"Is Algebra Necessary?"

Drakkith

I'm with Zooby and his article on this one. I don't have anything to back my opinion up other than my own experiences, but I would expect that most people never use algebra outside of the classroom.

Absolutely. I believe that knowing basic history is essential to having a basic understanding of the world and how it works. But I dare say that learning the countries of the world or the history of the middle ages is a far cry from struggling through mathematical concepts that you will probably never use and the understanding of is far from necessary to a successful life.

zoobyshoe

That information comes from a guy who has specifically studied this:

There may be other 'educational psychologists' with dissenting opinions, but it's not the kind of assertion you can challenge without actually collecting data about what's going on in the U.S. workplace.

zoobyshoe

I'm not on the author's side about the solution, necessarily. I posted it because he highlights the problem well.

I, personally, never failed an algebra course, but I also never exceeded a B. What bothers me is that it all evaporated from my mind within a year of getting out of high school, that is: as soon as it wasn't reinforced any more. I learned algebra to pass algebra and it never had the least application to my real life. It was a weird, tedious problem solving exercise that got more and more complex without having any purpose.

Mech_Engineer

Well I guess I'm trying to make the point that there will always be a "hardest class" that some students may struggle with. I've heard this argument for calculus before and agree that lots of people don't need it, but algebra seems so fundamental to me...

Maybe instead of algebra they (we) could implement a series of "applied mathematics" courses that focuses more on real-world problems in statictics and finance and and less on understanding abstract algebraic math. Still, it seems to me that algebra has so many useful real-world examples its method of teaching doesn't have to be abstract at all...

WannabeNewton

If the argument being made is let's not teach algebra to students who have no interest in it and/or will never use it later in life then why can't I say the same thing about history or literature classes? I doubt I will ever in my life use what I have learned about the Mesopotamian era or the Ottoman empire or even the Puritans. These things many would not find essential but I find it hard to believe that people would think high school algebra is not an essential job skill for a reasonable amount of jobs. My mom is a biologist who deals mainly with immunology and there is a good amount of math that crops up in the articles she reads but should such math not be important to an aspiring biology student simply because he/she is not "interested" in it?

micromass

Right. It's not only about algebra being necessary in later life. I will concede that many people will never use math in their later life (although many people will, which is already a reason to teach it).
But that's not the point here. High school is supposed to give a general education. How can you call somebody well-educated if he never heard of Shakespeare before? How can you call somebody well-educated if he doesn't know who won the US civil war? Likewise, somebody cannot be well-educated if he never learnt to do basic algebra.
Algebra is truly one of the triumphs of human reasoning. It is truly terrible that people do not want to learn it.

Vorde

I think the problem here was highlighted by someone else when they were talking about the apprentice system. In the old days, you became an apprentice to learn the skills needed for your job, and you went to school to be taught many different things. Both aspects of those two things are combined in modern day schools.

It sort of comes down to what you expect a high school diploma to contain. Drakkith seemed to draw a distinction between math and literature (history really) and their relevance to modern day life. I see no such distinction.

If you are going to say school is about learning skills for life then I would say the curriculum should consist of Foreign Language, Engineering, Writing and Economics/Statistics. If you are going to say school is about being taught, then I would say that History, Literature, Science and Mathematics are all on equal footing with regards to their relevance.

From that equality, you can't righteously remove a course because people are struggling in it, you need to examine your way to teaching it to see whats wrong with it.


Edit: Micromass said a very similar thing in a more concise way.

zoobyshoe

If people were being barred from college based on widespread failure in History and Literature, the same question would apply to those subjects. The fact is, it's not that hard to pass History and Literature even if you have little interest in them.

WannabeNewton

I can't say this with generality but at my high school the history and literature classes were tougher than math classes simply because of the hours and hours of daily work we would receive from those classes. I loved US history but the daily multiple page written home-works would easily make my LA or DE class look like heaven on earth. It was a pretty controlled experiment at my school because both the US history teacher and the LA \ DE teacher (same one for both) were excellent; it came down to the nature of the classes. I think getting good marks on a math test would be considerably easier than pulling off consistent A's on history essays given that the math teacher is a good one. We need to have better math teachers not discard algebra from being a mandatory high school class. That would be absurd in all honesty.

zoobyshoe

This is probably true, but is it an insight you arrived at yourself, or was algebra presented to you in this enthusiastic way?

zoobyshoe

Word. I think I would have loved algebra if it had only been taught differently.

micromass

So since when is it wrong to challenge the children? Should we dumb everything down and make everything easy for them??
The fact is that algebra isn't even that hard. The children should just apply themselves and struggle through it.

micromass

My algebra teacher was very bad. I hated it. But it was important and I studied for it anyway. In the end, I'm glad I know it.

WannabeNewton

Unfortunately it would be a monumental task getting such teachers in each high school in the country or even a majority of the high schools.

Andy Resnick

Andrew Hacker is asking the wrong question. While his logic is sound, the underlying question is not "Is Algebra Necessary?", but "Should Schools Teach or Train?" Historically, professional schools (Medical, Law, Graduate science programs, etc.) trained future professionals, while K-12 and liberal-arts undergraduate programs provided a broad education. The rise of standardized testing has introduced the notion of training K-12 and undergraduate students, and as a result, increasing numbers of educators (like Professor Hacker) are rightly questioning the fundamental purpose of education- should schools provide a 'learning environment', or 'train the future workforce'?. That is the correct question to be discussed.

For an excellent critique of the current state of K-12 Mathematics 'training', Paul Lockhart's 2002 essay "Mathematician's Lament" is required reading.

D H

On my own (there was no internet in the stone age), I came up with a proof that 0.999... is 1. I showed it to my 9th grade algebra teacher. He said I was wrong. He was quite adamant. He ranked right up there in teacher quality with my 9th grade history teacher, whose main job was football coach. He made rocks look downright intelligent. At least my high school algebra teacher was smarter than a rock. But not much.

zoobyshoe

I don't think it's a matter of replacing teachers, but of getting the ones that are in place to understand what they're doing wrong and how to correct it.

However, I'm not sure anyone knows exactly what's being done wrong or what they should be doing instead. All that might be certain at this point is that there's a big problem.