Modern Educayshun

Post Reply New Topic

A right angle is 90 degrees, as ordained around the time of the Greeks.

There's no dispute about that....

Which sounds great and all, but it's not like it matters whether you calculate velocity in meters per second, miles per hour, parsecs per century or any other measurement of time and distance, it's still gonna amount to the same velocity. 100kph and 66 mph are the same velocity. Even if you invented a distance called a "booga" and a unit of time called a "wingo", you can still run the exact same velocity calculation, and get "boogas per wingo", and it's going to be just as accurate as miles per hour or meters per second or anything else. And if you know that a booga is 13.7 feet plus 14 centimeters, and a wingo is one hour and 22 seconds, you can still convert among them freely.

All you're doing is playing with word meanings, and replacing established units with arbitrary units. But the units don't matter, as long as you can actually quantify them. Lets say, as you say, a right angle is "5000 suns". So what? I can still convert that. A full circle is 20000 suns. A standard right triangle has a primary angle of 5000 suns, and two equal acute angles of 2500 suns. All of the angles of a triangle add up to 10000 suns. Changing degrees to "suns" in no way affects the ability to do the math effectively and accurately. It's just a conversion. Math is cool like that. It cares not what units you use, so long as you stick to them. Now, if you're going to change the reality of what a right angle is (the angles formed by the intersection of two perpendicular lines) rather than simply the words or units used to quantify that angle, you're basically tossing out the established system that gives it meaning to begin with. At that point why even use english? Or any language, singe theyr'e all just made up and arbitrary. Just make up words and bromp flum worb snogs berbiggle abbapa fromollilop as much as you want - but that doesn't mean other people are wrong cos they still call it "degrees".

And if you tried to argue with a trig professor that a right angle was NOT 90 degrees, but in fact 5000 suns, they would NOT "respect and allow your creative personal interpretation", they'd tell you to get with the program or get out. I suppose you could argue that's being "silenced", but the shoe's also on the other foot. You're there to learn trig from them, not teach your version of trig to everyone else - and that's the opposite of the "everyone is equally right" tripe from the video.

Ever tried to do non-base-10 mathematics? That's a real brain twister. Much like words have arbitrary meanings, the fact that we use a numeral system based on 10's is also arbitrary. Math works just as well if you do it in binary. Or hexidecimal. Or base-6. Do you know why we use base-10 math? It's a kinda dumb obvious reason. Point is, the units are usually irrelevant. Math still works.

The idea of "cultural relevance" seems to be proposing the idea that if you're trying to teach people math, a la "billy has 5 apples" kinda stuff, you have more luck if the person knows what the things being counted are. Which is true, but only in a really obvious kinda way. If I said that someone has 5 "gazorgnaphlaatz"s and someone takes one "gazorgnaphlaatz" away, sure, you can still figure out that the correct answer is you still have 4 "gazorgnaphlaatz"s left - but since you don't know what a "gazorgnaphlaatz" is, it still leaves things feeling vague, and not necessarily understood. But if I say you have 5 of something that you know what it is, you aren't left to wonder whether that unknown term was relevant somehow. This may seem like a minor detail, but when it comes to the learning processes, that additional ambiguity can greatly complicate things, whereas that additional clarity can greatly reduce the uncertainty.

I have to wonder if the people who think that this is what happens in college, have ever actually been to college. Video feels more like imagination filling the void of inexperience. Simply put, since they've never actually been to college, and can't speak from experience, it's easier to imagine unrealistic things, having never seen evidence to the contrary.

If I were a type X individual, I'd likely assume they're just making an hominem attack to stigmatize or otherwise perceptually devalue the act of getting a higher education, in the hopes that additional people won't get one.

In the end, it's all well and good to pick little things out of the video to find shreds of supposed accuracy in - but there are a lot of people who work damn hard to get their degrees, and acting like that video is even remotely realistic is a pretty big slap in the face of all that hard work. There are those of us who are autistic that have degrees, and if this video is true, we apparently only got them cos we were the special snowflake with the highest privilege score, and not cos we EARNED it, WORKED HARD for it. All that time money and effort, just so some smartass video can convince people that school just teaches you how to worship 40 genders and shame everyone into submission with victimhood.

