A number of replies suggest teaching statistics or "risk". Steven Levitt (co-author of Freakonomics) has been advocating for this - calling it "data science": https://www.edweek.org/teaching-lear...ing-it/2022/01
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A number of replies suggest teaching statistics or "risk". Steven Levitt (co-author of Freakonomics) has been advocating for this - calling it "data science": https://www.edweek.org/teaching-lear...ing-it/2022/01
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Still only ~35% of young adults earn a 4-year degree - while an all-time high, it is still far from a majority of workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educat..._United_StatesOriginally Posted by Edward Weber
Also consider how innovation has reduced demand for labor. Consider how laborious residential plumbing was even 20 years ago (with cutting copper, sweating fittings, etc) compared to today with pulling PEX and crimping fittings.
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From my observations of jobs and young people entering the market, there appears to be a shrinking number of jobs available for young people without a degree that provide a decent living.
And even for young people with a degree it depends on what the degree is. For college students, there should be more guidance as to what the employment opportunities are for the field they choose. It's nice to say "Follow your dream" but that path may lead to starvation.
Many of the fields with the best renumeration are technical fields (a BS and not a BA).
Mike
[Too many young people want to go into a "glamour" job (example, movie making) but there are too many people in the field and it's tough to break in.]
Last edited by Mike Henderson; 10-18-2022 at 11:35 AM.
Go into the world and do well. But more importantly, go into the world and do good.
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As one that has spent over 50 years in professional woodshops, I eventually learned that I was a problem solver. Often, the work (radius staircases, round and elliptical work, and compound radius work) appeared to be derive from calculus or at least algebra. However, the math was simple, arithmetic, and rigid. As such, solutions were easily at hand, once I realized I merely had to identify the problem.
When in High School (1964 to 1968), I told my math teachers that I did not need to know anything more than minimal math, because these little boxes would be available for us to do basic math upon. Further, I should also have access to the computing machines as they became prolific across the landscape. Popular Mechanics and the like forecast the arrival of such devices. I went so far - too far, but it was high school - as to say that there would be little need for classes in mathematics, and algebra.
I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.
- Kurt Vonnegut
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I don't disagree, but if you have one of the millions of houses with soldered copper plumbing that need repair or maintenance, you need skilled labor to do it.
There is now and always will be a need for skilled craftsmen, no matter how much innovation reduces unskilled labor. The more demand there is for those with specialized skills, the higher the price for the service.
Of course, some may just rip it out, replace with lego piping and sell the copper.
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It doesn't take a lot of skill to sweat copper pipe - a lot of average homeowners learn to do it fairly easily. To really have valuable specialized skills, they have to be the type of skills that take a lot of time and effort to learn. Otherwise, others move in quickly and undercut the wage of the "skilled" person.
I don't know what those skills might be, but fixing copper pipe is not one of them.
Mike
[Certain types of welding and the certifications that go with that might qualify as a specialized skill.]
Last edited by Mike Henderson; 10-18-2022 at 4:34 PM.
Go into the world and do well. But more importantly, go into the world and do good.
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Yeah... NO! I was an artsy-engineer type in high school. I was part of an experimental group that studied algebra in 4th grade, geometry in 5th grade and an in depth repeat of them in 6th grade. I started to the see the world in shapes and angles, repetitious patterns, etc. To a large extent I still do. Some people do cross word puzzles, I would pick a large number and calculate the square root. I built sheds, dough boxes with angled sides, etc without a ruler or tape measure. I could calculate the volume in cubic feet or gallons of a large cylinder tank, or cone shaped feed bin. I used those formulas nearly every day on the farm, at the office, even in the kitchen. We have a 13 x 9 baking pan, and a scratch recipe for cake that makes 2 8 inch round layers. How much do you increase the portions? Had to calculate dosing of medication for cattle of various ages and sizes. Mrs. is a nurse and has to calculate medicinal dosing for various patients. (most done now on computers, but not all.)
I have a recipe for a certain soup that makes 3 quarts. What quantities of ingredients to make a 40 gallon kettle for an outdoor fall party? This is all elementary algebra.
When I drive down the road, I see trees by their shapes. Some are giant cones, some ovals, some egg shaped, spruce trees have hanging arched branches with vertically hanging segments, like fringes on a buckskin jacket. all spaced evenly repeated patterns in nature.
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Hmm-- I must be missing something, when I went to college the only major for which algebra was a requirement was mathematics. Many other science majors required classes like differential equations (completely useless, I have to say, to me as a biologist!), but algebra was sufficiently abstruse that only the math majors had to take it. The folks who do it for a living (I know several) seem to be kind of proud of its lack of real-world application.
