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Algebra
2012-12-12 12:18:49
edited 2012-12-12 12:18:49 in Meatspace
Ridi, Pagliaccio, sul tuo amore infranto!
Why the fuck do I have to learn this stupid subject? I will never need to know how to find the vertex of a parabola or anything for any reason in my life. If it wasn't for this stupid bullshit requirement, I wouldn't have to retake the two stupid bullshit classes.
Comments
Because you're young enough that people your age haven't really necessarily made a final decision on what sort of career to pursue, and if someone who didn't take Algebra decides on a career that involves math at all, that's another year in college.
Doesn't mean the people who know what they want to do should have to take it.
In any case, I might not have to retake the classes after all. My mom cheered me up by introducing me to the CLEP, which I have never heard of.
The only way to identify those people is to magically predict the future.
Or to ask them.
"Do you know what you plan to major in and what classes you want to take? Yes? Step through Door A."
That way, I don't have to take the pointless Gen Ed Classes that hold me back. Yes, part of this is my own laziness speaking, but I still find it bullshit.
Well, the thing is, at that age, most people people who think they know what they want to do are wrong.
So they shovel requirements at you. Great.
English: Why the fuck do I have to learn this stupid subject? I will never need to know how to construct a grammatically correct paragraph or anything for any reason in my life.
History: Why the fuck do I have to learn this stupid subject? I will never need to know who won World War II or anything for any reason in my life.
et cetera
^^Well, the alternative is just not teaching you anything.
The system is far, far from perfect (You should look up Ken Robinson, he provides good and eloquent insight on the subject), but you're severely underestimating the unpredictability of the future, particularly when it comes to kids and teenagers' career choices. Plus, algebra is a good (if inefficient) way to train your analytical skills and swiftness with numbers, which do have use in everyday life.
Also, and this is an opinion many will disagree with, I think it's good for early education to encompass a broad amount of subjects, even if they don't have obvious applicability, it helps develop well rounded individuals.
If schools really did only teach subjects that everyone needed, what would they teach?
I'm thinking basic math (like, up to multiplication and maybe division), and...sex ed? Anything else?
Well, the basic language skills: reading, writing, enough grammar that people will more or less understand you. That's all I got.
Though I'm pretty sure Saturn's problem is just with the fact that it's required, not that it's taught.
This I more or less agree with, though nobody is going to convince me that there's any good reason for four years of high school English to be mandatory.You learn to speak just by living, and you don't really need to be able to read and write. Those would be optional.
Given the grammar levels I see on the internet, it could be argued that it isn't enough, which is just terrifying.
Or maybe it's too much. If nothing else, I'm pretty confident that US public education serves to make students into extraordinarily poor writers (who just happen to be decent at BS-ing essays), though I suppose that's not necessarily because people aren't learning proper grammar and spelling.
Yeah but after a certain point they stop actually teaching you grammar and switch over full-time to "read novel / Shakespeare play, write essay, repeat". Which is exactly the point where it should become optional.
^In theory, the point of essays should be to improve grammar/writing.
Overall writing quality? Sure. But if you can't grasp basic grammar, it's not going to help a hell of a lot.
Math is not only useful in all walks of life -- almost any major can be understood and exercised at a far deeper level using math -- but algebra in particular is necessary to do basic financial calculations.
It's mostly a problem because the classes are terrible and set a fantastically low bar. At a respectable pace, the high school curriculum could nail writing requirements in less than two, and literature as a focused elective.
Part of the problem is that English classes teach writing and literature at the same time, and most of the literature they pick eschews typical writing structure, either by antiquity or stylistic choice. So you get tremendously mixed signals when learning basics.
As for classes everybody would need I can think of a few besides basic reading/writing skills and low level math.
- a drivers Ed class, particularly for students in rural areas
-basic emergency training
-- supplement this with basic self defense if you want
-basic finance management and organizational planning
-rudimentary food prep and nutrition knowledge
-knowledge of how to spot when people are trying to manipulate you
- base knowledge of how to use the Internet and how what you do online can affect you in the real world
-an empathy class for lack of a better word
- a crash course on etiquette for various situations
- how to read social cues
Those are all things I think that pretty much everybody needs to know to deal with the world, regardless of job or education level.
The thing about algebra is that it's one of the essential parts of maths as a versatile system. I mean, the simplest expression (not mathematical expression, mind) of algebra is x + y = z. Now you have a rule within which you can place values to find an outcome. It's essentially about the relationships between values in whichever context you're working with, so it can help you find solutions to a wide variety of problems quickly and easily. In a more physical sense, for instance, it's a significant part of trigonometry, which harnesses the two most important shapes in anything, ever -- circles and triangles.
I'm not even good at fine calculations, but knowing how and why different values relate to one-another in different contexts is a very useful piece of knowledge.
tl;dr Algebra is what makes maths useful rather than a shitshoot.
@Bee:
Agreed on all counts there.I won't get into specific complaints about the Ontario high school curriculum here (suffice it to say it's largely terrible), but English here is the only course that's mandatory all four years, and what's more the grade 12 English is almost the same fucking course as grade 11, except you read different books and your essays are a page longer.
Yeah, my English classes were basically identical from 9-12, and the writing and lit classes in college were the same but with slightly more focus and even lower bars. The 300-level technical writing I had to take for engineering was the only one in the space of those 10 years that actually buckled down and made me improve my writing in any way whatsoever.
In a good portion of those classes we were reading the same books. At least three of them covered the same Shakespeare plays, three more jumped right to the stock Greek tragedies, and two spent a good chunk of the term on Inferno and Great Gatsby.
I have no problems with English, Science, History, etc. In fact, I'm GOOD at all those subjects.
I just fucking HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE math. Seriously. There is aboslutely nothing about the subject I like, and nothing about it I ever will like. The fact that I personally have to take math classes when they do NOT pertain to me at all, is what is upsetting to me.
Agreed. The issue is when this philosphy starts creeping on tertiary education, where you're paying a lot more and your early workload is not necessarily related to your major
(Of course, Colombian education could be shit, who knows?)
(lol "could be")
Man, I would have killed to have the Inferno taught in my English class. We got the Great Gatsby, and The Things They Carried (both great), but most of the time it was stuff like the Scarlet Letter, and some of the more middling Shakespeare plays (Caesar, Romeo and Juliet).
Also, every single one of them were taught incredibly poorly.
Math pertains to everyone.
Juan says what I am trying to. Math, in college, keeps me from moving forward to the major I'm supposed to.
I hate writing essays. My program of study does not require writing essays in any of its core courses.
I still had to take an essay-writing class this semester, and will likely have to take several more in order to meet breadth requirements. I don't complain about this (well, okay, I bitch while actually working on the assignments, but I don't actually believe it shouldn't be the case) because being able to write an essay is a good skill to have, even if I hate doing it.
I think it's a damn shame that society considers mathematics so unimportant that "I shouldn't have to take math classes because I don't like it" is considered, to some degree, to be a reasonable thing to say.
Look, I want to be clear that I get it and I'm sure so does everyone else. It sucks to be held back by something irrelevant to your program of study, and it sucks to have to take a bunch of "irrelevant" courses in general (from what I understand the US system requires far more of this than the Canadian one). If your complaint was just that the course was too hard, nobody could really fault you on that without having taken the course themselves.
But instead you came from the angle that because you don't see the immediate relevance of algebra, it's stupid and a waste of time to learn it, which is frankly bullshit.
Honestly, I don't mind learning things like mathematical logic and so on. I just dislike the fact that this is not optional for me because it simply does not measure my skills as a film student.