The fact that people believe the video is both funny and sad. I love a good prank, but not when it turns in to the spongebob-dumb-squirrel-episode. I laughed at the vid cos I've seen those people come into college thinking that's what it would be like, where all opinions are equally valid - one thesis paper later they're in tears. Sorry kid, time for a hard lesson.

Of course, it makes for a nice package - make school look like a joke, and then because it's a joke, there's no reason to go and find out for yourself, cos why waste time on a joke. Saves the trouble of having to prove it for yourself. Just keep believing the video. Way easier.

FYI: 66MPH = 106.194 kPH

The underlying problem is that black people are very, very under-represented in STEM jobs.

So, the thinking is that math is too Westernized and is holding them back ("racist").

The trig professor may be called "racist", face job termination for enforcing Western abstractions over minority abstractions.

A member of minority ethnic group within a western country is still a "Westerner". Black Americans maybe under represented in STEM, but not because they have some African tradition of math in their heads that prevents them from digesting math as taught in American schools. How is making it "less western" going to help?

And besides...in American schools they ...(1) use ten digits for the numbers you count with (zero to nine) which is known as "the Hindu Arabic number system" (because they invented it India and it was brought to Europe by the Muslim Arabs), divide circles into 360 degrees (invented by the Babylonians who lived what is now Iraq thousands of years ago), and the farthest that most kids go in math is to something called "al gebra" (invented by the Arabs- which is why it has an Arab name). The only time Europe gets mentioned in the lower grades is when you pass through geometry, and they talk about Euclid (a guy who lived on the south coast of Europe in a place heavily influenced by nearby Egypt and Babylonia called "Greece"), before you leave Greece and explore Arab al gebra.

So where is this "Western bias" that you speak of? Maybe when you get to trig. But not in the lower grades of school.

What Seattle is doing is ...

1. One simple change is to show a non-white face in the math book to indicate to non-white students that non-white people can achieve success in math.

2. Including discussion of other number systems, such as the base 20 Aztec system.

3. Including discussion of math use per different cultures.

https://www.seattletimes.com/education- ... n-in-math/

From an ASD perspective, I think math is taught horribly.

So, I am sympathetic to their argument.

I was rounding so as not to confuse the unfamiliar. The point stands. That relationship doesn't change just cos the units do.

But thank you.
At least SOMEone here knows math.



"The thinking is..."? Who thinks this? And just cos they "think" it doesn't mean it's accurate or true.

Your points are imaginative, but in no way based on reality.

"Western abstractions" vs "minority abstractions"? You're kidding me, right?

I have a hunch that these whackadoo actions are merely being undertaken so they can present the image of trying to "fight racism", by fighting imaginary problems, without actually having to address the REAL problems. For the most part, the only people "upset" that there aren't more pictures of non-whites in math books, are virtue-signaling white people. By the way, most REAL math books, don't have any pictures of any people, period. They have diagrams and charts and indexes and graphs, but generally not pictures. LOL a math "picture" book, how delightfully kindergarten. Also, my trig book from 10 years ago already uses multiethnic names and multiculturally relevant examples, and a variety of units both metric and imperial.

But yeah, the imaginary textbook didn't have a black person in it, and the word problems mention computers or automobiles rather than ox-carts or mandalas, that's SURELY the REAL problem here "It'S AlL tOo WeStErN FoR mE To UnDeRsTaNd!! !" Never mind the fact that minority groups like African Americans are ALREADY "WESTERNIZED", since they've kinda been here for generations already.

Rubbish.

Yes, representation matters, but this is people latching on to that one single point as though it's a magic bandaid that can fix everything. It's not the issue at hand when it comes to academics. Visible representation of minorities is the BARE MINIMUM least-you-can-do thing that should already be done, and often is. There are some lingering dinosaurs still clinging to the past that haven't gotten with it yet, but for the most part people are on-board with it, and don't even notice when little things happen - though some people do go off like a shrieking fire alarm whining and crying about things like dr seuss no longer publishing a book that hasn't sold in years anyways.

Talking about what college is like, if you've never attended, is like talking about what having autism is like, if you don't have it, or talking about what a foreign country is like, if you've literally never been there. The speaker lacks the necessary experience to be able to speak from a position of anything other than 3rd party regurgitation of things they were told heard or read, assumption, and ignorance. It amounts to little more than armchair quarterbacking.

