So, I read this article and have to disagree with this point that people in very remedial math classes have cognitive issues .
I can think of so many exceptions to this that I have personally encountered. Its usually because of poverty or home schooling and often isnt the fault of the student. I know someone that is far more intelligent than I (I went to a top 3 cs school and have had a very successful career). This person can't do basic math because they were never given the opportunity to learn it. There are also people that are perfectly intelligent, but messed up really badly when they were younger. They should have the opportunity to turn things around.
They should, but this is arguably social work rather than the sort of education we should charge [massive quantities of interest-bearing] money for.
What I don't understand is how you can ethically accept someone for admission to a university knowing you will have to do extensive social work to bring them up to the standard of education you were supposed to test for at admission. Big chunks of that are affirmative action, sports scholarships, and functionally-for-profit admits (in my system, overseas admissions to a state university). Every student like this you accept for a normal course of undergrad work represents another student that you're going to reject for not meeting admissions criteria.
We have historically used "Community Colleges" as a second tier system that assisted this sort of student for minimal debt with significant subsidy, and "Universities", especially "Research Universities", as a first tier system where both professors and students are expected to perform higher level work.
I know a couple people who are much smarter than me in many ways, but who failed a whole bunch of college math classes because they checked out way back when nobody could tell them why the fuck they were spending so much time factoring or solving quadratic equations or any number of other hated-by-most-students and largely motivation-free chunks of our k-12 math curriculum.
Hell I got a lot farther in math and for the most part I can’t tell them why we did a lot of that, either.
People who ask this kind of question have a very narrow fixation on math specifically, I think. One learns to do these things to understand mathematical thinking, how to approach and solve math problems, etc.
When, as an adult, have you used the knowledge contained in the book Frankenstein? But nobody says "why do I have to read Frankenstein?" because they understand that it's not the specific book that matters.
> But nobody says "why do I have to read Frankenstein?"
They really do. Secondary school students famously often don’t “get” good books and think they’re awful and pointless, much as people who’ve not been exposed to a given anything-but-totally-non-challenging musical genre will often think its masterpieces are boring and/or bad.
IMO, that's also due to a lack of life experience. The students don't "get" it b/c it's too alien for them to relate to. They can be taught to echo the correct answers, but it's later life experience that will enrich their knowledge if it was drilled deeply enough that they remember.
In this particular narrow respect, math attracts and rewards people who like doing it without need for motivation. Same like people who like to play sports.
About half of middle class US public school students don't want to learn any math at all. There are many HS students who can't answer "What's half of 20?" or factor the number 15.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/
There are many HS students who can't answer "What's half of 20?" or factor the number 15.
Part of me sees that and immediately thinks "That can't possibly be true". Another part of me reminds the other part that I used to feel the same way about the statement "many working programmers can't write FizzBuzz". And then I was on the interview team for my employer a couple of jobs back, and we routinely asked candidates to write FizzBuzz. And many, including folks with 10, 15+ years of documented coding experience, and/or Masters or PhD degrees in C.S., could not do it. And that's even when they were given a laptop with an IDE open, with the skeleton of the program in place, with strategically located comments saying "your code goes here" and suchlike.
I don't know what to think about humanity sometimes. The same race that put people on the moon, helicopters on Mars, Voyagers beyond the edge of the Solar System, invented the Internet, nanotech, lasers, etc. has people who can make it to (and through) high school, and still can't come up with "what's half of 20" or, apparently, write FizzBuzz???
> I don't know what to think about humanity sometimes.
If it's any solace, selection bias is a thing. Those applicants that can't Fizz Buzz? They rarely get hired, and are rarely kept on for long when they do get an offer. Spoolsky made the argument like 20 years ago that as a result they flood the zone, and produce a massively biased applicant stream.
After the Boston Marathon bombing, one of my buddies (masters cum laude in history) posted a long series of socially conscious rants about white elites unfairly demonizing the suspects for being brown people. I had to explain that Chechnya is right in the middle of the Caucasus mountain range. "Oh."
They had to fudge the demographics in the 1930 census because so many people from Georgia, Texas, etc identified themselves as South American.
I knew a guy who spent weeks drooling over bargains in a UK computer magazine without realizing that £ was not a dollar sign.
My buddy in Santa Fe gets into arguments with customer support people over whether New Mexico is part of the United States.
I can think of so many exceptions to this that I have personally encountered. Its usually because of poverty or home schooling and often isnt the fault of the student. I know someone that is far more intelligent than I (I went to a top 3 cs school and have had a very successful career). This person can't do basic math because they were never given the opportunity to learn it. There are also people that are perfectly intelligent, but messed up really badly when they were younger. They should have the opportunity to turn things around.