Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Let's Not Teach Calculus In High School Anymore

Yes, let's dumb down our curriculum so that everyone succeeds!

I love teaching statistics, and I agree with this author that statistics is more practical for most people than is calculus.  But can you spot the false dichotomy here?
Let’s get rid of high school calculus and start teaching young students the math skills they really need.
We can, and should, do both--teach kids the skills they need and teach calculus to those who are capable of learning it. 

And don't you love this comment?  Where does it not apply?  Let's just postpone every high-level class to college!
And those who do need it (calculus) – future engineers, physicists, and the like – can take it in college.
The same can be said for chemistry, biology, literature, sociology...

Let's just call a spade a spade here.  The author has written a stupid column.

8 comments:

PeggyU said...

I wish they had had it when I was in high school. School was too small to manage it.

Darren said...

My school of ~1600 didn't have it, either. Six of us needed it when we were seniors so we had to go to the nearby community college to take it.

PeggyU said...

Our nearest community college would have been about 150 miles away.

maxutils said...

Why do we need to rank these? I think it's a straw man argument on both sides. I fully believe that high school students should be involved in a math course all four years. I also believe both calculus and statistics should be available, and should be offered proportional to demand ... I stray in two places. Stats is really valuable, I've taken three college courses in it, and I love it, especially in analyzing models. But - it isn't really a math class. Not like Alg 2, or Calc, anyway. That doesn't make it a bad thing, but it does lead to my second straying. You might very well never use calculus in your real life, but understanding, in particular, the relationship between functions, derivatives, second derivatives ...these are so locked in to so many fields, it's amazing ... and it completely cemented my understanding of math. The real problem is trying to force people who don't have a solid grasp of fundamentals in to higher level math classes...I'm all for every student having the opportunity to take higher level math classes, but not everyone needs to take calculus or stats in high school. Those concepts the kids really need? Should have been taught prior to high school.

Last, I found it hilarious that he wrote, "Colleges do a really good job of teaching calculus." Um, no they don't...at any medium to large size university, calculus is the pre- algebra of the math department. Instead of a class of 36 with a passionate teacher (HS) you get a class 2-3 times as large taught by by a disinterested grad student, who has no teaching experience and cares more about his thesis than he does about the entire class...

concerned said...

The only statistics class that I was required to take for a mathematics major at a state university was Calculus-based => Calc was a prereq!

Joshua Sasmor said...

It might be worth knowing that over 407000 people took the AP calculus exam this year (approximately 295000 AB, and 112000 BC). That's more people than took calculus at all American 2- and 4-year colleges and universities combined. Even if the "colleges do a good job teaching calculus" argument is fallacious, the students are opting out of college calculus in huge numbers. There is some research on how these students do in college, but it is still incomplete.

Maxutils, I teach at a small liberal-arts Catholic university, so I am biased; my calculus classes are rarely larger than 40 students. I think I'm a passionate teacher, and I learned that as a TA in a huge school. I also teach descriptive statistics to our education students, and this is where I think most of them will disagree with you (it is still too _mathy_ for them). I think that there's enough automation in statistics (statkey jumps to mind) that understanding of standard deviation and how likely/unlikely a particular event was is vitally important to reading the news. Look at http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28481060 as an example.

Ellen K said...

You might want to read what is being done to APUSH. They are gutting almost all information on the Founders of the nation and pushing to have more on the last fifty years. While I don't have an aversion to teaching more current history-most classes barely get past WWII-to do this by excluding the key factors that created our nation is just simply wrong. I can't wait to get back to school and ask our long time APUSH guru what he thinks of this. As for one of my AP classes-AP Art History is essentially being cut in half with only 250 works required in depth and more of a push toward "other than Western art." Truthfully, the course is 25,000 years of human creation and should be two courses, not one. We'll see what happens.

maxutils said...

Joshua ... teachers get a sense very early of who is good and who isn't at teaching. I already know you're good, and would be interested in your stats course ... I deliberately geared my critique to 'not small universities', which is not your tableau -- I don't know your demographic, but it sounds like your calculus class demos are very similar to a high end high school course ... Is your stats course available on line?