Is Calculus Too Much for HS? - Geeks vs. Mathophobes

Parent Cafe
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<p>Some of us have been discussing how worthwhile it is to teach calculus in HS and if colleges are overrelying upon it for admissions and what not.</p>

<p>Let me say up front that I am an actuary and have degrees in Math and Sociology, so consider me a geek for purpose of this discussion. </p>

<p>I am in favor of immersing kids in as much math as they can handle. For one thing, higher math does have many real-world applications and with computers so much more powerful these days, the number of those applications is increasing. Second, higher math requires a certain type of thinking that is really useful in so many ways. It may not be important that you know how to intergrate by parts but the process of learning it and doing it has benefits in and of itself.</p>

<p>It saddens me to see students holding themselves back or, worse, parents holding themsevles back so they can avoid HS Calc. A parent we know is afraid that her D would have had to cut back on her athletics in order to put more study ttime for he “harder” math. She sees sports as the more likely source for scholarship money even though the girl is good math student. Other kids pull back from the higher math in order to keep their GPAs up.</p>

<p>I am also a bit put off by people who seem to brag that they don’t understand math and aren’t “numbers people”. Ever go to a gathering and have some say “Gee, I can’t write a decent paragraph to save my life; guess I’m not a “words” person.” and have the other people in the conversation say “yeah, me too, I can’t write worth squat”. Why is it OK for people to be ignorant about math?</p>

<p>Am I off base here?</p>

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<p>Dadguy, I don’t see much difference if you take calculus in high school or in college. People are in such a rush. Our kids are probably going to live to a hundred, so waiting to take calculus in college doesn’t seem like a big deal to me.</p>

<p>If a person wants to take as many math classes as possible in high school, that’s fine too.</p>

<p>How do you like being an actuary? My daughter is a math major and I have told her to look at that field. She loves the study of probability.</p>

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<p>DStark, my D says the opposite: they don’t bring kids along in Math fast enough, young enough. So much of K-8 Math is dull slow repetition. No reason to not let those who can go faster…of course, anti-tracking forces would be up in arms about this. I don’t see what the big deal is…some kids learn to read at different rates, some grasp Math at different rates.</p>

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<p>Thedad, I added another paragraph. :)</p>

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<p>But is CALCULAS the only way? That very narrow subject, is it the only way of teaching </p>

<p>I aced all my math in HS…with basically a 97% average for four years…so I get Math…I like Math</p>

<p>But the colleges depending SOOOO much on one class is very sad to me</p>

<p>There is a big difference being ignorant about math, and not taking 2 years of Calc in HS…a HUGE differnence</p>

<p>I am going to find some Logic puzzles for you and you tellme if they don’t make you think…and some links to math discussions, that while one doesn’t have to memoraize formulas, your head will hurt…</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.qbyte.org/puzzles/puzzle01.html[/url]”>http://www.qbyte.org/puzzles/puzzle01.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>A sequence of integers is defined by</p>

<p>a0 = p, where p > 0 is a prime number,
an+1 = 2an + 1, for n = 0, 1, 2, … .</p>

<p>Is there a value of p such that the sequence consists entirely of prime numbers?</p>

<p>Two players play the following game with a fair coin. Player 1 chooses (and announces) a triplet (HHH, HHT, HTH, HTT, THH, THT, TTH, or TTT) that might result from three successive tosses of the coin. Player 2 then chooses a different triplet. The players toss the coin until one of the two named triplets appears. The triplets may appear in any three consecutive tosses: (1st, 2nd, 3rd), (2nd, 3rd, 4th), and so on. The winner is the player whose triplet appears first.</p>

<p>What is the optimal strategy for each player? With best play, who is most likely to win?
Suppose the triplets were chosen in secret? What then would be the optimal strategy?
What would be the optimal strategy against a randomly selected triplet?</p>

