Slashdot Mirror
Discouraging Students from Taking Math
Coryoth writes "Following on from a previous story about UK schools encouraging students to drop mathematics, an article in The Age accuses Australian schools of much the same. The claim is that Australian schools are actively discouraging students from taking upper level math courses to boost their academic results on school league tables. How widespread is this phenomenon? Are schools taking similar measures in the US and Canada?"
If you never learned calculus or any higher maths, how do you know that you would have never used them? Math is used for all kinds of research in history: population extrapolations, statistical correlations, dynamic modeling, hypothesis testing, etc.
You're like a blind person who has found ways to cope with what you're missing, but that doesn't mean that you wouldn't benefit from sight.
No, you're not a former Math teacher. You're still a Math teacher, only now you're a math teacher with integrity. That's a former school. You're still a Keeper of the Flame of Knowledge. That building used to be a place where Knowledge was passed on. Now, like me, you're probably making the money you should have made as a teacher doing something else. And, yes, our world is poorer for it.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."