Reply to Why is the math so terrible? Can parents do anything?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]When I went to college for Computer Engineering, and ground through all 3 units of Calculus, by the way the culmination was 3-d Calculus, which is really crazy hard.

You just put your head down and churned out numbers and equations, until you could do them in your sleep.

Honestly that taught me more about process and organization than if I did half the work and then wrote down some blah, blah, blah explanation.

You have to understand the theory and application to derive the original formula, but when you get down to the brass tacks of any engineering discipline it is about the numbers, and knowing how to get to the answer.

Writing a bunch of explanation about how you get the final value in the actual equation is not going to help anyone.  Sometimes it just comes down to good old fashioned hard work. [/quote]

NP here -- I have to agree with the PP who says even the hardcore techies do, in fact, have to be able to communicate what they're doing in words, and to discover the mathematic problem in the context of words.  I don't want my IT people in silos where are they think about are the numbers in isolation from the context within which we work -- and I certainly want them to be able to communicate effectively with users (frequently not very tech-savvy) to determine what the problem is and how to solve it.

As a parent, I struggle with the new curriculum too, because it's not how *I* learned math.  I was very accelerated myself and it wasn't until far too late that I understood the real-life applications for the algorithms I was learning.  What is a quadratic equation really representing?  What are you doing when you calculate an integral, and why would you ever need it?  I appreciate that my kids are breaking down the problems into parts that I might not recognize, but that it will give them a better foundation as they advance.  I see why it's not enough that my kids are getting the right answer -- which they frequently do -- they have to explain how they got there.  Could CC/2.0 be rolled out better?  Yes, absolutely.  But I get tired of reading all the doom/gloom here about how it's contributing to the downfall of Western Civilization or it's part of some master conspiracy by Starr to destroy MCPS so that illegal immigrants can take over.  Or that there is no value to teaching our kids how to solve problems in multiple ways and to explain -- in words -- how it is done.[/quote]

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