# Tag Info

87

Questions like this, or variants (from students, the notorious "when will I use this in real life") seem to be pretty common, and I'm always a little surprised, because the unstated premise - that high school is supposed to teach students things narrowly tailored to their future career - is so obviously false. It's obviously false because almost no academic ...

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Why is Mathematics a compulsory subject for high school students, especially those who are clearly studying in Humanities streams? A kid at age 14 is not ready to make irrevocable decisions that will affect them for the rest of their life. That's why we don't let them get married. I have a friend who, at age 30, decided to apply to grad school in sociology, ...

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I'm a LaTeX user, but I'll stake out a devil's advocate position against this proposal. Reasons: Quality of mathematical thinking neither causes nor results from using a certain piece of software. Tech ed belongs in tech ed. K-12 education should mainly be about enriching people's intellectual lives and creating the level of education that makes it possible ...

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TL;DR 2-semester course is not enough. Disclaimer: I write this as a computer-scientist that uses math a lot in his work (I'm a research assistant at a university). Introduction: There are three (overlapping) aspects of math in computer science: Math that is actually useful. Math that you can run into, and is generally good to know. Math that lets you ...

38

I'm really wondering if this is the end of the world or the beginning of an improvement in the way we teach math. I'll answer this first, and then talk a little bit about the rest of the question. Please excuse my bluntness. I will try to give you the opinion you ask for by weighing what I think may be most important relative to quality of math education. ...

34

I cannot answer the OP's question about cross-cultural/international perspectives, but here is a historical perspective that may be helpful. The issue here (whether the category "rectangles" includes or excludes the category "squares") is one aspect of a larger question having to do with whether the classification of quadrilaterals ...