Perhaps sometimes the issue isn't "math is taught poorly", but rather "not everyone is good at math", or even "some people need to try harder than others to get good at math". Everyone wants to blame the tool, but nobody wants to admit they might not be using it right.

Is everyone who gets a degree smart? HELL no. But that's the exception, not the rule. Kids get daddy to buy a new dorm building and they get a free pass, kid cheats their way through, kid just barely passes the tests but doesn't actually know how to apply it, kid's on a sports scholarship and gets a pass, etc etc. These things do happen, but they're also fairly rare. That's not a failing of the curriculum. That's a stupid person who got lucky.

There's a few reasons why people try to discredit education. They don't have one or aren't skilled learners and are salty about it, they do have one but they suck at it or it's useless, or they do have one and they want to keep it to themselves, cos if you get one too, you're now a threat.

The video feels like a CollegeHumor type satire (IRONICALLY), in which case taking it seriously is like using The Onion as a credible news source.

A math problem has one right answer, but there can be different approaches to solving the problem.

Let's go to the source and look at the actual Equitable Math website itself, rather than right wingers' straw-man interpretations thereof. Here's the FAQ.

Math problems don't always have one right answer.

Just imagine math problems with irrational solutions.

Another example, what is the square root of 4?

Is it -2 or 2? Both work.

There is a philosophical debate as to whether math has existential meaning in the physical world, or it's all just in a human's thinking.

Remember, Pythagoras supposedly killed a shipmate , when shown this ...

If I remember correctly, the one most correct answer to the question "What is the square-root of 4?" is "Any point on a circle of radius 4 when projected onto a Cartesian Coordinate plane where the X and Y axes are orthogonal".

I might have to look this up, but most primary textbooks seem to assume a scalar value, not a complex one.  It was not until secondary school that I learned about complex numbers, and not until taking AP geometry did I learn about the answer I gave in the preceding paragraph.

How do we get more minorities and women into STEM jobs?

This approach is to make math more appealing.

What other ways can math be made more appealing?

"Dumbing Down" maths to appease the masses is why so few of the masses are good at higher maths.

That would be a nice education.

My experience, is the SQRT operation is abstracted from the underlying geometry, so a student only knows "two of the same numbers multiplied together".

Combined that with a *whole number line* with negative numbers.

Focus on correct answers and methodology more than history and appeasement.

I am tired of interviewing candidates who have allegedly earned their BSEE degrees, but who do not understand the Pythagorean Theorem and/or who cannot handle simple trigonometric terms (i.e., sine, cosine, tangent, et cetera).

We used to do those in secondary school level around the age of 12 to 13 onwards, and today they are considered to be college or university subjects. My older cousin and my Mum were introduced to them in the last years of primary school (We did algebra in primary school) and they had to use the old tables to find them out. (We were allowed to use calculators but only to work out the logerithms as it saved the schools having to supply us with the old books of logarithm tables. Those "Scientific" calculators were expensive as they were £30 each. That was a huge chunk of my fathers wages back then so my parents were not too thrilled when I annouced it was compulsary that I get one!)
Schools saving money by getting parents to foot the bill. (Teachers pay was a lot more then my Dad was earning).
But anyway... It is concerning when students at a higher level of education have not learned the more basic aspects of mathematics when their subjects are mathematical based. I do understand that not everyone has a mind to follow maths as a subject because we all have different talle ts and abilities and fair enough. Where one person is tallented in one subject, another person is tallented in another ad so on, and I would not change this as we need each other to be tallented in different things or our society will collapse, as if we were all tallented in the same subject, we would not need any help in that subject (And so no work would be available in that subject) and in the areas we will all lack, there will be no one else to come in and take over. We all need each other in life and it is good when we can all share our tallents and be rewarded for what we can do.

I must admit that the way I do maths in my mind is in pictures of dots in patterns, so I struggled a bit with showing my workings out because I would have to "Invent" workings out to tally with my answers (Working backwards from the answer) which was fine if I had the right answer as most teachers and lecturers would see the right answer and not look at the workings out, but when I got a wrong answer and they tried to follow my thinking to see where I went wrong, I could not explain what I was doing and neither could the teachers follow me in what I was doing!

What "the" correct answer is depends on how the problem is defined. When people speak of "the" square root of a positive real number, they usually mean the positive square root. On the other hand, if you are asked what the square roots are, the correct answer is that there are two of them, 2 and -2.