> “Who is going to trust somebody who got a degree in airline engineering who doesn’t know how to think through a problem without a computer telling them the answer?”
Years ago when I was working in education (Canadian public schools) our school board had a conference ahead of the school year. The keynote was an inclusive-ed researcher / consultant / speaker who told an anecdote of how they had successfully lobbied for a student with a substantive intellectual disability to be registered for the high school physics courses.
Part of the anecdote was pushback from the physics head: "I've known Jake for years. Great kid. But what is he supposed to get out of physics class?"
The consultant's in-anecdote response: "what is anybody supposed to get out of physics class?"
Wild laughter and applause.
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A surprising number of people in education seem to simply not know that there is substantive and consequential content in the curriculum.
Having never really learned math, they've never really used it. Having never used it, they don't recognize its utility.
They seem to earnestly believe that it isn't an actual tool but a gatekeeping mechanism devised by autistic persons to humiliate normies.
The UCSD report shows some of the questions they asked incoming students.
39% got this right:
Round the number 374518 to the nearest 100
Find 13/16 ÷ 2.
If a=-2 and b=-3, evaluate ab² - a/b
> “Who is going to trust somebody who got a degree in airline engineering who doesn’t know how to think through a problem without a computer telling them the answer?”
I think the answer is Boeing
As long as odd college students can still do math, it's not a big problem.
Embarassing Occam's failure in the lede:
> For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment.
Good grief. No, it's just the pandemic. The kids whose middle school years got disrupted are behind on skills taught in middle school.
Can you squint and blame other things? Sure. But experimental education policies are hardly new ideas, and none of the nonsense from previous decades has shown an effect like this. If you want to show up to the game with a claim that it's some other effect, I want to see a big exposition of why it's not the obvious hypothesis at work.
It's covid, folks. And over the next 3-4 years the scores will bounce back (to much crowing in the media from whichever faction wants to claim credit). Write it down.
What if USA would stop treating education like a business - customer paid for degree, customer gets the degree no matter if customer has essential knowledge for the degree?
Maybe there are too many colleges if there's not enough qualified students. Perhaps save taxpayer money and downsize UCSD. Better have fewer, but qualified, students than load it up with people who shouldn't be there.
What happens?
It seems we have entered the Find Out phase of FAFO; which FA began with a lack of preparation in US educators in the 1960's for "New Math" which focused on conceptual understanding and abstractions, such as set theory and differential number bases. This lack of preparation, especially among primary educators (who had not themselves encountered mathematical theory in their own education) led to a regression; "Back to Basics" in the mid 1970's. Those missteps; both in educator preparedness, and in systemic regression to a rote memorization approach were substantially aggravated by reduced standards testing in the 1980's to hide the resulting weaknesses resulting from this regression.
First hand experience as a student through these epochs from the late 70's through the 80's and 90's in US academia led to thinking I was 'not good at mathematics.' For me the 'breaking point' of this pattern was the discovery that even with an undergraduate STEM degree from a PAC10 university, including 'advanced' math courses available therein, I was not sufficiently mathematically educated to qualify for enrollment in a post-graduate physics program at a leading scientific institute or to participate in advanced mathematics discourse at an international mathematics symposium.
During COVID lock-down I attempted graduate level bio-molecular studies from several tier-one US and UK online university programs and ran into proctored coursework where the educators opined that "some problems are simply intractable due to scope or complexity" and I was unwilling or unable to accept that there was no approach to solutions for these systems.
The ensuing self-directed relearning from international curricula and classical resources has remedied my misconception of inability; extended my approaches to include concepts such as p-adic bases and complex topological approaches. and shows that current cohorts of US students will need to become self empowered to learn conceptual math beyond what their educators believe achievable.
Those who do not grok math will always be in the position of being taken advantage of by those who do.
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I never understood why math is such a divisive topic and gets certain people all defensive. Why is the reaction so different from literacy? For example, I have never heard anyone say "I am not a reading person; I don't like to read." but I have head the "I am not a math person" so many times (I'd estimate 30%+ of population around me).
I think bad math teachers (educated in the education department) and bad textbooks are to blame for this collective trauma inflicted on the general populaiton... grown up adults swerving away aggressively at first mention of an formula or algebraic equation.
Chill, y'all. Some of this stuff[1] was know thousands of years ago... it would take you a few months to (re)learn all of high school math and solve all your math phobia issues. You're an adult now, you can totally handle that shit.
[1] https://minireference.com/static/conceptmaps/math_concepts.p...
Let's be clear though, there's quite a difference in doing problems related to working memory, mental computation, etc. under time constraints - usually what you get when taking standardized tests, aptitude tests, IQ tests, etc. - and solving "actual" real world math problems, like mathematical modelling, numerical methods, and what have you.
I'm sure if I walk around in the office and ask people a problem like "Car A starts driving south at time zero, with speed 30km/h. Car B is located 10 km down south and starts driving north 5 minutes later, at speed 45 km/h, at what time do they meet? You have 1 minute. Go." a bunch of them will start to sweat, and many will likely fail - even though they have graduate STEM degrees.
".....In 2020, system leaders voted to phase standardized-test scores out of admissions decisions. They argued that the tests worsened racial divides and unfairly privileged wealthy students. But SAT and ACT scores are the most reliable predictors of a student’s math ability, the report found...."
We need to redefine math as procedural logic (like imperative programming for humans).
That way, we can defend the study of mathematics as a form of discipline for the human mind that has benefits beyond the knowledge gained.
The meta-process for solving any mathematical problem is the same as any other form of project management.
Or maybe we should first try to teach kids the value of project management & then try to get them to apply those principles to math problems?
Math is the most abstract logical way of human thinking. On the other side pure art is totally on the other side. If you are an artist or similar, you don't need math. If you are a STEM professional, definitely. In between (eg health care, management, politics) it is desirable but not necessary. That simple.
They can do math?
cant do mathematic? shouldnt it be mathematics? ie "...students cant do maths anymore?"
How much mathematics is needed anyway?
In the day job, how many people have to use maths skills beyond arithmetic?
What about trigonometry?
Differential equations?
Integration and calculus?
To be honest, if I am using Boolean Logic then that might as well be 'advanced mathematics', far beyond the comprehension of non-coders. Even simple trigonometry isn't so simple to most people.
Clearly we need some people on the planet able to do more than basic arithmetic, however, what is the point in trying to teach the whole population how to do differential equations given the lack of workplace opportunities to use such knowledge?
The why question isn't explained with maths beyond the theoretical 'yep, you will earn more'. Too many maths textbooks are utterly abstract, you might as well be learning cuneiform for the amount of practical use cases.
It seems to me that the policy makers and journalists that complain about the demise of maths skills aren't doing a lot of maths themselves yet they want to force maths on the masses, as if it was good for you in a 'eat your greens' type of way.
Maths is hard and it really does not suit a lot of people. Fluency in maths is only attainable by a few, the majority that can do maths need a lot of armbands, whether that be calculators, text books or internet crib sheets. Then there is everyone else, not even floundering, just giving it a miss.
Rather than forcing the entire population to be maths geniuses, which will never happen, maths needs to be a specialist subject chosen by those that know what it can be used for, and with ambitions to take a career path where maths happens.
https://archive.is/fPJiW