Not sure what the high school curriculum looks like these days. Isn't algebra important because it's the formal version of word problems? I mean, word problems are used in math because they approach real life uses of math, very broadly speaking at least, and algebra is the way to model any word problem more complicated than "You want to buy 5 sodas for $3 each. How much does it cost?"

I'd agree that statistical literacy should be taught before calculus and trigonometry. I've used those to play number games with when I'm bored and that's it, I'm pretty sure.

Algebra is important, but people don't tend to write down those symbolic equations for the vast amount of algebra that they end up doing in the world.

(But yes, lots of people do actually need and use algebra, and they should be taught it. I just don't know that it rises in importance to universality.)

How do you teach statistics to somebody who doesn't know algebra?

I wouldn't connect ditching algebra and adding stats. That is, I wouldn't ditch algebra at all -- if you're going to teach math through high school you need it for pretty much everything, and while I'd want statistical education, I wouldn't think of it as in the math curriculum exactly.

Doing stats is math, and it's difficult math that definitely requires algebra. Reading stats critically at the level anyone is going to manage in high school is something that doesn't take much math other than sort of basic numeracy, but it requires a conceptual understanding of how stats work and what people do with them. I'd put that somewhere in the social studies curriculum.

I think you can teach a lot of basic stats without a whole lot of algebra if you focus on tying things back to why you're doing each thing. So the only algebra covered is what you need at that moment to accomplish a given step, as opposed to this labyrinthian course that's evolved to teach conic sections and factoring degree n polynomials. (I guess those are more Algebra II than Algebra I). You need to be able to do some computations and look things up in spreadsheets, though.

There's all this pressure to move algebra earlier and earlier. It's crazy. The superintendent in our district recently announced that they were NOT going to pursue teaching algebra in 6th grade as a general course. JFC, it just reflects a trendline that drives me nuts. Just save it until students are thinking abstractly enough to handle it.

I'm just seeing how many students come to college and fail algebra over and over and over again, even though they supposedly learned it in high school. (This isn't a new thought.) It's a big mess.

and factoring degree n polynomials

I think I've mentioned this in other threads, but my high school algebra classes seemed to consist of endless worksheets doing this over and over again. Why you might want to do it in the first place wasn't clearly explained.

I don't know about ditching algebra, but massively revising how it's taught might not be a bad idea.

I'm not just badmouthing Texas here, I know the schools are pretty good overall. But all your teaching experience is mostly kids from TX schools, right? Is the TX algebra curriculum overly ambitious in a fucked up kind of way that's shaping your thinking? Because your concept of "don't teach them Algebra (in the sense of the formal course), just enough algebra to get through stats" seems to visualize a bigger gap between Algebra the course and just a little algebra than I would have thought.

I skipped Algebra I in high school. I don't actually know what was taught except that they figured I already knew it. The problem being that I was pretty good at bluffing through things.

Back when I was in high school in NY (or at least in my school) the math classes didn't have names before Calculus. It was just Ninth Grade Math and so on, with various units on different topics. But there wasn't a year called Algebra and a year called Trigonometry.

I always have such whiplash where my brain is like "yes, who cares about polynomial factorization" but then "but if you actually understand long division, then there's literally nothing new to learn and you already can do polynomial factorization."

Statistics is all about functions (instead of numbers) as primary objects which is already the hard part of precalculus/calculus. I'm very open to getting rid of "techniques of integration" and replacing that with something more statistics-y, but I really don't see how you can do it any earlier.

I'm not sure I can do long division.

I mean, to do any serious statistics at all you need to talk about the function 1/{2\sigma \sqrt{pi}} e^{-1/2 ((x-\mu)/\sigma))^2}. If you can parse what that means then you're going to have no problem learning calculus in a month.

11: I skipped the sophomore one.

I think there should be one required math class in high school called "Practical Math". There will be units on shopping, banking, doing your taxes, reading the news, and gambling.

Taxes are algebra. The 1040 is basically a really long function.

Gambling is kind of subjective because I don't know where to draw the line between "muddy" and "sloppy".

14, see 4.last. I know when I say that we should teach statistics better in high school, I'm thinking about things like understanding the importance of half a dozen COVID-19 reinfections like in the other thread, or margins of erro, or the reliability of polls with small sample sizes, or spurious correlations. This kind of stuff. It's math with a heavy social studies element, not stuff like that formula.

Instead of brackets, we should just have the tax rate be a quadratic function.

19. I think that's right. We want kids to know maybe what a correlation coefficient is, but not necessarily how to calculate one. (This example comes to mind because I've never studied stats and I once had to calculate one, and it turns out that Excel makes it easy; but the key piece of knowledge I had was that there was a statistical tool that could solve a problem I had.)

Algebra is fine in the abstract. Factoring polynomials, which seems to be the bulk of the algebra curriculum in primary schools, is pointless puzzlework.

I strongly agree that statistics is more useful, but more broadly, a course on practical applied mathematics for the everyday citizen.

