Would you be in favor of school math teaching more practical things, instead of just formalized math?

I would definitely be in favor of more practical teachings. As a college engineering student, I feel like I’ve learned so much theoretical mathematics with not much application. Also, I definitely haven’t learned anything about a mortgage, credit, and loans outside of what I’ve looked at online. I think that formal mathematics is still necessary because bits and pieces are used depending on one’s professions, but the practical topics should still be integrated into education.

I don’t think Pythagoras’ theorem is obscure and have used it more than once “in real life”. That said, I definitely think we should be taught those other things in school as well but not as a replacement for math classes, we do poor enough in math as it is already.

These things should be taught as another class entirely “Shit you need to know so you don’t end up poor”. Being in college and really having little to no idea of what exactly all your loans mean or how to best deal with them is a bit ridiculous.

Schools have never taught that except in special courses on living. It’s not a bad idea, in fact it’s a good one, but not as a replacement or alternative to “formal” math.

Anyone who trivializes Pythagoras’ Theorem is not adept at doing simple construction calculations.

@El_Cadejo Great minds, etc.

I think Pythagoras’ Theorem is necessary as is all trigonometry, calculus, and differential equations. However, I don’t think everyone will use these things in their profession, but everyone needs to know about finances. In that regards, its imperative for everyone to be proficient with. Also, @El_Cadejo I don’t think there is anyone who doesn’t know what their loans mean, but there are a lot of students that end up getting caught off guard with interest rates and payments after they graduate. As for me, I don’t know much outside of what I’ve learned online because I don’t have any loans. My college is paid for by scholarships.

@zenvelo: I was not trivializing Pythagoras Theorem, nor saying that “practical” math should be a “replacement or alternative to formal math.” I was suggesting that it be taught in addition to, not instead of.

@jca Okay, I read your question as an alternative approach because you use the word or. And you called Pythagoras’ Theorem obscure; that trivializes it.

Instead of an alternative math program, high schools ought to have Life Skills, including how to vote, how to vote, how to deal with the cable company or the phone company, how to find a doctor and how to see what’s covered by a health plan.

Plus how to bake a decent loaf of bread, how to change a tire, how to sew on a button (I can still darn a sock with a darning needle from Jr. HS Home Ec.) how to remove a splinter, staunch a wound, and swim one lap in a pool.

Applied mathematics is general is more complicated than pure mathematics, as it involves problem solving skills. It should be taught along with pure mathematics, but never just instead of. If one can’t solve pure mathematics problems, they are going to have a hard time applying those concepts to more practical problems.

I think balancing a check book, taxes, applying for a loan, credit scores, opening a bank account, firm handshake, interviewing skills, should be in a “Home Ec” type of class.

@jca The math you’re talking about with check books and interest rate was taught in my high school ( 1960’s ) as a part of the business, business law and typing classes. The pure math is also used for logic, Venn diagrams and problem solving.

The thing about math is that it makes me think. The problem, in my opinion, is when math is taught in a formula-memorizing, rote-recall sort of way. Math should be taught in a “logical” way where you learn how to apply ideas to situations. If you have two apples and you buy three apples, a student should not only be able to add 2+3, they should know that solving this problem requires addition. That’s a pretty basic example, but I hope you get what I’m saying.

‘In addition to’ not ‘instead’.
Doing the latter will only serve to cripple a nation’s scientific, technological and, inevitably, economic future.

@dxs I think sometimes the application of math makes more sense after the fact. Kids can’t really understand how math is useful in real life in my opinion. I do think practical problems are good, but I also think just learning math and formulas is valuable too. It isn’t just one or the other. I hear a lot of arguments talking about learning math in very black and white terms and I think the truth is there is gray area. Everything in the form of a word problem takes a lot of time and hurts children who have reading comprehension problems, but who otherwise would excel in math. Let’s not take math away from them too by overloading them with too much practical application. Really I am more focused on very young children in my thinking. I just don’t want a very young child who might be slow in his reading skill to have that affect every subject.

I’m all for programs that help kids whose parents don’t or can’t teach them all of the “extra” things mentioned in this thread (interest, loans, balancing checkbook, baking bread, swimming, sewing, changing a tire, applying for a loan), but I really hope that parents (who can) teach their children these things at home.

I hope that parents know that they don’t have to formally homeschool their children to use every opportunity as a learning opportunity.

My job as a parent is to prepare my child for independence. I’m fine with offering these things in a formal education setting… but please let my kid opt out. I’ll be teaching all of these things myself.

@Cupcake A huge percentage of adults don’t know how to manage finances, have never owned a home, think living on credit is nornal, and I cannot tell you how many women don’t have a firm handshake. Add in other etiquette things like holding a fork and knife properly, which can also affect the workplace. I know more than one executive who says they get turned off when an applicant can’t eat lunch with them in an expected manner. Above I am talking about parents who they themselves don’t have the skills, then there are the parents who do, but done think to pass on the information to their children, or only pass along a part of the information.