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Given the shocking stupidity of the average American student of 2022, and given the clearly superior performance of past generations, I dismiss anyone who thinks it's smart to be against the old-fashioned methods of teaching by memorization and repetition. That point of view is too ridiculous to give time to.
It is remarkable that we live in an age where people are becoming more stupid and uninformed. Given the resources we have now for spreading information and teaching, there is no excuse for it.
As for unnecessary subjects for higher education, I would put things like English (apart from teaching grammar and writing), history, art history, anthropology, and sociology on the list, and I would keep music, languages, and STEM subjects. With the obscene tuition pointlessly greedy colleges charge these days to build their Musk-like endowments, it is cruel to make a student pay several thousand dollars to learn something he will never need in his career and which he can pick up in a few weeks on his own simply by reading books.
It's hard to learn music, languages, and STEM subjects outside of a school, and these subjects have value in the real world, so they should have priority over what people like me call "basket-weaving" subjects. And kids should have to learn algebra and geometry before college because most high school seniors still don't know what they want to do. They should be prepared.
I got a raw deal when I was a student. I was gifted in languages and writing, and educators with zero common sense encouraged me. Carl Hovde, the head of the English department at Columbia University wrote me an unsolicited letter inviting me to apply. What he didn't tell me was that studying literature and writing was a one-way ticket to becoming a fungible drone in a cubicle farm, or a cab driver.
The world of writing is a club, and talent isn't what gets you in. You need to share the morals and agenda of the people who publish. If you don't, the best you can hope for is to get one of the few niche positions available to tokens. No one told me this when I was young.
I was also pretty good at STEM stuff, and it's what they should have encouraged me to do. A 95th-percentile STEM talent is a gateway to productive work and financial security. A 99.9th-percentile verbal talent is of nearly no value. No one is going to pay you to do crossword puzzles or win spelling bees.
I dropped out of college, but I went back as an adult. By a weird series of events, I ended up studying physics and getting into a good graduate school. I almost didn't make it to my undergrad diploma, though. I had gotten bad grades in math in high school, and instead of trying to teach me good study habits and encouraging me, one of the bigwigs at my prep school suggested I just stop taking math courses. Because I was a big verbal brain.
As an undergrad in physics, I had to take calculus, which meant I had to learn algebra and calculus at the same time. Because I had been encouraged to give up on STEM classes, I didn't have the foundation to understand calculus. Boy, did those creative writing courses help me. Not.
In the end, I got burned out on physics and took the easy way out, becoming a lawyer. Some people are proud to be lawyers. To me, it was a badge of failure, but I had to do something, and law was easy to get into.
I wish I had been brought up in the drill-and-memorize days. I would have had a better STEM foundation and better study habits. I would never have dreamed of wasting my time or my dad's money with liberal arts courses. I don't think it was smart to try to become a physicist, because they tend to be miserable people with horrible social lives, and they generally end up in academic environments where tolerance and freedom of thought are punished. But I would have enjoyed working as an EE or ME.
I suppose it was not a good idea to take 7 or 8 semesters of calculus and tons of pure physics, but on the other hand, it's nice to be able to understand things other people can't get a grip on. A lot of people fall apart when they have to understand things like sines and cosines. Those things are like basic reflexes to me. I have forgotten an awful lot. I don't understand many of my old homework papers. But what I remember is more than most people ever learn.
I think it's a big mistake to throw out what works for most kids in order to cater to the oddballs. We shouldn't sacrifice the welfare of the majority in order to make people with learning problems (and their defensive, emotional parents) feel better about themselves.
Math and science are hard, and they turn kids into better students and better people. My physics homework was so hard I spent about 4 times as much time on it as I spent on math (things like differential equations and complex analysis), and math was much, much harder than tee-ball liberal arts courses. After physics, every other subject seemed like a joke, because it was, and the same principle would have applied had I studied math but not physics.
When I was in law school, I did not study much at all. The first semester, I learned I could live in the library, study all semester, and get an A, or I could study for three days at the end and get a B. I was satisfied with cum laude. You could never do that in math or physics. You have to be responsible. You can't do it in music or languages, either.
I remember being forced to take anthropology as an undergrad. The textbook was like a big coloring book. It was written on a level for children. The professor told us academia's simplistic, absurd theories about humanity, I confirmed what he said on multiple-choice tests, and I got an A-. I did virtually nothing in that course. I also had to take philosophy, and another physics major sat next to me. The poor professor made the mistake of starting to talk about electrons and so forth. We kept raising our hands. "That's actually wrong." "That's actually wrong." It amazed me that I could get 4 credits for that and only 4 credits for things like optics, which actually required intelligence.