The ASSIGNMENT was for you all to make your OWN curricular modifications. I think we need a prerequisite in competent commenting.

Is this going to be on the exam?

A social studies level statistics course like 4 and 14 mention are what I have in mind, actually.

I fantasize about developing an undergrad course that would be called something like Avoiding Irrationality: a mix of basic logic, very basic stats via Kahnemann-Tversky et al, stuff on motivated reasoning, and... I don't know what for the media literacy bit, besides Orwell. And maybe Milgram and Asch just on general principle. But of course it should really be a high school class.

And 19. That link is exactly the type of thing I'm thinking of.

Dear Ms Geebie, We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole morning in comments for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you how we think math should be taught.

I got a lot of benefit from a class on environmental problem solving. Lots of emphasis on making estimates, clear back of the envelope calculations, and looking at relative scale. That was in college, but I think it could be taught to high schoolers. Even the question 'is that effect big or little' is a good question to learn.

I'm not just badmouthing Texas here, I know the schools are pretty good overall. But all your teaching experience is mostly kids from TX schools, right? Is the TX algebra curriculum overly ambitious in a fucked up kind of way that's shaping your thinking?

Texas school fail the have-nots miserably, it's true. But I'm not thinking about my own experience teaching - I think it's fine that the SAT should have some algebra on it. More like Jammies' experience teaching high school. I'm thinking of what we want for the half of students who don't go to college.

I am genuinely curious if there's any methodical way to compare non-college bound students across non-Common Core and Common Core states. It's possible that we're failing them worse than other places, but it's also possible that they're getting disastrously bad educations everywhere.

29: It's a good way to make jokes about "Cohen's D."

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Sorry, don't know here this should go; but Coney seems deeply stupid, no?

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Cohen's d has no unit specified but .5 is medium and .8 is large.

We should designate a Coney Barrett thread. It doesn't have to be a new one.

She's not stupid. She's saying what she thinks it's most likely to get her a position of great power and knows that people who care about whether she is stupid or not have basically zero ability to influence the decision.

It's pretty quick for me just to throw up a new one! (Retch it up.)

I agree with heebie

AIMHMHB, I struggled with math in school insofar as I was the slowest person in all of the fastest classes. I can apply formulas just fine, if someone tells me which formulas to use, but I can't do much calculating in my head at all, and have little intuitive grasp of how or why math works. It's very frustrating to me, and I've long wondered if having better math instruction when I was younger would have made any difference. That said, I also passed AP Calculus with a "4" my junior year of high school, so it's not like anyone else was stressing over my math abilities.

Anyhow, the sequence I took was the most accelerated (also probably not a good idea in my case), and I did Algebra 1 in 7th, Algebra 2 in 8th, Geometry in 9th, Precalc (ugh) in 10th, and AP Calc AB in 11th. I think people on my track who didn't want to take Calc took Probability and Statistics instead, but I don't know if students were allowed to take it instead of Precalc also.

If I had to take K-12 again, I'd ditch homeroom and gym. Assemblies were usually a waste of time, but now and then, there was a gem.

As others have noted, the problem with ditching algebra is that you need it to understand statistics. I tutor high school kids now and then, and when one of them punts math, it turns out they have punted half of all possible college majors. They often talk about one's life being shaped by decisions one didn't realize one was making when one was younger. Not taking math is one of those decisions, and it is a hard struggle uphill to compensate.

Many people hate factoring. It's like scales and chords for people who just want to play music. Factoring appeals to the people who like to take things apart and try to put them back together again. I used to hang with that crowd. Some liked taking gadgets apart, for others it was novels, symphonies or movies. It's about realizing that it sometimes takes organization, discipline and time to understand what one is dealing with. Some things are hidden, but they can be revealed. I remember one writer noting that the big thing one learns in math is that sometimes it takes more than 15 seconds.

I found highschool stats probably the most frustrating and arbitrary part of maths because it was applying preset formulas and I couldn't see why. Persisted all the way to undergrad first year stats where they introduced probability using algebra. I always did ok at maths though.

39: Never had a class called homeroom myself. Definitely disagree about cancelling gym. Change lots of things about it and deemphasize team sports, sure, but physical fitness is enough of a problem as it is these days.

41. So do the physically disabled kids get a free pass on gym, or what do they do instead?

39.3:

My issue with factoring polynomials isn't that it was taught, but that a disproportionately large amount of time seemed to be devoted to it, especially given how far down it falls on the list of "things learned in algebra that might actually be useful later on".

We learned about using matrices to solve systems of equations, but I recall that that received a fraction of the time that was spent on factoring, despite it being more useful.

Maybe I'm just bitter. Much of my work now involves math and coding, but I didn't really get going until I was an undergraduate. It seems like the high school curriculum was designed to carefully conceal that fact that math can actually be really cool and useful.

Now teaching coding earlier on and better incorporating it with the mathematics curriculum is something I can get behind 100%.

We learned Apple Basic and it taught me about life.