Why algebra is useless

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Continue reading with a Scientific American subscription. By dallasnews Administrator. Only mathematicians and some engineers actually use advanced math in their day-to-day work, Hacker argues — even the doctors, accountants and coders of the future shouldn't have to master abstract math that they'll never need.

I showed the book to my husband, Andrei, a computer programmer who loved math in school. He scrunched up his face. But I had no idea what he was talking about. In high school, I found math so indecipherable that I would sometimes cry over my homework. Hacker attacks not only algebra but the entire push for more rigorous STEM education.

For low-income students, math is often an impenetrable barrier to academic success. Algebra II, which includes polynomials and logarithms and is required by the new Common Core curriculum standards used by 47 states and territories, drives dropouts at both the high school and college levels. The situation is most dire at public colleges, which are the most likely to require abstract algebra for a degree in every field, including art and theater.

Unlike most professors who publicly opine about the education system, Hacker, though an eminent scholar, teaches at a low-prestige institution, Queens College, part of the City University of New York system. A subsequent study showed that when students were allowed to take a statistics class instead, only 44 percent failed.

Such findings inspired Hacker, in , to create a curriculum to test the ideas he presents in The Math Myth. For two years, he taught what is essentially a course in civic numeracy. Hacker asked students to investigate the gerrymandering of Pennsylvania congressional districts by calculating the number of actual votes Democrats and Republicans received in The students discovered that it took an average of , votes to win a Republican seat, but , votes to win a Democratic seat.

In another lesson, Hacker distributed two Schedule C forms, which businesses use to declare their tax-deductible expenses, and asked students to figure out which form was fabricated. Then he introduced Benford's Law, which holds that in any set of real-world numbers, ones, twos and threes are more frequent initial digits than fours, fives, sixes, sevens, eights and nines.

By applying this rule, the students could identify the fake Schedule C. The IRS uses the same technique. In his person numeracy seminar, the lowest grade was a C, Hacker says. Immigration always drives down labor costs. Once this is acknowledged as largely hooey, then it clearly becomes imperative to reduce competition for unskilled or low-skilled labor so that this population has a better chance of making a living.

I was just including that suggestion because most HBDers the official term for the Voldemorts are concerned about immigration for this reason. So I was glad to read your analysis and be challenged. You posit that poor instruction is not the issue, because in the early elementary grades, most kids are more than proficient.

My thought based on experiences in Gotham is that the th grade state tests in math are aimed very low. Kids can do well on them even if they have not developed a solid understanding of the underlying principles of place value and fractions, or real automaticity with fact recall. Especially with all the test prep they are given in class these days. In 7th and 8th grade this failure comes home to roost, as the concepts are more abstract.

So even on the equally poor tests in those grades, they suddenly look less competent. So if NAEP scores are bad too, why are you using them in support of your position? The stronger half still do worse than the entire population of math students until 6th grade. In order to believe that the elementary school teachers are doing a terrible job that harms all our students, you have to accept that the top math students, taught by teachers with far more qualifications, are still being held back by the failure of their elementary school teachers who did a poor job at covering fractions.

Not buying. But even more damning than that, and this is probably shown in NY tests as well: the achievement gap stays consistent. If the elementary school tests were dramatically easier, then all elementary school students would be acing the test, or close to it.

Instead, the gap is consistent—as the tested math gets harder, the gap gets wider. Meanwhile, the scores show the same results as is true of all tests—poor whites do as well as middle income blacks, and so on. The results do not show that math instruction is leading to poor scores, but that math, as it gets harder, leaves more and more people behind.

Wu, who feeds the fantasies of well-meaning middlebrowers who blame instruction. Wu has no clue heh as to what is involved in teaching kids of low ability.

He thinks that instruction will help communicate difficult abstract concepts. That will help with kids of high ability, but not with kids from the mid-low end of the spectrum.

Two addenda: I sound too definite about Dr. Teaching proportionality is extremely difficult. Second, this is a very broad picture and of course, there could be a way to massage the data that would reveal different shades of gray.

So I really should say that the results do not suggest a relationship between math instruction and poor scores, but rather a relationship between the cognitive difficulty of math and test performance. I was not trying to lay the contradiction of rising 4th grade scores and falling 8th grade scores at the feet of teachers. So the fact that elementary school teachers have SAT scores that are at least near to or slightly above the national average is, in a sense, neither here nor there, right?

