Colleges across the country are grappling with the same problem as academic setbacks from the pandemic follow students to campus. At many universities, engineering and biology majors are struggling to grasp fractions and exponents. More students are being placed into pre-college math, starting a semester or more behind for their majors, even if they get credit for the lower-level classes.
Colleges largely blame the disruptions of the pandemic, which had an outsize impact on math. Reading scores on the national test known as NAEP plummeted, but math scores fell further, by margins not seen in decades of testing. Other studies find that recovery has been slow.
Do you ever think a lot of people just don’t care about math because it isn’t relevant to their every day lives?
Math is kind of this thing that we patronizingly tell children is so important and force them to learn. Many of them then go home and realize math, unlike reading, doesn’t actually matter for most people past the elementary school level. It really doesn’t.
Except it does, which is why so many people are so bad with money.
I could agree with criticisms of outdated teaching methodologies or uninteresting course material, but saying math is irrelevant is totally misguided.
I said past the elementary level.
Even understanding things like compound interest don’t require you to be able to do the computation itself.
Being bad with money is a complicated subject. It goes way beyond an understanding of math, hence why there are plenty of people who are good at arithmetic but still spend like idiots.
That’s fair, on the second point, but I can only partially agree with the other.
There’s no “shortcut” to real learning (i.e. developing an intuition, understanding, etc) besides practice, the closest maybe being cleverly developing new ways to teach.
We definitely don’t need to teach those old mental math tricks anymore, but brains learn via practice (i.e. manual computation) to gain the fundamental understanding needed before using tools to skip those steps.
The only way I can imagine really not needing for normal life is if you can afford to pay someone you trust to understand it for you.
Again, beyond the elementary school level. So, how do all the poor people without higher level math skills survive?
You’re being very patronizing right now. Probably because you, personally, rely a lot of math skills that the vast majority of people somehow manage to do without.
I hope you can realize that.
It does though, understanding what interest is and how it works is pretty relevant. Understanding percentages and fractions is important for things like cooking too. Ever tried to build something without using any math? It’s everywhere, it literally describes our world in a language that allows us to predict things as well.
you have a recipe that serves 5. You only need to cook for two. That’s a fraction right there
Yeah. The vast majority of amateurs who build things don’t use advanced math. Most people don’t build anything significant at all, and that’s okay.
I get it. If you’re looking for a career that requires math, great. Learn it. Most people aren’t and don’t need it.
Math people just don’t understand this. Or they do and they don’t want to admit it.
Whatever makes them think what they learned is better than what other people learned, I guess.
And here we find the poor problem solvers in life who lack critical thinking skills.
Nice personal attack. Did you make it just cause you have no real argument?
Problem solving and critical thinking are skills developed by math education
Right. They’re also developed by many other things.
Math isn’t a requirement to develop those skills, lol.
Why is this so difficult for you to understand? I’m thinking you must be trolling at this point.