Saturday, July 28, 2012

Off topic - Is algebra necessary?

This editorial by Andrew Hacker written for the New York Times has sparked something that I have wondered over the last few years. It seems as though we push algebra even into the elementary levels before students are ready. Plus we force many of our students to take math that they will never even remotely use in their adult life. I'm not against adding rigor for our students, but shouldn't it be appropriate for the student?

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. 

"...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! 

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." 

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).
 
Let me know what you think.

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