When I was a freshman in high school I placed past algebra and into geometry. Looking back at it I now realize that my teacher sucked. Great at teaching computer programming but for some reason not good at teaching geometry. Anyway, freshmen were all required to take a shop class. I took woodworking. Really enjoyed it but I quickly and easily finished the required box and hand mirror that we were required to make. We were all supposed to design our own project to build which for most was just a bigger and nicer version of the box we had previously built. I needed a new electric bass so that's what I decided to build. The teacher pretty much shit all over that idea saying it was too hard and he would fail me if I didn't complete it. Long story short is I made that electric bass and it turned out great! But what I didn't realize that I ended up learning more about geometry building that bass than I did in actual geometry class. That needs to be the focus of teaching math, finding real-world ways to teach and use math. When possible and applicable those real-world lessons should be tailored to fit the communities that the kids live in.
Math needs to be taught in context for many young people to grasp the puzzles....I worked with math challenged kids in public schools and if you get away from X Y Z formulas and teach it in terms of Nike Air Jordan tennis shoes with a 20% discount...kids grasp it. We also have a new crop of students that have new challenges that were not really addressed in my father's generation....OCD, dyslexia....some say we have had a severe increase in dyslexic youth since the soda pop craze of the 60s....heavy sugar intake during pregnancy...the Big Gulp drinks...my wife studies this stuff a lot and is a health nut....the other point I wanted to make is the metric system.....we are so far behind by not adapting the metric system and applying it to our math programs. I paid a tutor to teach my son abacus and learning abacus put him at the top of his math class....he was way ahead of the local kids who didn't know what an abacus was. My father was a math genius and could do complicated math in his head without paper or calculator....he had an 8th grade education in the depression and signed up for the Army Air Corp as soon as he could. He had a library card and read extensively...self taught.. We also should be buying our kids educational toys instead of toy guns..or Barbie dolls....my 2 cents
I had a similar experience except it was Jr. High and I made a letter holder that was three pieces of wood glued together and it sucked and I hated it and I never took another shop class again. barfo
Most kids these days use Metric and Standard AFAIK, we have talked about it multiple times in our engineering meetings (because we want to use unit of measures that make sense to people) and all of the people with kids in public schools have said their kids are being taught both. My oldest is doing homeschool (she's only 5), but her math has included mostly both as well, and it's not really that confusing either. When we're with other kids I've never seen a family have exclusively "educational toys" or "fun toys", it's usually a mix. I tend to think to learn anything, whether it's music, programming, science, the stars, math, it's not so much about the how or the what it's about understanding the individual kid, what piques their interests how do you keep the interest piqued. So kind of what you're saying to some extent teach them things that are in context for what they're interested in. Trig and Linear Algebra were fine for me like I understood the concepts but I didn't really care until I started working in 3d space for a living and found many of my interests required a good knowledge of them. One of the best mathematicians I know learned math because of his love for music and he applies math and musical principles together to do really interesting things.
I took one shop class realized I am really freaking awful at this and went back into my computer science classes... heh. Still though I feel like I'm so bad at working on anything like, anything wrong happens in the house and I'm just like, hey there are people we can pay to fix that...
Music….when you learn that the circle of 5ths is not a drinking game! Music is great for math and geometry....it's like quantum physics in that the possibilities are simply endless
Yes! Many people believe that is the correct approach. But, back in the day when income taxes were so high, a little bit of math made me learn to fix a lot of stuff. When you only get to take home about 25% of what you earn, then using it to pay other does truly make the price 4X what cost for you to do it.
It's not that I believe it's the case I'm just terribly unhandy outside of the bedroom. I can't fix stuff or put it together, it's a cheaper venture to buy new things or have someone else fix it most of the time.
I hate that complexity of both. Especially when you get into areas where metric is really out of place. Like speed in Kilometers doing Navigation on World Geodetic 84 charts. Where a minute of latitude is a knot mile, commonly accepted as 2000 yards. Where a kilometer is nothing relevant, but they make those charts.
I actually kind of like having both, it's a really good introduction to fractions and conversions. I suppose you could make an argument that if everyone used the same units of measures for everything that you wouldn't need conversions, but still that goes beyond standard and metric. Some people use pi, some use tau, some use radians, some use degrees, some use arcseconds, etc.
