SovietOmega posted...
"Why is it important to teach it, though? All I hear is THAT it's important, but not WHY. Only a precious few people will ever use any of their math and science education. No one I know has learned anything in any of their math and science-type classes except people who are or were in college studying math and science."
Exactly >_>;;
Although I should say that it's correct that most people don't use math and science past the elementary school level.
Ness26 posted...
From: WhoopsyDaisy | #019
Except... part of being a functional adult is understanding a little bit how math works. Everyone has to be able to add and subtract, if nothing else than to sanity-check what their calculator says. If they had no math at all and replaced all their math with push-buttons-on-your-calculator classes, they'd have to take it on faith that they didn't slip somewhere when pushing the buttons.
Okay, now what about math after 5th grade?
I can guarantee you that people draw more often than they use anything from past Algebra I.
Oh, this post came up during the video. Yeah, people draw, but they draw for fun. It's like saying "people play video games more often than they use anything from past Algebra I." There are very few situations in life where being able to draw matters and being unable to draw is a bad thing. Having no sense of the scale of numbers IS a bad thing, pretty much always.
And re: the video, I agree that kids are creative and encouraging their creativity is a great way to help them learn. It reminded me a lot of Lockhart's Lament, a paper by a mathematician about the tortuous process of teaching math to kids and thus killing their interest in it (25 pages, but you can skim it):
http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
He talks about how he teaches his students by letting them explore problems while kind of guiding them to the right answers. This model isn't THAT unrealistic; given enough time (which is lacking in our 182-day school year with 2 weeks between semesters and 12 weeks between school years), it would be much more engaging than "the area of a square is the length of one of its sides times itself; I'm going to give you hundreds of squares for you to find the areas of and ensure that you have no fun at all in my class" and it would give them a better understanding of the material since they know not only what works, but also what doesn't, and why.
The point is that the system is broken horribly, and art is an attempt to fix it by throwing money at it. Instead of appealing to kids' love of learning and exploration in every class, the school system is set up to appeal to adults' need to give yes/no answers to the question "is our children learning."
--
senorhousemouse