Colleges use math as a bar for students to hurdle, one that might be too high for some.
It's possible to take these students and give them the math that they need, based on the job they will take after high school/college. This is a great example.
"Even in jobs that rely on so-called STEM credentials — science,
technology, engineering, math — considerable training occurs after
hiring, including the kinds of computations that will be required.
Toyota, for example, recently chose to locate a plant in a remote
Mississippi county, even though its schools are far from stellar. It
works with a nearby community college, which has tailored classes in “machine tool mathematics.”
"...But a definitive analysis by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce forecasts that in the decade ahead a mere 5 percent of entry-level workers will need to be proficient in algebra or above.
On the flip side, since elementary teaching has done away with much of the 'drill and kill' assignments, students have no basis upon which to fall back when doing algebra. I encounter high students on a daily basis in which multiplication and division are as foreign a concept as calculus. These students cannot complete an algebra problem because they never learned the basic skills. The problem is NOT algebra!
On the flip side, since elementary teaching has done away with much of the 'drill and kill' assignments, students have no basis upon which to fall back when doing algebra. I encounter high students on a daily basis in which multiplication and division are as foreign a concept as calculus. These students cannot complete an algebra problem because they never learned the basic skills. The problem is NOT algebra!
Update
There have been a few responses to the editorial in the New York Times since then. This is from a blogger for Scientific American and I think she makes a great point here:
"Mathematicians are recruited by hedge funds, consulting firms, and technology companies not because they already know how to balance portfolios, what the best corporate strategies are, or how to optimize user interfaces, but because their mathematics degrees indicate experience and acuity at problem solving (bold added). It’s easier for companies to teach someone with a strong mathematics background how to do their specific work than to teach someone who knows the company business how to solve problems. And, like it or not, algebra is one of the first places students start to learn these problem solving skills."
Let me know what you think.
There have been a few responses to the editorial in the New York Times since then. This is from a blogger for Scientific American and I think she makes a great point here:
"Mathematicians are recruited by hedge funds, consulting firms, and technology companies not because they already know how to balance portfolios, what the best corporate strategies are, or how to optimize user interfaces, but because their mathematics degrees indicate experience and acuity at problem solving (bold added). It’s easier for companies to teach someone with a strong mathematics background how to do their specific work than to teach someone who knows the company business how to solve problems. And, like it or not, algebra is one of the first places students start to learn these problem solving skills."
Update 2
One more blog post from Scientific American. It has a great quote from a Japanese educator as they made a shift away from math in the mid-1990's.
“This is extremely dangerous, and we should not just laugh at it. A similar argument led the Japanese Government to reduce elementary, junior high, and high school math education significantly during the 1990′s. In the past few years, the Government realized the mistake and is trying to reverse it. Unfortunately, a generation of children missed opportunities to get decent education in mathematics, and I am afraid that its negative effects will be felt for many years to come.” (Ooguri graciously granted permission to quote him).
He is referring to the yutori kyoiku (“room to grow”)
educational policy that dramatically altered the elementary, junior high
and high school curricula in Japan. It sounds great on paper: convinced
that traditional rote memorization is insufficient in a 21st century
world, Japanese students now were encouraged to develop individuality
and initiative, and foster critical thinking and problem solving. The
number of classroom hours was reduced, and so was the amount of required
math. “Japanese had good basic study skills, so the idea was to add the
more individualistic things that westerners have on top of that,”
psychologist and author Hideki Wada told the Financial Times."