Getting really tired of the Humanities Vs. STEM stuff..

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Well, let's look at all of those. Some of us screwed up in school. Some of us did not do well, especially at math. That's our fault. At the same time, some of us did amazing at other subjects. Some of us were brilliant at art, or good at english, or skilled at languages. People have different talents. There will always be a spectrum of ability and differing talents among students, and the denial of that fact is largely why standardized education is a failed concept. Then there's the fact that 60% is passing. Easy enough to fake your way through, with no understanding of the subject. That's the system. And they teach us on the calculator, so while I can plug in an equation and get the right answer, to this day I'm still trying to wrap my head around FOIL.

There's also the fact that some of us, whether by necessity or inclination, pass a great deal of time between high school and college. I was out for almost a decade. Math is a language, and if there is a single rule that applies to every language ever conceived, it's "use it or lose it".

And while I may not have been a great student, allow me to give you a glimpse at who was teaching me: I, the worst student in my class, had to teach my teacher how to multiply matrices by hand, because she was convinced that it was impossible.

So to answer your question, it's the whole shebang. The entire system.

Then there's practicality. We need doctors. We need administrators. We need scientists. We need all sorts of careers to be filled that require math. It is far, far easier to go into a field like history or art. Why would a student, who is most likely just interested in getting a steady job and getting on with their lives, put forward the extra effort to learn math when they could go into another field, just as if not more lucrative, if the math was not offered for credit, and might I add, when they still have to pay a huge chunk of change for it? That credit is incentive, like it or not.

And see, I'm trying to repeat exactly the kind of stuff they taught us in the class. This is how it all comes out to me. All I remember is endlessly doing pointless excercises to try and find points on a graph that then were lines... and sometimes were curved lines.. just over and over and over and over...


and 90% of the time you could draw a line ANYWHERE on the graph and still get the answer right.. just as often as if you drew the line exactly where the points were you got it wrong.. and that kind of thing I just don't understand.. they also never showed us how to put an equation into our VERY expensive Ti84's and I still to this day don't really know how to use it to solve "College algebra" problems.. but I can use it's stats functions very well.

Algebra does actually have to do with lines, but the lines are just a tool. The entire point of a sloped line is to represent the relationship between the variables. Say, I get paid a certain wage per hour. For every hour that passes, my total amount of money earned increases by that amount. If my wage is 9$ an hour, and X is the number of hours worked, and Y is my total earnings, then that equation could be represented by Y=9X. It is also represented as a line that increases by 9 for every 1 hour, a slope of 9/1, or 9. It's the same thing, a different way of representing the same concept. That's what the lines you were shown are.

The curved lines are exponential. This means that the slope, the rate of increase of the line, changes. So in that previous example, Y = 9 times the hours worked (1 hour, then Y = 9; 2 hours, then Y = 18, etc.), in an exponential equation, say Y = X Squared, then Y is equal to X times itself. So if X = 2, then Y = 4 (2x2). If X = 4, then Y = 16 (4x4). Because the slope is changing with each one, that gives the line a curved appearance.

Basically, that's simple algebra. I'm not sure if that helps or just confuses you more, but trust me, man, I feel you. Most of the time in my precalc class I'm banging my head on the desk because I have no idea what's going on.

Why? You keep acting like this is somehow bad without ever giving a reason.

I could understand if you were upset that math was frequently taught badly, or that the only math that's usually taught is just tricks for calculations, rather than concepts.


Many of them didn't. Why does this surprise you?


The "somehow" seems to imply that you think forgetting it would be difficult. If they have no reason to expect that they'll ever use it, and if their teachers made it seem like a bizzarre, arbitrary game played with symbols that have no meaning, I'd be more surprised that any of them remembered it than that some of them forgot it.

Well for one I took the bare minimum number of math classes in Highschool because.. gasp.. I still sucked at math just as much when I was 17 as I do now.. and then.. gasp again.. I had 10 years to forget the 70% of the material I'd managed to learn to pass the class 10 years before! So that basically meant.. All of it.

Amazing really.. since I never ONCE in 10 years.. used ANY of that stuff... I didn't do a job that needed it, I didn't just bust out some binomials for kicks.. I passed the test.. and then once I had passed the test and gotten out of highschool.. I saw no reason to bother trying to remember any of that..

Only thing I really remember is pi r2 which I think is the circumference of a circle.

If students aren't actually learning the material, then why are they being given passing grades. Something is obviously wrong with a system that does that.

