Ask Lemmy

And fucking Excel. Better yet teach budgeting and spreadsheet courses in one.

If people had stats, budgeting and excel it would be an incredible improvement.

Budgeting also only gets you so far in our dystopian age when you need 2 full time jobs to pay rent.

When I got to college, I had to take two math course, which I dreaded. Because I was a music major, one of the math classes had to be Acoustics. For the other, I was terrible at Algebra, and didn't want that dragging me down, so I chose Statistics, since I was interested in politics, and would learn about polls.

I actually liked the class a lot, and to this day I track political polls closely. But I'm not a person who just accepts raw numbers. I want to know the sample size, the margin of error, etc. I know when a candidate is cherry picking his data, or leaning on a partisan poll, etc. It's been very helpful through my life.

BTW, it was standard procedure for every music major to procrastinate on the Acoustics class until their senior year, and we got a cool math professor who was also a pretty decent amateur trumpet player. He didn't want to be the guy to destroy our graduation prospects in our senior year by flunking us all, so he made the class interesting and challenging but not really difficult.

I learned a LOT in that class, and later I ended up working in sales for an audiophile classical record company, and my knowledge of sound and acoustics from that class allowed me to weasel myself into an additional part-time job helping out at recording sessions, some of which went on to win Grammys.

So Statistics and Acoustics were the math that worked for me, and I posted elsewhere that Business Math is something that I have also used a LOT, but picked it all up mostly on my own. NOT ONCE, have I ever said "I wished I paid more attention in Algebra." Those two quarters of high school Algebra might have been the two most painful quarters of my educational career.

The emphasis on advanced math at the high school level is detrimental to many people. It instills a sense of failure and stupidity early on, reinforced by parents and teachers, and often develops a sense of hatred toward those who are good at it. People who struggle with advanced math would be far better served by teaching them Business Math. First week lesson: put up a pay stub, and start figuring out all the percentages of all the withholding on that paycheck. Every kid in that class will be riveted on the screen, even the thugs, who will want to know who FICA is, and why is he taking all their money?

"The most powerful force in the Universe is compound interest."

No banking corporation wants people to understand this.

if he can get that far into calculus, he wouldnt be having problem with math skills. its the people struggling with aritmetic, or early algebra thats problematic. i think the early books in ALG1 and 2 and geo, are just a little to convoluted for people to learn, because its mostly abstract word problems. plus the teachers in our HS dont even teach the subject properly at all, they expect you to know how to do it already in the early 2000s. same went for chemistry, and adv algebra, just poor teaching skills at least in our school. hence why alot of hs comes out with such poor math skills.