It will be an easy class for those with parents who do teach their kids these thing, I am just fine with the easy A. I venture to guess that all children, no matter how great their parents are, will learn something new in a Home Ec class that teaches practical personal finance topics along with the more domestic things we usually associate with a Home Ec class.

All of the practical lessons mentioned on this thread are things that parents should be teaching their children.

assuming that parents know these things themselves

Both need to be taught. If I could change our education system I would frankly add a year. In that year they take nothing but vocational or occupational type courses like shop, auto mechanics, basic electronics, simple programming, home economics, etc….. That way they have at least some idea of what they want to do in life before going to college and just “picking” something.
Are kids even exposed to this anymore?

Absolutely. I just heard a cool story on NPR about an innovative way to accomplish this, at least in part.

I’m in favor of those things being taught in school, but not under the title of “math.”

The “obscure” theorem you mention is absolutely essential for anyone going into a STEM field.

Maybe more practical applications could be taught as side classes, optional for kids who aren’t interested in pure math, but please don’t replace any of the hard theory math in schools. Oftentimes “for applications” is just a nice way of saying “watered down.”

I would learn both… bank accounts and isolating variables would be most useful. In Alberta in 1995 we had three streams university math 30 , trades math 33 , and life skills math 14 – 24. Also on its own we had math 31 what was pure calculus.

I was thinking around the high school or middle school age, @JLeslie, at which the brain is more developed. Where I tutor, I focus on applying math, and the students seem to do well with it. Perhaps even at a younger age it could work.
I definitely, definitely think that the “Home Ec” topics should be taught in every school. Those who think it’s responsibility of the parents to teach “Home Ec” stuff: I agree. But the problem is that you can’t rely on them—my parents didn’t teach me these things! (In all fairness, I didn’t really ask them about everything, either.) This stuff should be part of the curriculum. I want to know what insurance is, how taxes work, what the different types of bank accounts do, and how credit cards work. Hell, we should even throw in a cooking class. You won’t believe how confused I am about life right now. Google just doesn’t seem to cut it with these kinds of things.

Lastly, for anyone that says “formal math” is not practical, how much did you learn? I learned a lot, and I use it every day.

A great many people have problems with these so-called “home ec topics” because they are not encouraged to read. They should be taught in school but the best form of learning about these matters is from unstructured reading every day in the newspapers, in new books, the most recent journals and the like. My experience: at about thirteen years, I asked my father how I knew the kettle was boiling. He looked at me in astonishment: “and isn’t Chemistry one of your best subjects?” he said. For some reason, and I think it was related to the teaching, I had not associated my Chemistry studies with real life. I never had that problem with Mathematics. When my husband and I were negotiating a home mortgage and learning to handle money, we found that much of the knowledge we needed was already present. We belonged to a generation that did not know about computers until our fifties.

I am not, by any means, dismissing the electronic media. It has revolutionized my whole life. But I think that my learning experience and that of my close relatives, including the younger ones, has been enriched by reading.

@bea2345 What’s your point? Sure reading is important, but there are other things in life to learn.

First, I’m going to disagree with the claim that “everyone admits that much of the math we learn in school is never used again in life.” My school had a poster in all of the math classrooms outlining the ways in which various professions used math. Journalists need it to check the statistics thrown out at them. Meteorologists use it to predict the weather. Police officers use it to analyze crimes. And there seem to be a lot of things that people wish they could do that would be much easier if they remembered their high school math. In fact, a basic understanding of combinations and permutations might help more people understand why the lottery is sometimes referred to as a tax on people who can’t do math.

Second, I will reiterate what others have said about home economics being the place where these skills should be learned. (Though I agree with @Blondesjon that parents should really be on top of this, @ragingloli is quite correct to point out that—unfortunately—not all parents have the skill themselves.) My school had a home economics class, and it was extremely useful. So yes, I agree that more schools should teach these things. In fact, I think all schools should teach them. It’s not a coincidence that most private schools teach their students to handle money even though their parents almost certainly know and teach their children these skills as well. By keeping this sort of practical knowledge away from poorer students, we are essentially perpetuating the poverty cycle (though of course, that’s what a lot of education “reformers” actually want).

Those are things I cover myself at home. School is not the only place our children learn. My daughter has chores to do, responsibilities to cover. Practical experience at home, from family is very important. It helps in making those practical points more real. The school my daughter attends is pretty good at sharing hands on experiences, and making it real, but she needs to see a certain amount of it for herself.
One thing she has learned at home is budget is not like xbox. When it hits zero, you don’t have a reset button, it stays zero until the income is paid again.
I don’t have the patience anymore to talk trig with her. Let them cover that. I have the monthly bills and shopping budget aspect covered. You should have seen the look on her face when I explained FICA! XD Now that I would not have missed just so she could learn it in school.

My father taught me about checking accounts and budgets and staying within my income.
To this day I am haunted by his “to the penny” when I deliberately no longer reconcile my checkbook monthly. But his instructions enabled me to handle all of the family finances in both my marriages and comfortably today, as a single woman.

