• Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Don’t they teach math in the US anymore? Or do you get a pass on basic subjects if you are on the football team?

    • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      No they definitely teach math but unfortunately math is kind of useless when they don’t teach critical thinking.

      Because then people blind themselves with their own bias and refuse to actually critically think about what they’re reading and realize that they misread it or misunderstood it.

        • Abnorc@lemm.ee
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          2 days ago

          I was lucky to go to relatively good public schools and do some extra classes as well. It’s unfortunate that a good education is locked behind being wealthy enough to live in a good area and additional instruction outside of school, sometimes. This is one of the things that shows that people are not on a level playing field in the US.

          • Sprawl@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            It’s so getting worse too as we continue to defund public education so parents are forced to send their kids to private school, or worse, home school them.

          • A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            It’s a problem non-white Americans have been talking about for a real long time now. If only we could leverage the Department of Edu- oh

    • Abnorc@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      Practice is important. People definitely learn this level of math, but not using it for years dulls the senses. On top of that, lots of people scrape through school doing the bare minimum. (Not always their fault of course. Not everyone has ample opportunity to excel in school due to a variety of things.) From what I hear, the bar for graduating high school is not incredibly high, so people like this don’t surprise me.

      • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Knowing basic math (and sometimes a bit more) is quite useful in life. I am currently having a beef with my bank who tried to cheat me out of a larger sum. But I know the correct methods and the correct rates, and, of course, the contract. And obviously, it really pisses them off that someone even does the calculations…

    • Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 days ago

      You get a pass on pretty much every subject because the school’s interested in churning out worker drones rather than thinkers. Do this long enough and you get Trump supporters.

      • Sprawl@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Heck, for a while, we insisted on passing kids no matter what so they weren’t “left behind”.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      They teach math from like 6th grade up as if every middle schooler in the land is going to grow up to be a sweater wearing chalkboard writing mathematician when they grow up. It’s taught as a series of arbitrary rules to follow. Here’s some squiggles, and now you do this to the squiggles. NO you don’t do that to the squiggles, do you want to be a ditch digger you fucking waste of sperm. You do THIS to the squiggles. Can’t you FUCKING tell the difference you little cuntpuke? You use the Crendicative property of intiplicity. No, it’s not five, it’s negative three. It’s obviously negative three, What idiot would get five? I know you got five and not some other number because this is designed to be a trick question. There’s only one point in this big long procedure that matters, if you decide correctly you get negative three, if you decide incorrectly you get five. And you got five.

      They do this to you for your entire adolescence.

        • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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          2 days ago

          I actually learned math in physics class. Because in physics class, the equations mean something. They represent a relationship between things that you can grasp. There are built-in sniff tests. You can go “Wait, the ball rolled off the table and then…started moving toward the ceiling? That’s not right, where did I…Oh I subtracted a negative number, I should have added a negative number.”

          From Kindergarten up to about middle school, they teach by practical example. “You have two apples, and you buy two more, you have four apples.” “If you have two pizzas, each cut into 8 slices, you eat 5 slices from one and 6 slices from another, how many pizzas do you have left?” That stopped entirely in middle school to be replaced with “Here are abstract rules to apply to abstract numbers, and instead of explaining why here are paragraphs of “proofs” written in a logic system we won’t teach you anything about and therefore mean nothing to you, memorize it verbatim so you can write it on the test.”

          Yeah I’m not compatible with math class as I’ve seen it taught. I can do math when it means something. Arbitrary meaningless bullshit busywork full of gotchas? Nah, I’m not doing it.

        • faythofdragons@slrpnk.net
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          2 days ago

          My third grade teacher told me that negative numbers didn’t exist because having less than zero is impossible. I think I’m justified in being bitter about my education.

      • Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 days ago

        Yeah you’re right that they act like everyone’s gonna be a pure mathematician with only abstract applications. I think test standards have kinda fucked with their expectations. I’m sorry you had bad math teachers. Many of them suck at explaining the subject and act like dicks. Get enough of them in school and it’s easy to lose interest in something that’s extremely practical to know later in life.