The School System/School Systems (Math Specifically)

I am a person who has had many problems with the school system of today. However, I think one of the things I have the most problems with, is math. Reason being is because Math for later grades can become pretty useless, you learn things that you forget and or things that almost no one uses. You could argue that "Well those people who do use it needed it.", but those people are few and it doesn't make up for the time lost for everyone else. However, in all this, I would be interested to see what others believe and think.

As someone who enjoys maths far more than they probably should, I never really saw it as useless. On the other hand, I know plenty of people who didn't get it or just didn't find it useful in any way. To be honest, you could say the same about most compulsory subjects, one off the top of my head being English Literature. Generally, I think it's helpful to teach maths at lower grades, but at GCSE and above (grade 9+ I believe) it might be more useful to have a compulsory course for functional maths, covering, say financial and real life applications, leaving the more theoretical applications as an option to take. That would require significant shuffling of the educational system and attitude to education as a whole, though, and in that way I would say not only maths would fall under that category.

nowtofnote said:

As someone who enjoys maths far more than they probably should, I never really saw it as useless. On the other hand, I know plenty of people who didn't get it or just didn't find it useful in any way. To be honest, you could say the same about most compulsory subjects, one off the top of my head being English Literature. Generally, I think it's helpful to teach maths at lower grades, but at GCSE and above (grade 9+ I believe) it might be more useful to have a compulsory course for functional maths, covering, say financial and real life applications, leaving the more theoretical applications as an option to take. That would require significant shuffling of the educational system and attitude to education as a whole, though, and in that way I would say not only maths would fall under that category.

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I agree for the most part. Also when I said "useless" I did mean for like higher grades yeah. However, I feel maybe more like, the 5-6thish range would be better as that's when math becomes forgetful and more or less useless for a great deal of the population. Also, I do believe math skills for things like "financial applications" would be good because that is something that will be useful for most everyone taught it. Also yeah, I agree, more than math needs to be messed with in the school system, I just wanted to see specifically for math what people thought.

World of Untold Horror said:

I agree for the most part. Also when I said "useless" I did mean for like higher grades yeah. However, I feel maybe more like, the 5-6thish range would be better as that's when math becomes forgetful and more or less useless for a great deal of the population. Also, I do believe math skills for things like "financial applications" would be good because that is something that will be useful for most everyone taught it. Also yeah, I agree, more than math needs to be messed with in the school system, I just wanted to see specifically for math what people thought.

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Yeah, I'd agree that maths is up there for things that need to be messed with. Might be curricular differences, but in our school system at least up until 9th grade we have little to no choice over what we do. I quite like this for a variety of reasons, the most relevant being that it allows people to experience subjects that they might enjoy but wouldn't want to take forward, as well as providing a solid foundation with a broad range of skills. That was my main reason for proposing a divergence then as opposed to sooner, although I can see the argument for both. Be interesting to see how different school systems deal with the issue of compulsory subjects in general, though.

I fucking despise math! Always have and always will. When I was in elementary school, I had to take resource classes for it which lead to me being in Honors for it in middle and high school (meaning that I was a grade ahead of everyone else in Math).

Math is useful mostly if you plan on going into something like IT or anything else that requires a high amount of brain power. I think it needs to be more understandable so people like me can actually like it

If we want to talk about worldwide maths, the middle stream of maths(B) is supposedly more difficult than the higher stream of maths (C) in Australia. Both streams focused on complex algebra, mapping, and imaginary numbers, etc., the only difference between the two is that the highest stream provided practical scenarios in its exams.
Only the lowest maths stream (A) teaches you anything about tax or VAT- even then to a very limited degree- whilst the non-academic maths (Prevoc) proves itself to be the most useful, solely focusing on tax, wage management, exchange rates and speed. Yet this practical maths is frowned upon by both the school and local universities, and doesn't contribute to your exit grade- it is simply a placeholder for those who didn't want to do a higher math grade.

Ultimately, people on my school were forced to do a year of bridging courses in order to get an academic score after graduation, simply because their A in Prevoc maths wasn't enough to get them recognition on all their other subjects. It's a system that fails to nurture those who aren't great at maths and ultimately shames them for choosing a path that they think is best for them.

I'm a bit biased as my day job actually involves frequent use of statistics, but that being said, I would argue that math is actually pretty useful, the problem is that math as it is taught in primary, secondary, and even post-secondary education is of a very poor quality.

Similarly, a lot of strange ideas exist regarding math that really don't survive a closer empirical examination (for example, most of us tend to believe that we are either good or bad at math, whereas a more accurate view would be that math like many other skills requires a lot of practice and embracing/learning from failure or mistakes).

In an increasingly technological world, being able to understand or use mathematics is to my mind becoming increasingly important (even for jobs that traditionally have very little to do with math). It's similar to being able to code or at least understand code. No matter what your job is, being able to put a couple of coding languages on your CV is only going to help you.

Honestly I've always been grateful that my math teacher was really really dedicated to making sure we all learned math in highschool, even if I'm happy I never have to touch a math class again in college. Math can be incredibly important, even in simple situations like budgeting and stuff. The thing is our public school system... at least in North America isn't the best. Honestly I think public schools can really just harbor a lot of resentment for subjects because of poor teaching (I do have a really big distaste for how they handle P.E. and to this day I have some resistance about actually getting exercise, but that's for another topic entirely.)

However... sometimes it can also just boil down to what you like and what you're good at. In a perfect world, even if my school was more than equipped to make sure each student properly understood the subject being taught and did the best of their ability to provide a good learning environment... I still wouldn't like math. I'd probably be better at it but I wouldn't say it would be my passion. Thinking about it, I guess more of the problem is teaching people math that's more applicable to their life than just throwing maths they might not even use if they don't peruse it further.

Math has always been something that I've hated, despite being good at it until 11th grade. There are certain branches of mathematics that are beneficial to everyone, specifically financial apps and obviously basic arithmetic skills. However, I begin to question the need of requiring students to learn calculus before they graduate (though this might just be something my school did). There are a lot of careers that have no need for higher levels of math, therefore I'm inclined to think that the required math courses need to change. I feel like teaching students things like how do to taxes and things that will apply to all people is far more important than teaching students advanced trigonometry, which may benefit a few people. Offer the advanced math lesson as separate classes instead of required courses.

ShadowCoyote0 said:

Math has always been something that I've hated, despite being good at it until 11th grade. There are certain branches of mathematics that are beneficial to everyone, specifically financial apps and obviously basic arithmetic skills. However, I begin to question the need of requiring students to learn calculus before they graduate (though this might just be something my school did). There are a lot of careers that have no need for higher levels of math, therefore I'm inclined to think that the required math courses need to change. I feel like teaching students things like how do to taxes and things that will apply to all people is far more important than teaching students advanced trigonometry, which may benefit a few people. Offer the advanced math lesson as separate classes instead of required courses.

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Yes, this was pretty much what I was getting at, if it wont be useful to most people and can't be used in everyday life more or less. Then it should not be mandatory. Things like taxes would be something that people are gonna wanna and need to know and will be used, therefore should be taught.