They do learn it, for the period they need it. Once they don't need it, they don't remember it.

Please do go on though and tell me that I'm not capable of college work considering I have A's in EVERY SINGLE class

Clearly it is needed, which is why they are forced to take the material in college again. You even said you wish you could pass "College Algebra", but this material you should have learned in high school, you shouldn't even need to take this class, you should already know the material when you graduated high school.

WHY do I need to know it?


You've YET to answer that. What Possible reason do I need to know how to find imaginary points on a grid? Or find out what a missing variable is?

Yes, I wish I could have passed it because it's the only F mark I have in a sea of A's. At the end of this semester I will have completed 48 hours of college classes, 51 if you count the F. So that means that I've gotten 18 A's to my 1 F. I'm still not using any of the stuff from that algebra class. I will NEVER EVER EVER need any of that stuff. If I need to make a graph, Excel will do it for me, so teach me how to use Excel!

You're just a troll, trolling and trying to cause trouble. You won't answer anyone's questions as to why "College Algebra" is "Highschool level" when clearly it isn't. It's a 1000 level Class. Just like English Composition 1 and 2 are. If these classes were all 'Highschool Classes" they would all be taught in Highschool and wouldn't be being taught in College.

You get a mark for every 3 hours of class? Wtf is that?
Also, I have around 18-24 hours of lecture per week... 48 a semester?
It sounds like you're complaining about an extremely small work load, to be honest..

and I know the high school curriculum inside and out from tutoring the courses, if "College Algebra" involves such simple mathematics as "solving for unknowns" and "plotting graphs", that's like Grade 9 or 10.
Grade 12 was full-on calculus here (Canada) - everything up to anti-derivatives essentially.

When I was in high school I had this same attitude towards English "I speak English why do I need to read shakespeare blah blah blah" .. just get it over with

Because when they take the test, they do know the material, at least well enough to pass the test, although given how things are taught and tested, that's just memorizing formulas and some symbol manipulation. And yes, I do think the system is messed up, although handing out passing grades is not the problem.

3 credit hours of class. As in 3 hours per week for a semester. 48 credit hours is about 3 semesters worth.

I have no idea what that means.
You get marks for showing up?
I go to lectures 3 hours a week per class, 3 to 5 classes, have a weekly assignment and 2 exams, for most courses.. sometimes there's an optional tutorial.

By your logic though, it sounds like he's saying he only has 3 hours of class a week? Maybe I'm just misunderstanding.

No.


If you have 3 hours of lecture per week in 3 classes for one semester, that's 3*3 = 9 credit hours for the semester.
If you have 3 hours of lecture per week in 5 classes for one semester, that's 3*5 = 15 credit hours for the semester.

If you took 5 classes with 3 hours of lecture per week for 3 semesters, you'd have 3*15 = 45 credit hours.

He's got 48 credit hours completed, with 51 total credit hours attempted, which means that he's taken 51/3 = 17 classes, and passed all but one of them. (That's assuming he hasn't taken any classes that aren't 3 credit hours, if he'd taken 3 different 4 credit hour classes, his total would be 16 classes, but 3 of them would have taken more time than an ordinary class. Since most classes are 3 credit hours and the number of credits he has is divisible by 3, this is a reasonable assumption.) If we take the heavier of the 2 loads you mentioned (5 classes a week), that's a little more than 3 semesters worth, if we take the lighter of them (3 classes a week), then it's nearly 6 semesters worth. A full load around here is considered 12 to 18 credit hours, or 4 to 6 classes.

Seems like an arbitrarily complicated way to keep track of credits, but I'm not surprised from a country that won't use the metric system..

Pass a course = 0.50 or 0.25 credit depending on the course, 40 to graduate (with specific courses needed obviously)
Pretty simple.

I am not trolling, College Algebra is a high school level course, when the majority of people take it in high school. English Composition is nothing like College Algebra, and the vast majority of Universities do NOT offer credit "College Algebra", like they do for English Composition. You are totally clueless, not to realize the material in "College Algebra" is taught to most by the Junior year of high school, many even learn it by their freshman year of HIGH SCHOOL, and a few bright learn it in MIDDLE SCHOOL.

EVERY SINGLE school allows you to test out of College Algebra, because it is HIGH SCHOOL material, no school allows you to test out of English Composition. Stop being so dense, and use your brain.

Last edited by DVCal on 12 Mar 2013, 10:31 am, edited 2 times in total.