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Contrary to widely-held opinion, taking high school calculus isn't necessary for success later in college calculus—what's more important is mastering the prerequisites, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry—that lead to calculus. That's according to a study of more than 6,000 college freshmen at 133 colleges carried out by the Science Education Department of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, led by Sadler, the Frances W. Wright Senior Lecturer on Astronomy, and by Sonnert, a Research Associate.In addition, the survey finds that weaker math students who choose to take calculus in high school actually get the most benefit from the class. The study is described in a May 2018 paper published in the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education.
"We study the transition from high school to college, and on one side of that there are college professors who say calculus is really a college subject, but on the other side there are high school teachers who say calculus is really helpful for their students, and the ones who want to be scientists and engineers get a lot out of it," Sadler said. "We wanted to see if we could settle that argument—which is more important, the math that prepares you for calculus or a first run-through when you're in high school followed by a more serious course in college?"
The study's results, Sadler said, provided a clear answer -a firmer grip on the subjects that led up to calculus had twice the impact of taking the subject in high school. And of those who did take calculus in high school, it was the weakest students who got the most from the class.
To get those findings, Sadler and Sonnert, designed a study that asked thousands of college freshmen to report not only demographic information, but their educational history, background and mathematics training.
https://phys.org/news/2018-07-mastering-prerequisitesnot-calculus-high-schoolbetter.html
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @07:46PM (7 children)
Young
menminds need to know that they're working on something demonstrably useful. All teaching should be about solving some actual problem.Pure mathematics should be something left to be pursued by those few
menminds who can perceive its importance without encouragement.(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday August 09 2018, @08:15PM (6 children)
I can genuinely say I've made use of all the math I studied in both high school and college in my post-academic life. Yes, I work in software, so math is more likely to come up in my profession than, say, marketing, but it has real applications.
For instance, to make geometry into applied math, just do anything related to construction.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @08:22PM (5 children)
That's the point.
Also, either your sector of programming is quite niche or your studies of mathematics weren't as advanced as you seem to think; most programmers never touch mathematical thinking beyond basic "business logic".
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday August 09 2018, @08:51PM (4 children)
The extent of my math education was mid-level undergraduate and a fairly prestigious college (USA Today top 25 in its group). Of those courses:
Calculus doesn't come up all that often, but is involved in some analytical contexts where you need to track rates and totals of variable things. Linear algebra comes up when maximizing one variable in the face of a bunch of others that affect it, e.g. trying to maximize server throughput while minimizing the number of servers, the electricity to supply them, and the cabling to hook them all together. Discrete mathematics is heavily connected to programming, to the point where much of CS can be described as "applied discrete mathematics". And set theory is vital for understanding databases, which even the most code-monkey of code-monkeys has to be able to handle.
You still think math is useless?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @09:02PM
Also, I doubt you approached any of those computing problems in the way that a student of mathematics or even computer science would. I suspect you basically looked around for software or formulas or excel sheets or StackOverflow posts, etc., that gave you readily applicable (and perhaps parameterizable) solutions that you could just crank, thinking all the while "Yeah, I kind of remember stuff about this. Thank goodness I did me some learning."
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @09:49PM
Also, I doubt you approached any of those computing problems in the way that a student of mathematics or even computer science would. I suspect you basically looked around for software or formulas or excel sheets or StackOverflow posts, etc., that gave you readily applicable (and perhaps parameterizable) solutions that you could just crank, thinking all the while "Yeah, I kind of remember stuff about this. Thank goodness I did me some learning."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @12:06AM
Also, I doubt you approached any of those computing problems in the way that a student of mathematics or even computer science would. I suspect you basically looked around for software or formulas or excel sheets or StackOverflow posts, etc., that gave you readily applicable (and perhaps parameterizable) solutions that you could just crank, thinking all the while "Yeah, I kind of remember stuff about this. Thank goodness I did me some learning."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @01:21AM
He didn't say that math is useless, only that schools teach it very poorly by not having students solve real, practical problems.