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<p>Being an actuary has been fulfilling. It requires an examination process in addition to college so there is extra work involved there. Assuming you are in the U.S. contact the Society of Actuaries i(SOA) n IL or the Casualty Acturial Society (CAS) in VA about the accrediation (sp?) process. Virtually everyone finishes their exams while working, so it’s sort of like a graduate program that way. It takes several years to complete.</p>

<p>I’m a property casualty actuary, so I belong to the CAS. I work onworkers compensation, professionial laibility, asbestos liability issues, etc. Other acturies with the SOA specialize in health insurance, life insurance or employee benefits, including pension and Social Security issues. The market is very good for someone with just a few years under their belt and shows professional growth.</p>

<p>It may interest your D to know that some schools are currently having a tough time hiring PhDs as lecturers in the probability-statistics field. The job market is red hot for those folks right now.</p>

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<p><a href=“http://perplexus.info/[/url]”>http://perplexus.info/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Colleges don’t solely depend on calculus. Geez, where’d you get that idea? Hundreds and hundreds of colleges aren’t even competitive, and the very top schools expect to see people well-versed in a number of areas, including math. The kids I’ve known who have gotten into top schools have gone up through the AP level in a number of areas - math, foreign language, literature - and it’s not that hard.</p>

<p>Oh, on a side note: It’s calculUS, not calculAS.</p>

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<p>Dadguy, thanks.</p>

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<p>I have one math kid and one not, and I’d like to argue for keeping calculus in the high school curriculum for this reason: while public schools have difficulty agreeing on what kids should get out of English classes and even history, there is much more agreement on math. Therefore, when my daughter took calc AB, it was her one really rigorous class and, when she scored well on the AP exam, it gave her a true sense of accomplishment and mastery that she didn’t get out of any other class, most of which she glided through and was bored by. </p>

<p>Back in the dark ages, I didn’t even get as far as trigonometry. In those days, we took two languages instead. I regret it. It meant that I couldn’t even take many entry level science classes in college that I might have enjoyed, given that I loved some of the science for dummies (that is, non-majors) that I did take. </p>

<p>

If my son's school is any example, they're all heading into finance, especially hedge funds, even BEFORE they get PhDs.  Masters programs and even undergrad programs in financial math are springing up all over the place.&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>My oldest S is entering college this fall as a Math major.</p>

<p>At the end of school last year, my youngest S was whizzing through Geometry, so I asked the HS about advancing him in class figuring he would do the in-between (Algebra II) over the summer. They put a lot of conditions on him (summer class wouldn’t be transferable to HS, he had to get an A, he had to take the Algebra II final from the last school year and get at least a B, etc.) and wife and I had to promise not to hold the school liable in case things didn’t work out. You would have thought we were asking permission for him to bring a gun on campus.</p>

<p>Now, on the other hand, if we had decided to have him repeat Geometry to help hold up his GPA, we wouldn’t have had to ask anyone, he would just go sign up. The moral of this study, aim low and stay out of trouble or aim high and risk ruffling some feathers.</p>

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<p>One last round of comments before I sign off tonight:</p>

<p>While some people are gifted at math, math is not a subject merely for the gifted. I beleive that is also a worthy subject for someone is who is a little bright and is willing to work hard. </p>

<p>The nature of work is changing rapidly. Jobs are being created and destroyed at an ever-quickening pace. Graduates are more likely to switch professions in their careers or at least take an abrupt unexpected turn. Under those circumstances, you could do a lot worse than hold a math degree. It’s a way of thinking and doing that will help you transition between things a bit more smoothly.</p>

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<p>

My boyfriend and I were just discussing this the other day. You spend years on the basic math operations, and then suddenly it’s derivatives-integrals-diff eqs, bang-bang-bang! Kind of gives you whiplash.</p>

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<p>

Psychologically speaking, children are unable to learn upper level math until they have reached the formal operational stage (the logic required for math is too advanced for children before that point). the formal operational stage generally occurs around age 12, which is usually when kids start to learn different and more challenging math.</p>