Thus I come back to the quality of the curriculum. I know you touched on this in your SAT post; in my district the tutoring starts in 3rd grade. I go through the sample questions quite often. Fourth graders have to answer questions on fractions, for example. I did? Just as true for high school teachers, though. But your premise is not only unproven, but unlikely as a dominant reason for the high performance of elementary school kids. And then you switched from elementary school math to algebra.

And arbitrary. Congratulations on being freshly pressed — and good luck. The idea that elementary school teachers need to be improved is crap. Eighth grade geometry, we had a teacher with a thick Indian accent who showed us slideshows. Pre-calc was the one class where my teacher was great, but he was this little old guy who used to work with missiles in the navy, so of course he was good at math and had years of experience teaching it.

That pre-calculus teacher was the one good math teacher on my entire high school campus. Algebraic math is a little like push-ups for the brain. While one may not need algebra, the brain benefits from the solving of equations. By the time they have to choose where they want to go to college, they might find that they love astronomy. You need algebra for a lot of astronomy, especially when you get into the area of astrophysics. I became furious when I realized that my sub-par high school education had wasted multiple years of my life.

Lucky for me, I managed to switch to a school where I take college-level classes that are even beyond AP mainly because most of them are actual college classes, at a college. Not everyone can do this, though. It angers me that the government lets this go on while they bitch and argue about gay marriage and abortion. Apologies for the long, angry post. As a student who considers herself an intellectual, I get really, really frustrated by the crapshoot that is modern education. Great comments, even though I disagree with a lot of them.

This is not open for debate. It happens. Moreover, high school math is much, MUCH harder than elementary school math.

Your argument, in my view, only holds for kids with high cognitive ability. Yet a large part of that unhappiness is caused by the expectation that all students can achieve equally. In that environment, teachers are often prone to simply passing the kids who work hard. There are an infinite number of ways in which school can be bad.

Overall, we do a pretty good job given our ridiculous expectations and our challenging populations. In other countries, they boot half the kids to vocational ed.

Also, I hate to break this to you, but your post tells me that your school did a pretty good job of educating you. I see way too many of my classmates failing. On those grounds, you are right. Not everyone can achieve equally. Having developed a hobby of researching how the brain works and all that jazz, I know that different people have different levels of intelligence.

I suppose I am overly optimistic in that respect. I participate in a lot of outside learning. I research things that I want to learn about. Most of the students I know complain of not being engaged or taught in a way they can understand. This is simply based off of what I and those around me have experienced, and in the past at that. The school I now attend has excellent teachers. Honestly, the only thing that Algebra proved was that I was lousy at math and it made me hate math from then on.

Personally, the whole set-up that algebra is less worthwhile than statistics is silly—algebra introduces the ideas of variables and multiple answers that statistics is based in. That said, I do think everyone should be required to take a semester of statistics, because it is so applicable to everyday life and decisions.

Why on Earth do you need to sort test scores by race? I use algebra in real life to change knitting patterns into bigger or smaller sizes. We sort scores by race all the time. Sure, measure by country or socioeconomic status, variables that indicate differences, but if you keep measuring by race there will always be segregation. I use simple equations to scale recipes and other mixtures up or down. In other words, never. All humans are not the same, any more than different dog breeds are the same, despite all being dogs and having some shared ancestry.

I use algebra all the time. I also use probability, statistics, calculus, logic and many other branches of math. I quite see your point but I think that if we keep drawing attention to race, using it as a reason for things then it will continue to be an issue. I expected more out of this blog such as: algebra is not used in the real world. I believe algebra is useless in this day and age. Why we had to suffer through it and why our kids must do the same is beyond me.

You use a computer since you wrote this, and you likely have a cell phone. Do you have any idea how much cutting edge mathematics is involved in creating these technologies?

I used to love algebra in school. If not as a separate subject, it could be incorporated in statistics just to introduce the concept of equations and variables, which is the bedrock of statistics.

The database you used to tabulate your graphs is really cool. Congrats on being freshly pressed! Forget algebra, geometry, literature, physics, and the works. Just teach highschoolers some vocational skills so they actually have a prayer of getting a job in this though economy. It would be a bit more interesting if there was an education system that created jobs for students instead of preparing students for jobs.

I pulled through college algebra with a TON of tutoring. But, it was a necessity in order to graduate. All I really learned anyway was how to use a calculator to figure it all up! Something I could have learned from the calculators instruction manual The price of advanced education and the unnecessary classes is deterring a LOT of people from wanting to advance their positions in life.

Algebra, geometry, literature, foreign languages, etc should only be required if those are the fields in which a person wishes to advance to. Universities are all about profit and so they force students to know this stuff.