessary too?
Why on earth does a degree in Accounting require me to take electives that may not benefit the degree overall. Hey take a computer class, oh most easy ones filled up, here take Visual Basics, for what purpose does a an Accountant need VB for?, CS I get, but business management or economics?
One of my electives I took was World Geography, wanted to enjoy getting to know the world, little did I know this is a major class for people looking to get into travel industry and were confused to as why an accountant major was here
I was like damn, y'all have cliques in here?
Also Community College really is High School+
I never understood why in college you are burdened to take all these classes that most of the time don't really affect your degree
If you're an Engineer, of course math and all the sub classes attached to it should be taken, but why the hell is Literature 101 or Comprehensive Writing 101 necessary too?
Why on earth does a degree in Accounting require me to take electives that may not benefit the degree overall. Hey take a computer class, oh most easy ones filled up, here take Visual Basics, for what purpose does a an Accountant need VB for?, CS I get, but business management or economics?
One of my electives I took was World Geography, wanted to enjoy getting to know the world, little did I know this is a major class for people looking to get into travel industry and were confused to as why an accountant major was here
I was like damn, y'all have cliques in here?
Also Community College really is High School+
Can you blame people when it's a completely abstract problem indicative of nothing other than their willingness to engage with completely abstract problems?
Reword the whole thing into something that sounds at least vaguely relevant and I suspect you'd have a lot more people showing due respect to the problem.
A degree in a STEM field is practically a piece of paper that demonstrates your ability and willingness to engage in abstract problems, so yeah I kind of would. You can't have this sort of unhealthy hostility when faced with your own intellectual inadequacies, especially in academia.
...particularly if this is a problem solvable by sixth to seventh graders.
I'm probably alone here, but I actually love math. When I finally solved a long complicated problem, I get a sense of euphoria/endorphins released lol.
The whole "solve for X" scenario has never came up, but in the abstract form algebra has drastically helped my critical thinking and ways to analyze everyday problems.
Memorizing isn't that useful... Remember the most common 3-4, and keep the rest on a file you can handily access.My most hated class was Ordinary Differential Equations. Proofs were so incredibly complex that you weren't ever expected to use or derive them. You were just expected to memorize 50 different types of ODEs and their solutions. Really hated that class.
This is baffling to me, did you actually take a lot of math?Can't remember how to do that shit and I've got an engineering degree
Then you have a very rigid and narrow view of intelligence.Yes. This is what I tell my students. Math isn't about the specific skills you learn. It's about Establishing an underlying base structure for thinking well. I have never met an intelligent person who is bad at math.
Because higher education != job training
If you take a random sampling of any student body and ask them "Why are you going to college?" an overwhelming amount of them will probably say "to get a better job"
He's right and wrong. The problem is that people pass these classes without having gotten anything out of them, because they're not really learning how to do math. Teaching people to memorise rules is pointless. We should be teaching every one some level of math, but the quality of the teaching needs to improve. I'll also drop this here:This was the video (less than 3min) with Neil deGrasse Tyson I was talking about earlier, although he was talking about math in general not specifically algebra (although algebra is pretty much math in general).
Neil deGrasse Tyson- Why Would-be Engineers End Up English Majors
I never understood why in college you are burdened to take all these classes that most of the time don't really affect your degree
If your an Engineer, of course math and all the sub classes attached to it should be taken, but why the hell is Literature 101 or Comprehensive Writing 101 necessary too?
Why on earth does a degree in Accounting require me to take electives that may not benefit the degree overall. Hey take a computer class, oh most easy ones filled up, here take Visual Basics, for what purpose does a an Accountant need VB for?, CS I get, but business management or economics?
One of my electives I took was World Geography, wanted to enjoy getting to know the world, little did I know this is a major class for people looking to get into travel industry and were confused to as why an accountant major was here
I was like damn, y'all have cliques in here?
Also Community College really is High School+
That seems like a failing of the public school system then. As is Algebra. Most people I went to university who had any trouble with higher maths could trace that issue directly back to a lack of knowledge and practice in Algebra.
I'm a firm believer that, for almost any field, a well-rounded education is more important than being an expert in one single detail. This is a big part of why you'll see so many complaints about programming interviews. People self taught themselves programming but never bothered to learn math skills. Now they have to try and wrap their head around algorithms and they have issues. So you end up with 100 Medium posts about how shitty programming interviews are because employers would like people with some level of comprehension rather than syntax monkeys.
This is baffling to me, did you actually take a lot of math?
What if it's a big hoax and we make people smarter for nothing?
Knowing how to do algebra is not important
Going through the process of learning how to do algebra is what's important.
It absolutely is a failing of the system. I agree that a well educated population is better for society overall, but academia is still very much stuck in a mode of "university is only for the pursuit of knowledge". Ivory Tower syndrome is a real thing and many professors and departments are beholden to outdated ideals about what purpose the institution serves, and who they are serving. Last I remember reading, there is approximately 4x as many PhDs graduating as there are positions available at universities. Yet the level of professional development on how to apply those degrees outside of the university environment is sorely lacking, and in many fields looked down upon. You get people who can cure cancer but don't know how to write a grant so they end up in adjunct hell for the rest of their career.
Now, I'm not arguing that math is useless, but on the other hand, we have a lot of math majors and people who work in the physical sciences and technology fields up in this thread doing a lot of shaming. Sorry folks, but your bias is showing. Yes, it's a great tool for developing critical thinking and problem solving skills, but so is the scientific method, so is philosophy, so is law school, so is the debate team.
What good are math skills if you're a total douche to work with and can't compose a grammatically correct email? Employers consistently rank communication and teamwork skills at the top of the list of desirable traits in a new hire, along with problem solving/critical thinking.
A lot of folks are knee deep in "you're not wrong, you're just an asshole" territory, and I know very few folks who like working with assholes.
This is baffling to me, did you actually take a lot of math?
There are smart people and there are dumb people. The end. All intelligence tests have strong correlation with a general intelligence factor. The idea that people are just "smart in different ways" is an attempt to democratize intelligence so everyone can feel good.Then you have a very rigid and narrow view of intelligence.
I'm the same as him and I think I had 7 math courses total in engineering. Can't remember even basic shit anymore because I haven't used that kind of math in work life.