Rant about the stupid things I’ve heard about Math this week * **
“We don’t care if they learn algebra, we just care if they can think.”
NO, NO, NO, NO, NO! Don’t get me wrong, thinking is awesome. Thinking is what everyone should be doing. But if you leave an algebra class and pass it and you haven’t learned any algebra, you certainly didn’t get your money’s worth. Second, you probably don’t know how to think.
What do I mean? There are two fundamental tools that civilization is built on, Math and Language. Everything else we do uses these two fundamental tools and combines them and builds on them. We wonder why America is in the toilet? Simple, most people in this country can’t do algebra and can’t express themselves coherently. If you look at the average adult, they are working at an Elementary or Middle School level. This is wrong. You want to know why we don’t have hover cars and personal jet packs? We don’t care enough about education to produce the people would make them. Why are we dependent on fossil fuels? Because the people educated enough to solve the problem are so few and far between that they are spread too thin on too many problems.
This is like saying to someone “paint a masterpiece” and not only have you not given them a canvas or pain or a paint brush, but they don’t know the meaning of the words paint or masterpiece.
This isn’t going to be fixed by politicians (that is another rant for another time). It is going to be fixed by parents who demand that their kids get a better education. It is going to be fixed by employers supporting and encouraging their employees to get a better education, realizing that this will vastly improve their quality of work. This is going to be fixed by neighbors realizing that the parents of the kids down the street are working with a fourth grade education and stepping in and advocating for those kids along with their own. It is all of us trying to make ourselves better and trying to help the people around us. WE DON’T VALUE EDUCATION. We need to start.
To say that we are only interested in if you can think is bull shit. We are selling you short, we are selling us short, and it is no wonder that we are seriously sucking as a nation and we can’t compete. You need math and language to be able to think.
“Math is like a pyramid with Calculus at the top.”
WTF? You are leaving out at least half of mathematics. I’ll give you hour glass with Calculus in the middle. New and awesome things aren’t happening in algebra (that isn’t entirely true, but it is pretty true), they are happening in math most people haven’t even heard of. To say Calculus is the top is selling everyone short. Calculus is from Newton’s time, are we saying that we haven’t advanced since Newton? Dude, we suck! We don’t deserve to be a superpower.
Final thoughts: This nation doesn’t need the barbarian hordes to come conquer us, we are doing just fine on our own. We are producing mediocre and sub-mediocre workers and rewarding them. We are saying, it is okay if you don’t understand what you are doing. We let the computer do it for us. We believe politicians and corporations when they tell us things because we don’t have the tools to judge for ourselves.
Also, this is after one day of meetings with administrators. I have two more days to go. I anticipate this list will get much longer.
*Note: This rant is about the system, not the individual. If some of this applies to you, I’m not talking about you specifically.
*Note 2: These are the views of me, myself, and I. The do not reflect the opinions of the institution.
