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In reply to the discussion: Trend-starting Texas drops algebra II mandate [View all]SheilaT
(23,156 posts)that kids just shouldn't be required to take courses they find difficult or boring, you need to understand that the logical outcome would be to require no more than a fourth grade education.
The fact that somewhere around half of all kids starting college have to take some kind of remedial coursework is stunning. It's a combination of low high school graduation requirements, low achievement on the part of the students themselves, and sometimes poorly taught classes.
I had the amazing good fortune to take a math program in high school in the early 60's that was called UICSM - University of Illinois Committee on School Mathematics. It was absolutely amazing in the way it taught the students to figure out and prove everything. I did reasonably well through the first two and a half years, but into the third year we were in calculus, and I just wasn't ready for it. Some thirty years later I was needing to take more math to complete a college degree, and after having taken no math (beyond a simple statistics for social sciences in the interim) I tested into algebra II. The first two weeks were a struggle, but every day things I'd learned three decades earlier came bubbling up into my brain and I got a B. Then it was college algebra, the level I had to achieve for my degree, and I got an A. I was on such a roll that I then took statistics (another A) and calculus (a B). When I was taking the calculus class and loving it, I kept on marveling to the various math teachers at the junior college that I was now in my late 40's and doing so well. To a person they said, "Oh, Sheila. What people don't realize is that math is developmental, and a lot of 16 or 17 year olds aren't ready for calculus. Give it a couple more years and they will be. As you are."
Note that they were very specific about calculus.
I am of the opinion that math at least through algebra II, at least two years of lab science (Biology, Chemistry, Physics, or Physical Science) and a couple of years of a foreign language ought to be required to graduate high school. The other alternative is to simply let students take the GED whenever they want and get a leaving certificate that way.
And it's not so much whether you'll actually use the specifics of whatever math you learn, or speak to someone in Spanish, or whatever. It's the intellectual discipline, the basis of real education, of learning, of opening up the world of knowledge. That's what it's all about.