Since grade school, I have always went "WTF?" with maths questions they asked at school. Here is an example I faced when I was around 8 years old:
There are 8 chickens and an unknown number of horses in an animal farm. When you count their legs, there are 28 legs. How many horses are there?
I was like "Just stop wasting our time with counting legs and count the damn animals already". What a genius solution right? I guess that explains why I still can't learn a maths topic without thinking "What kinda stuff are we going to use this knowledge for? I would be okay if it was general knowledge but..."
...But that's just missing the point, it's just a metaphor to make the example less abstract. Would your eight-year-old self preferred it if it said. "X=2Z, Y=4Z. You have 8X and 28Z. How many Y do you have?"
(Also I hope I did that right because I suck at math too and there is a big chance I failed )
Well, I would went "WTF?" anyway. I guess creating illogical metaphors is better than that
But they should at least make the students think "Oh, mathematics are very useful" I don't know how to do that though.
The ability to just shut up and work on a task is quite an important one too. Besides that, many of the seemingly senseless problems (like the leg-counting one you mentioned) train you to convert a textually explained problem into one a mathematic problem. In that case they were trying to get you to realize that you could solve the problem by realizing you'd need to solve the equation 4*h + 16 = 28. I would argue that the ability to convert problems and the realization that problems are convertible between different kinds of descriptions is actually something very important and mathematics helps a lot with that.
Sorry. I can't just shut up and work on a task without thinking about the purpose. That's why I think I would be the worst soldier in the world. I just think those metaphors should be logical to make students understand the topic better and stop brats like me going "What do we need this stuff for? Geez"
Of course. If you ask an average student s(he) won't want to learn a thing that seems complex. But do they really have to teach college stuff (IMO) like trigonometry at high school?
I learned it in 9th grade, so...it doesn't seem that advanced to me.
And Virex is right, the ability to convert a situation into a mathematical model, perform your calculation, then translate the mathematical result back into a real-world explanation is a *core* skill in life. Down to things like "I have 25 days to be ready for this trial. Discovery takes X days per witness, and we have three legal strategies, each of which involves calling a different number of witnesses, but some of the witnesses are the same for all cases, and each has a different probability of success....what's the time-optimal strategy to pursue?"
Wow. We learn it at 10th grade. I forgot it all though.
They don't really teach they skill. I don't know what kind of education is going on there but come to my school and ask that to 100 students. I will jump from a sykscraper if 5 can answer correctly. Rote learning system is used here and I'm pretty sure we will forget everything when we graduate.
Did anyone get the feeling that this thread is about to turn into something else? Just sayin'