If they would have taught me how to use algebra and geometry in in my daily life, I wouldn’t have forgotten it as soon as I left school. Thirty years after the fact, I was shown how all those x’s and y’s and commutative, associative, and distributive properties had very practical uses in figuring out amortizations of mortgages with only a pencil and paper in seconds, BTU conversions, the slope of a roof line without a framing square, the drop of a river over a certain distance and it’s volume per minute, the expected real progress from point A to point B of a sailboat through water when the wind speed and direction are known, and current speed and direction aren’t. Algebra will allow you to calculate that simply by data based on the behaviour of your boat, and recalculate it hourly and readjust your ETA hourly as these variables change—so you’ll know where you are and who’s waters you’re sailing in when you haven’t sighted land in a week or two. Navigation by the stars is impossible without a rudimentary acquaintance with algebra.

But they just taught me the rules and I passed the tests and that was that. It was a purely academic exercise. What a waste of everybody’s time that was.

Teaching the rules of algebra and geometry should be done in the classroom, but the second half of the course, the practicum or lab, should be all about the practical application of what has been learned. I never got the second part. Those idiots thought that just because I could pass their exams that I knew the subject. Not true. I learned it all by rote for no other reason but to protect my GPA and I was glad when I was free of it.

For example, the kids who pass the classwork part should be taken on a week’s sail, and each independently take the noon position with the sextant and again take the position by the stars, mark their charts, and hand them in daily to be check for accuracy—just like the young midshipmen apprentices did under Nelson. In the meantime they can climb the ratlines, work the sails, cook, do carpentry and sail repair—all the things you do to maintain a ship transiting an ocean under sail, many of which algebra and geometry can be useful.

They could explore an island, survey it with transit teams, map the topography, map the shoreline to the compass, create the charts. There could be a competition between teams for the accuracy of their charts. They will run into problems where the algebra and geometry will be inadequate and this will be the opportunity for the teaching staff to offer trig and other disciplines as a solution. They’ll never forget algebra or geometry after an experience like that and they might even find trig and calc much more interesting. That’s how you teach, I imagine. You show them the value of what they’ve been working for. Then it becomes rewarded behaviour.

Now, that’s the kind of thing I would have responded to.

@RedKnight To clarify what I said above, I think, I may be wrong, that very few people actually understand all the fine print within their loans. Subsidized , unsubsidized, different interested rates on each one, there are a lot of little stipulations with each one and often students get multiple different loans for small amounts rather than large lump sums, at least that’s been my experience. You were lucky enough to get through college on scholarships, but I don’t think you fully grasp how much there is to deal with for those of us that had to resort to loans.

I really am shocked to learn that the majority of the people on this thread feel like their parents taught them all these practical things we are mentioning like bank accounts, taxes, what affects credit scores, sewing, cooking, loans and more. I think that is great. Or, if not their parents, that they feel they understand all those things well enough to teach their children. I really have a rather negative generalization about those sorts of things in America. I realize not everyone on the Q is American. I think I am pretty savvy on those things, but I know even I have to google stuff all the time to know the laws, or check myself.

Ask 1000 Americans over the age of 25 how the tax laws work regarding the profit when they sell their house and I bet you over 50% of people get it wrong. Also, see how many people think it is better for your credit score to not pay off your credit cards in full at the end of each month. How many people think debit cards help your credit score (unless it has changed recently to actually affect credit and I was not aware of it, I know some people were fighting for it). How many people don’t understand that you pay most of the interest on a mortgage in the initial years that you are paying it back. I could name a bunch more. I can’t tell you how many times the people who bag groceries in Memphis at the supermarkets put raw meat with vegetables or raw meat with cooked meat in the same bag. There seems to be a deficit in that town of basic food safety, a lot of us from outside the state bitched about it. Or, how many people can’t follow a recipe, because they don’t know what saute, fold, or poach means; not to mention understand a menu in a higher end restaurant, because they don’t know cooking terms or don’t know many ingredients besides meat, potatoes, pasta, corn and carrots.

@dxs Jr. High and High School, yes, of course some practical math application is great. I don’t mean for the elementary level to be void of it either, I just don’t want such an emphasis that it is too extreme. Teaching techniques all to often to swing like a pendulum. I do really like @Espiritus_Corvus idea of field trips though. I use math all the time in daily life. Ironically, I use a lot of geometry lately, because I am building a house, and I didn’t like geometry in school; it didn’t come easy to me like algebra.

@dxs – There are a great many things one will learn without reading a lot. But much knowledge comes when reading is not only a means to an end, but also a pleasure. Books did not teach me everything: I learned money management, family living, work habits and the like through experience and example. I also learned when my marriage was going down the tubes, books were not terribly helpful. But handling a cheque book, paying my taxes and so on had few terrors because I knew how to read instructions.

For kids who have useless parents, sure. It could be taught in schools. My mother taught me more about cooking and sewing and helped me file my first tax return. I had business classes in high-school so I learned about loan calculations, interest rates. Kids where I live have little sense when it comes to consumerism. They are notoriously bad with money. Easy come, easy go, I guess.