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Math Skills Survey Shows U.S. Lags Behind
3l1za writes "The New York Times reports that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has released its results (pdf) for a test of mathematical skills given to 15 year olds in 40 different countries. A few apparent anomalies: The US kids rated 28th of 40 (so in the bottom third) while the Czech Republic, which spends in education 1/3 of what the US spends, ranked in the top 10. Further, only about 1/3 of US kids reported that they did not feel as though they were good at math, whereas about 2/3 of Koreans reported this--and the Koreans ranked in the top three. 'Mr. Schleicher said that students in countries that emphasized theorems and rote learning tended not to do as well as those that emphasized the more practical aspects of mathematics.'"
That's because most Americans are a bunch of ignorant dumbfucks.
Sorry, but it's the truth. And if you read Slashdot (and probably thus don't belong to that group) you know that I'm right.
Who needs math? All of our high-end jobs are being outsourced to other countries or being sent to the midwest for shit-wages.
Really, as long as you can punch the button with the picture of the egg mcmuffin on it and count back the change that the machine tells you, what else do you need to know?
Or are we all supposed to be calculus wizards for those high-end math-related jobs that don't exist?
From what I've heard, statistics like this are always skewed in favor of non-US counties, because not all counties educate all children. In many countries only the more gifted children even go to the high school level, so of course their average is going to be higher.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Who needs "math" and "science" when you've got Jesus??
Right. Because NCLB fixed everything. Because the red states produce smarkter kids. Because football is more important than academics.
Yeah, its all the lefties' fault.
Cheers ...
I agree.
One advantage of that manual exercise is that I have some feel for numbers, unlike a blonde who thought when you multiply by 10, you magically add 0 in the end. Don't ask me what happened when she was dividing by 10.
Czech schools would really like to spend millions of dollars or preferred local currency(one czech crown is about 1/25 of US dollar) on state-of-the-art sports facilities and equipment, the problem is, that they cannot.
;-)
Most funny, today was an article in czech newspapers that said: "czech schools are based on memorizing and they are lagging behind, Czech kids are unable to understand text they are reading and cannot accomplish basic tasks without clear instructions".
Well, math is considered to be very important in czech republic. Perhaps too much. Math itself is useless and czech kids doesn't know how to use it in real cases.
So much on czech schools. I've got long experience
Go ahead, mis-underestimate us at your own peril!
Why do I keep typing pythong?
How does this get modded Troll? It provides information on the state of public schools in the U.S. which is certainly relevant to the topic, no? You may not like the perspective or even agree, but to mod it Troll is rediculous.
A point of pride for whom? The child or the parent?
I see lots of parents driving their children around to all these activities with little thought to important childhood experiences such as play and fun.
A few apparent anomalies: The US kids rated 28th of 40 (so in the bottom third) while the Czech Republic, which spends in education 1/3 of what the US spends, ranked in the top 10.
Yeah, well the U.S. is #1 in terms of self-esteem, knowing how to put a condom on a banana and understanding that mentioning "Christmas" in a public place is an atrocious crime against our Constitution (Thomas Jefferson would be rolling in his grave).
That's far more useful than silly math.
Next you'll be telling me kids should study the Declaration of Independence even though it mentions God and is therefore technically a prayer. You should force all kids to recite Moslem prayers, especially when it's technically a conversion to Islam to do so, but Christianity is inimical to our country and way of life. After all, those horrible Ten Commmandments are trying to force us to worship someone. Who in this modern world could possibly do something so silly.
I'm so glad we are enlightened in the 21st century.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
"I took Calculus in college, but since I don't use it, I lost most of that knowledge."
Then you didn't *learn* it. You learned enough math to take you through the next test. But you didn't learn it well enough to take you to a place where you *did* use it.
There are people who need to be able to setup flux integrals and solve boundary value problems in the real world, at least setup to the point where technology takes over.