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[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 (humans are very bad at transferring thinking about one topic to thinking about another topic).

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]

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