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I just start with constant rates of change, where it's pretty blazingly obvious that the chain rule works. E.g., Jane hikes 3 kilometers in an hour, and hiking burns 70 calories per kilometer. At what rate does she burn calories? Our class is generally much more comfortable with the $f'(x)$ notation, and as a result I stayed away from the $\frac{dy}{dx}=\... 28 The OP may be interested in the controversial 2012 article by Andrew Hacker in the NYTimes: Is Algebra Necessary? Here is one reply, by Peter Flom: A reply to Andrew Hacker. His closing remarks: Is algebra necessary? In the strict sense, no. You can live without it. You can also live without art, music, literature or sports. Would you want to? And here ... 28 This is not an answer to the posed question, but only an anecdote. This semester, teaching US college students (Discrete & Computational Geometry), I prepared all my assignments in LaTeX, and made available a .zip file of the .tex, .bbl, .bib, Figure/ directory constituting the assignment. Students could submit assignment answers in any form—from ... 24 In my experience, students in sophomore or junior level math courses usually have very little trouble picking up LaTeX on their own. They typically require the following assistance: Some guidance in downloading and installing it, e.g. links to user-friendly distributions for both the Mac and the PC. I post links to my course webpage. A sample LaTeX source ... 24 It is possible to usefully mention "Lie groups (and Lie algebras)" in an introductory course, if one does not give formal definitions, but, rather, examples. It is not necessary (or advisable) to "define" smooth manifolds, which seems to have considerable baggage-of-abstraction of its own. Just give important examples, noting that they do seem to have a lot ... 22 Edit 9/5/14: It has recently come to my attention that another helpful paper is: Confrey, J. (1990). A review of the research on student conceptions in mathematics, science, and programming. Review of research in education, 3-56. Link. Though there are sure to be more technology-related errors today, you can find a late 70s article on this subject from ... 20 TL;DR: It's not the triangles that are interesting; it's the mathematical concepts that can best be explained by using one of the most primitive geometrical shapes. The reason for intensive use of triangles goes beyond knowledge about triangles per se. It's the act of and steps in proving a theorem that's important to learn at this stage - start with ... 20 I suggest you discuss the Seven bridges of Königsberg problem (the problem that essentially started the field of graph theory), then discuss the Three utilities problem. For each, discuss the problem first, then introduce the definitions, then perhaps give a sketch of a proof. The first problem allows you to introduce the concepts of vertex, edge, walk, ... 19 I've run into a few students like this. I usually try to convey a few messages. It is great that you are so interested in foundations and there is absolutely a place in math for people with this perspective. Followed by a recommendation of books suited to their interests: At a variety of levels, I might include Spivak's Calculus, an intro set theory book, ... 19 To properly understand and appreciate the different rounding rules, one really needs to have some grounding in statistics and probability theory. It is a little hard to describe the full theory in detail (the least being that I don't have a entirely coherent formulation of the theory off the top of my head), but here are some examples: Naively if we ... 19 As a first guess, I'd give the following categories: Overgeneralization of known theorems or techniques. Application of these theorems or techniques in unsuited situations. Overconfidence in intuition Making intuition into false theorems. Applying intuition where it contradicts known theorems. Nonapplication of known theorems or techniques. (Mistakes in ... 19 One angle you could look at is molecular geometry. Not really my subject area but a couple of examples: Organic molecules can have different chiralities. That means that while one is the mirror image of another you cant rotate one molecule to the other. The reasons for this are pretty deep mathematically, but chemically give rise to interesting things as ... 18 In my job, I evaluate university math courses for transfer equivalency on a regular basis. In the US, "Calculus 1" typically refers to single variable differential calculus up to the fundamental theorem of calculus. So the course includes limits, the definition of the derivative, techniques and applications of the derivative including trigonometric and ... 18 Many people think that the clientele of our public school system is the students. Others act as if the clientele were the parents of the students. Those people are wrong. The client is the citizenry of his state and nation, who need the electorate to be educated and informed, in order to secure the benefits of a well-ordered government. The question, "... 17 After reading the previous answers, I'd add logic and proofs. To reason about a program's (in)correctness is proofs, even if you don't go to the length of proving correctness formally. Many students struggle with the idea of recursion, recursively defined functions/data structures, and the related proofs by induction. More on the soft side, being able to ... 16 I'd be careful about trying to identify students for whom a math/science field is not in their future. At the college I work at, about half of our math majors do not intend to major in math or science when they arrive, but discover during their first few semesters that math is actually much more interesting than they had assumed. In the last five years, I'... 16 The appendix A in the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics seems to agree that traditional curricula put logarithms somewhere after Algebra I. CCSSM isn't a curriculum, and it doesn't suggest teaching logarithms later, it just offers "pathways" that are supposed to help districts using traditional curriculum find a way to meet the standards. I mention ... 16 I'll make some observations from a Western perspective (which may or may resonate with a Chinese student, say). Consider: Mathematics has been at the forefront of all education forever -- since long before the idea of compulsory education itself was conceived. In Classical Athens (~420 BC): More focused fields of study included mathematics, astronomy, ... 15 Through the repetitive drilling of pointless, boring, exercises many people develop a disconnect between the mathematical formalism and semantics. Many people have lost the ability to reason logically about simple mathematical entities since they don't understand them as entities. This is, in my view, a horrible situation and the biggest mistake, as in a ... 15 This is not an answer, but I share what I take to be your skepticism. I think polygons are a rich topic. For example, just understanding that every simple polygon can be triangulated would be an achievement. And it would lead to the often surprising conclusion that all$n$-gons, regardless of shape, have the same sum of internal angles:$(n-2)\cdot180^\circ\$....

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Years ago, as an undergraduate student, I experienced something close to your description of a utopian mathematics undergraduate-level curriculum at Sharif University of Technology in Iran. We didn't mind winning Fields Medal. Indeed,one did: Maryam Mirzakhani. I remember, one of the courses we had was "geometric analysis", quite uncommon as an undergraduate ...

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Kindergartners are generally at an early stage of geometric development, in which shapes are recognized by how well they resemble prototypical images, rather than by whether or not they conform to a definition. Thus, for example, the shape on the left below is likely to be recognized as a "triangle" (despite the fact that it has four sides), the shape in ...

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I don't think it should be a base skill for students in general. Have held jobs in engineering, chemistry, military, and finance and never needed it. Nor did my colleagues. Didn't need it for a thesis or science papers either. Just MS Word was fine. (I think I did enable the MSFT equation editor since it helps with typesetting sub and super scripts on ...

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