Actually, proficiency in what used to be fifth grade math (percentages, converting distance from miles to kilometers, basic division) is in short supply these days. Ever watch a table filled with high powered professionals in a restaurant try to calculate a tip or divide a check?
Yes - and that’s a far bigger problem than the faux-problem on CC that everyone’s little geniuses are sooooo bored with calculus already in 8th grade and they’ve got to rush-rush-rush through it all. Relax. Learning is not a bucket that you have to fill up by age 17 or so.
@Pizzagirl " the faux-problem on CC that everyone’s little geniuses are sooooo bored with calculus already in 8th grade and they’ve got to rush-rush-rush through it all."
The hyperbole is amusing.
You are completely right that they don’t have to “rush-rush-rush through it all.” They can take their time. Each child is different and should be paced accordingly. The point was never that everyone needs to rush. I was about the alignment of parents expectations and the level of work that students are doing.
Choosing to not go down that path is fine, just as choosing to not take advanced English is fine, or getting C’s and D’s is fine. It all depends on what is right for the particular student. Students can do all of those things and still get into a decent college and get an education. What concerns me is seeing students who are doing these things and the parents continue to have a baseless belief that the student will be attending a top school. I think these misaligned expectations can lead to a lot of frustration that can be avoided with a little work early on to understand what is reasonable for each situation.
FWIW, my kids have never been rushed a day in their lives. They drag me along. My ability to teach them math fizzles about 1/2 way through alg 2. When you have a child who sees the world in patterns and explains to you in K how he discovered rows of (his way of “teaching” me his mathematical discovery, ie multiplication), it really isn’t anything you do. It is simply something they do and see and you just offer them what they need at any particular point in time. No rush involved. Taking thermal dynamics as a college freshman was his norm. I have never even taken a physics class in my life. I stopped understanding what he was talking about by the time he was in 8th grade. 
But, not all of my kids are even close to functioning on his level. He passed his older sister early on. She graduated with precal and stats as her highest levels of math. It isn’t about rushing or pushing. For our family it is about thriving where you are.
I think there are a lot of people here who want to equate taking advanced math with rushing and pushing. There are two issues here. First, there are kids for whom this is not rushing or pushing, it’s appropriate placement. It’s not that they need to complete several college math classes before they finish high school. It’s that they are ready to do so and they want to do so.
The second issue is the subject of this thread. In a better or more competitive school district, you could have 50 or 100 graduating seniors taking calculus. If the kid or their parents wants to attend a top school, especially as a STEM major, and they don’t have calculus, that doesn’t look good in the context of their school and their opportunities. This isn’t about whether you need calculus. It’s not about whether some other kid got in without calculus. It’s not about whether the college offers calculus. It’s merely about what the colleges themselves are saying, that they want to see kids challenging themselves with what is available to them and that they are judged in that context. Commentators who want to pull that out of context and insist that no school requires calculus or that some kids get in without it or that even the engineering sequence starts with calculus are missing the point. It’s about whether the school is likely to judge that kid as being among the most competitive applicants. And maybe they still will, because the kid may have challenged themselves in other ways or had some major accomplishments.
I think it is a very valuable use of time for every college-bound student because the need to understand algebra pops up when you least expect it in college.
For example, my daughter took two basic, not-for-majors astronomy courses to fulfill her science general education requirement in college. Some people suffered through those courses and got poor grades because there was some math involved – though nothing more sophisticated than algebra.
And then a couple of years later, she was an undergraduate TA for a finance course and she had to try to help students who understood the finance concepts but couldn’t complete their problem sets or get the test questions right because the problems they were required to solve involved basic equations and they didn’t understand how to set up or solve the equations.
“Maybe anyone can do well in Algebra 2 with the proper support. My question is whether learning it is the best use of time for every student.”
Clearly, there are a lot of people who never use advanced math in their careers again after they finish school. This leads to the question of was it necessary? For that individual the answer is no.
The issue is that math gives students a valuable option to change their mind about what they want to do in life. The more math you know, the later in the education process you can go and change to almost any career. When a student stops after, say algebra, they know enough to do a lot of jobs, but there is another segment that quickly closes to them. To have fewer kids toiling away in math classes, we would have to be able to assess what they will want to be when they grow up with more certainty.
True, but I also think that math teaches problem solving and logical thinking in a way that other classes simply do not. And I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that people don’t need algebra2. If I recall, just one of the topics covered is compound interest. Ask yourself, when was the last time you needed to think about an interest rate? And when was the last time you needed to think about a rhyme scheme in a poem? I’ve never heard anyone suggest that we don’t need to spend 4 years in high school doing literary analysis, but I’ve seen several people suggest that maybe we don’t need to complete 3 years of high school math. Perhaps if more Americans really understood how interest works we would not be having so many people making poor decisions about their long term finances.
