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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I work in Information Technology, get paid 250K per year for the past ten years, and I have never used math beyond Algebra.  [/quote]
yikes.. it's not about using the math. It's about higher level thinking.  I'm sure you've read books in school by a bunch of old white dead men. Have you ever had reason to quote Shakespeare at work?  No, because that's not what reading those books is about.

It's amazing to me that people don't understand the purpose of higher level math.  I guess it's because a lot of people just really hate math.

-another IT person[/quote]

I'm an English Lit person, but I'll chime in here and say it's neither. I don't think students will need it because they will use it in their lives and I don't think it creates higher-level thinking in anything other than math [b](humans are very bad at transferring thinking about one topic to thinking about another topic). [/b]

I think that kids should take algebra (and beyond!) in high school because 1) the more you practice numeracy the better you get at it and that really is an important life skill 2) some kids will fall in love with math but they need to be exposed to different types of math for that to happen and 3) learning is inherently rewarding; it feels good to be able to solve math problems and play around with numbers and you can't do that if you're bad at it. [/quote]
And that's why it's important to take classes that teach more complex thinking with application.

Higher level math won't teach you better numeracy.  It teaches complex thinking.

Feeling good about solving a complex math problem is the dumbest reason to make kids take higher level math.  And I say this as a parent of a math-y kid who loves solving complex math problems (taking diffeq and discrete math as a freshman in college).[/quote]

I didn't say that higher-level numeracy teaches numeracy, lol. Obviously it doesn't. I said it gives you practice. If somebody stops at pre-algebra they are less likely to be able to do 42-37 in their heads as adults than those who stopped at Pre-calculus because they haven't had as much practice.

And we can disagree on this, but I think that giving a kid a sense of confidence in their ability to learn things and letting them experience some pleasure in learning of learning's sake is one of the best reasons for kids to go to school. The whole idea about how high school students are going to school to learn to be critical thinkers is kind of bunk (like I said, learning to think critically in one topic doesn't transfer well to others and people rarely have to think critically about the stuff they learned in high school), and most of what students learn in high school isn't going to be necessary for their future jobs.

On the other hand, the sense of personal satisfaction you get from successfully doing something difficult builds self-confidence, and wouldn't it be great if all young people had that kind of self-esteem and self-efficacy? And it's just a service to kids to give them tasks just challenging enough to trigger the reward center of their brains.

Honestly I think that's the best reason to justify making *all* kids learn a lot of things like analyzing imagery in a poem, recounting the events leading up to WWI (a lot of history is very relevant to our world today but I do think people can be excellent global citizens without knowing the name Archduke Franz Ferdinand), labeling the parts of a flower, etc. This isn't just about math. [/quote]

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