Ask Lemmy

Like 90% of concepts from those classes wouldn’t really help people in the world around them, not just “they won’t use integrals daily” but rather they won’t be taught in a way where they’ll connect differentials to what they see in the world or news.

That's one of the things I find most disappointing about the education system. Like, people technically pass classes that are supposed to ensure they've "mastered" certain concepts, but few seem to even notice how they could be applied outside a narrow scope of specifically worded problems. Its so strange hearing people say things like "unless I'm like a math teacher, this is all useless for me outside of class" when calculus specifically was something that I could immediately connect to problems I had outside school immediately.

Even when taking classes that seem to be designed around trying to build real-world problem-solving skills, the classes generally seem to devolve into teachers teaching an algorithm for solving a hyper-specific question, assigning homework doing those hyper-specific question types over and over, and then testing on those hyper-specific questions with different numbers. Those students seem to be virtually no better at identifying how to apply math to real-world problems after such courses...