This site is full of posts bemoaning how students (and often their parents) don’t appreciate the impact on their adult lives of taking on a large amount of debt to pay for college. How are they going to understand this better if we tell them it’s ok, they don’t need to understand compound interest? This is one of the few practical why-do-I-need-to-know-this things students learn in high school.
Algebra certainly should be known by a HS grad.
I mean, I don’t see people saying that it’s OK for a HS grad to only be able to read and write at an 8th grade level, so I don’t understand why some folks are blithely OK with a HS grad not being able to do algebra (which in most developed countries is covered before HS).
This quote goes back to the heart of a question posed earlier in this thread, American middle schools. Why do American middle schools seem to be a holding/review period vs. advancing to new skills? That does not seem to be the case in most other countries.
I think we should do less of that, actually, and go back to doing more votech stuff for all kids in HS.
This will also help kids understand practical applications of theory, specially if they were taught with emphasis on how they tie in.
Carpentry == Geometry & Trig
Cooking == Chemistry & Physics
Budgeting == Algebra
etc.
I suggest it often.
I’m not saying that kids don’t need four years of English, just that current English courses put too much emphasis, in my opinion, on literary analysis (as opposed, say, to clear, effective writing).
Way, way back when I was in high school there was a large variety of classes we could take for English credit. I remember taking Creative Writing, Speech, and Mass Media in addition the normal literature and composition classes. It’s one of the few things I think our school did right.
The great thing about literary analysis is that it teaches core skills which can be used in very practical, vocational ways.
I hand someone on my team a thick and dense review of our recruiting results over the last decade around the world. Who got hired; who stayed and performed exceptionally well; what it cost to recruit for our Mumbai office vs. London.
I ask- “please work through this and develop some conclusions”.
This isn’t James Joyce or Hemingway we’re talking about… just a country by country review. Employee A “gets it” immediately- find the trends, develop a theme backed up by fact, figure out if there are demographic or economic factors which account for differences, understand that educational pathways around the world differ (i.e. what represents “elite” schooling in China isn’t the same as in Germany), figure out if the global banking meltdown in 2008 is reflected in the numbers, etc.
Employee B is clueless and wants an algorithm- what is the numerator, what’s the denominator, what should I include and what should I ignore. I say “ignore the stuff that isn’t relevant to your thesis and include the stuff which supports your conclusions” and I see said employee start to get frustrated that there isn’t a “right answer”.
Seems to me that literary analysis is pretty good training for a lot of corporate work. Figuring out a marketing plan; develop an investment portfolio based on themes and trends in the economy and society; calculate the benefit or damage to tweaking the retirement benefits of a large cohort of former employees; make a case for buying a set of raw materials domestically even though the price is marginally lower by buying internationally; come up with a coherent rational for a price cut of your primary product… these activities all use numerical analysis (but not terribly sophisticated - and the retiree question usually gets the heavy lifting done by an actuarial team and then punted to someone in HR) but require the ability to stitch together a narrative BASED on the numbers. The numbers don’t give you the right answer (many times there are multiple right answers… like is Mrs. Bennett a heroic or tragic figure in Pride and Prejudice?)
Agree that clear writing trumps all.
I’ve been a librarian for 25 years, @blossom, and I think my training would work well in the scenario you present. Of course I had to go to grad school to get it. I think I could have learned to do it with a little training right out of undergrad, though.
I love librarians, information specialists, knowledge management professionals, etc. They pivot very well into a wide assortment of corporate jobs! Too much data; not enough usable information these days!!!
There is so much misinformation and opinion parading as fact on this thread it makes my head spin.
Parents: you know, in the pit of your stomachs, what your child needs educationally. She doesn’t need what anyone on an annonymous board states is necessary. She needs to be working at whatever level she can handle without losing her way, losing herself, losing her ability to keep up, and losing opportunities to grow in areas other than academically.
(Three kids: two college graduates, one entering college this fall. One kid never met a math class he couldn’t breeze through, and one repeated algebra in middle school because she, while earning passing grades, looked (to quote her teacher) like “A deer in the headlights”. Having her repeat that class was the best decision we ever made.)
This thread has taken quite a turn from the original post and, as @eastcoascrazy pointed out, there is a great deal of misinformation posted. The aspect that many people chose not to mention or recognize is does a parent have to hover and micromanage their child to be seen as supportive of their child’s college aspirations?
If having any idea what classes your child is taking is “hover and micromanage” then I’d say yes, that is necessary to be supportive of their college aspirations.
Why does everything automatically go to the extremes? There is a lot of ground between “having any idea” and “hover and micromanage”.