Math and physics taught me to think. The liberal arts junk hasn't helped me much at all in life. Whoopee, I know what Immanuel Kant thought. Hooray for me. I read Villon in French. Great. Let's discuss the innumerable times that has gotten me out of a jam. And employers always want to know your take on Villon. "Forget programming languages. Where ARE the snows of yesteryear?"
All of the liberal arts stuff, I could have picked up on my own for almost nothing. I have read more non-STEM books since leaving school than I ever did as a student. Paying to learn about things like history and literature seems ridiculous to me. Some schools are now charging parents (or taxpayers, through loan forgiveness) $2000 per credit to teach kids yoga or the history of porn.
Every year, we think we know more about education than the year before, and every crop of students is more stupid than the last. These things are unquestionably true, but somehow we aren't getting the message.
Cry "Havoc," and let slip the dogs of bench.
I was socially distant before it was cool.
A little authority corrupts a lot.
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That amazes me. One of the first differential equations I was shown was used to predict the growth of a culture of bacteria. I'll bet if I start Googling, I'll find all sorts of uses for differential equations in biology. How can you predict how an epidemic will progress without them? I would think they would be very useful in predicting changes in animal populations. I was able to predict the spread of covid way better than the government estimates for several weeks, and I'm no expert on differential equations.
Cry "Havoc," and let slip the dogs of bench.
I was socially distant before it was cool.
A little authority corrupts a lot.
Contributor
University-level advanced algebra (e.g. linear algebra, group/ring theory, and the like) is a much different animal than what is normally taught at the middle-school or high-school level: much more of an abstract thing than what is usually used in engineering and physical sciences. It is decidedly NOT something that would be a requirement for HS graduation unless you're running a whole school full of future quantum physicists.
An example: https://www.math.mcgill.ca/darmon/co...p-advanced.pdf
(And quite frankly, much of what that text considers "basic algebra" is still well above anything I'd expect in a normal HS level math course.)
Yoga class makes me feel like a total stud, mostly because I'm about as flexible as a 2x4.
"Design"? Possibly. "Intelligent"? Sure doesn't look like it from this angle.
We used to be hunter gatherers. Now we're shopper borrowers.
The three most important words in the English language: "Front Towards Enemy".
The world makes a lot more sense when you remember that Butthead was the smart one.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much ammo.
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Maybe we're talking about different levels of algebra. I view algebra as a high school subject and precursor to classes like calculus. I know there are advanced algebra courses in college but I didn't think we were discussing those. And, yes, only mathematics majors would take those classes.
Mike
[I didn't see your post, Lee, before I did mine. Here's a link to the Basic Algebra book - https://www.math.mcgill.ca/darmon/co...napp-basic.pdf
Waaay above high school Algebra.]
Last edited by Mike Henderson; 10-23-2022 at 9:56 PM.
Go into the world and do well. But more importantly, go into the world and do good.
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Yeah, it's only "basic" in comparison to the "advanced". Maybe a better term for what you and I had as middle/high-school algebra would be "elementary". Those look more like courses I had as a sophomore/junior math major.
That said, my knowledge of what constitutes "normal" HS math is over half a century old. But the times (still 20+ years ago) I helped a friend with his child's HS math homework, the thing that struck me wasn't that it was more advanced than what I'd had, so much as that it was less sequential. They seemed to be trying to teach algebra, geometry, trig, and calculus all at the same time, getting to concepts early that they really hadn't laid the foundations for.
Last edited by Lee DeRaud; 10-23-2022 at 10:09 PM.
Yoga class makes me feel like a total stud, mostly because I'm about as flexible as a 2x4.
"Design"? Possibly. "Intelligent"? Sure doesn't look like it from this angle.
We used to be hunter gatherers. Now we're shopper borrowers.
The three most important words in the English language: "Front Towards Enemy".
The world makes a lot more sense when you remember that Butthead was the smart one.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much ammo.
Contributor
That's been my observation, also. The joke in college about history majors was that you could teach or sell insurance. Certain other majors had the same problem.
My estate will go to UCLA to help talented young people who could not afford UCLA to get an education. But I've specified that the scholarships will only be available to students who major in certain fields, ones where I think they will be able to get a job - Accounting, engineering, finance, computer science, and a few others.
Mike
Go into the world and do well. But more importantly, go into the world and do good.
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I studied physics (bachelors) and software (masters) and am software engineer by trade. During bachelors spent time on biology, electrical systems, technical writing, computers and obviously maths (mostly calculous).
I don't use 95% things I studied directly for day to day job. This doesn't mean these courses were useless. Time spent doing those courses shaped how I think or approach a problem. 5% of cases when problem is new, I have various tools available and I use them, after re-reading/refreshing course materials.
Literature (not language) and history are the only two areas that I think added no value.
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