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<p>The IB math curriculum has several streams moving along that are non-calculus oriented- yet the kids who do the higher level sequence move into colleges that are more geared to kids who have taken a full year of calculus and seem to do fine with that. The IB really only accelerates for the higher level students in the last 2 years of HS however. </p>

<p>My feeling is that calculus is fine in HS so long as it is well taught. Face it, most HS math teacher are not mathematicians, they are math teachers. So, they have a limit of what they can teach- as much as some of the students have a limit of what they can learn. I think many kids are ready for more math than they get in the MS years, but that doesn’t mean that they are ready for more than can be taught in most HS programs successfully later on. If your child has access to ongoing university level instruction while they are in HS, that is a different story. </p>

<p>My mother in law, a mathematician who took time off to raise kids and then became a math teacher teaching BC Calculus with great success, strongly urged our kids to NOT accelerate beyond a point where they would do AB Calculus in HS. She felt that after that point you have to learn from people who write the textbooks, not people who read the books.</p>

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<p>I’m the parent of a not quite mathophobe but close and of a math-lover, so I see things from both sides, like Sac. I also have nieces and nephews going through different strands of the French high school curriculum, so it’s yet another perspective (mine being 40+ years old is too remote and outdated to really count). </p>

<p>Let me start with the French system first. In France and in Euorpe, the time for accelerating is 12 years old when students enter 6th grade. Not only do they begin the study of one foreign language, but they also get specialists teaching different subjects, including math. A higher level of performance is also required of students. Currently high schoolers are directed into different streams–lietarure and languages, econnomics and social sciences; and math and sciences. They in fact study all the topics other students study but in smaller or larger quantities, in greater or lesser depth. So my niece in economics and social sciences was exposed to some calculus in 12th grade, as was my nephew in liteature and languages but not as much as another nephew who was in the math/science track. </p>

<p>My mathophobe S did well enough in pre-calculus for the GC to strongly urge him to take Calculus, but he refused, and I supported him. He did take a fourth year of math. For him, it was the right way to go. My math-loving son needed acceleration badly in k-8 and finally got it through enrichment outside school and eventually thanks to a 7th grade math teacher who allowed him to study precalculus on his own (there were other advanced students also studying on their own within the class). </p>

<p>I don’t think calculus is as necessary as an understanding of statistics for most people. I did not push S1 to take either Calc AB or BC. But S2 also shows that for some students, a high degree of flexibility on the part of teachers and schools is necessary. Dadguy’s example shows that this is far from the case.</p>

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<p>about the only college that requires calc, is Mudd, but then, of course, it is highly recommended for matriculants to CalTech and MIT. But, I agree with your thesis, Dadguy…for kids who like math and wish to continue four years of progressively difficult math, calc in HS can be a good solution for them. But, since many kids in college may not have to take math, Stats (and Econ) are much more useful for the society, IMO. For example, most journalists are ignorant in both subjects, and it is obvious from their articles.</p>

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<p>my daughters school didn’t have AP classes (!)
she has a math disability but we didn’t realize the extent until late in high school. ( she didn’t even take 4 years of math !!)
She took up through pre calc and statistics in high school, leaving the calculus mountain for Reed College where calc is required for her degree.</p>

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<p>I’m the mathophobe, and checked out of HS math after trigonometry (didn’t hurt me much…still got two quite handsome degrees). If someone had told me in those olden days that Calculus was “required” for admission to good colleges (or even four years of HS math…the horrors), I would have been cooked.</p>

<p>Fast forward to the present. My DS skipped Algebra 2 altogether, went straight into Geometry Honors as a freshman, and will be completing BC calc AP next year as a junior. I suspect he will be at the Harvard Extension School taking math as a senior.</p>

<p>So, I think the advanced curriculum HAS to be there for the kids who need it, when they need it. BUt to encourage the mathphobes to take calculus…seems crazy to me.</p>

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<p>Does it seem crazy, then, to make future engineers and physicists to take AP english? Or AP spanish? Top colleges look for that stuff too, you know.</p>