Colleges across the country are grappling with the same problem as academic setbacks from the pandemic follow students to campus. At many universities, engineering and biology majors are struggling to grasp fractions and exponents. More students are being placed into pre-college math, starting a semester or more behind for their majors, even if they get credit for the lower-level classes.
Colleges largely blame the disruptions of the pandemic, which had an outsize impact on math. Reading scores on the national test known as NAEP plummeted, but math scores fell further, by margins not seen in decades of testing. Other studies find that recovery has been slow.
The maybe rheu shouldn’t advance and be failed? Like to me if you’re bad at a subject, you should be required to take it until you pass it, not push along to the next harder version of it. Kids don’t get left back or failed now. That is the problem. If you’re not ready fine, but you can’t take algebra until you pass pre-algebra.
I’m speaking as someone who didn’t learn to read until 3 grade and still graduated on time and went to a good college. Failing classes is fine as long as you can also catch up if you rapidly learn the material as well.
Yeah, but math isn’t really relevant for most people past the elementary school level.
It’d be pretty messed up to fail them for something they aren’t going to use in the real world. Lots of people who justifiably ‘don’t care about math’ would be held back for no good reason, except maybe to stroke the ego of people who do.
I hate these takes. Math isn’t about relevance of specific concepts and whether you’ll use them in day to day life. It’s about learning to think critically and problem solve in general. We need more of society to be better at that.
Being good at solving lots of complex math you never use in every day life CAN be beneficial in nearly all situations which require critical thinking, problem solving, logic, following instructions, etc.
There’s a weird amount of accepted anti intellectualism that specifically applied to math, and I’ve never understood it.
Most people have a hard time grasping concepts as simple as compounding interests, which is an incredibly important concept if you want to either save money or not go into ridiculous amounts of credit card debt. You use algebra every single day, doing thing as simple as shopping. People just don’t realize it.
You have a good point, but it’s not something most people would be interested and for good reason.
They need pragmatic ways to care about the problem at hand. If you can’t offer them that, you’re just focusing on theory which may or may not be relevant. Lo’ and behold, people care more about what’s actually relevant than what may be relevant.
It’s about learning to think critically and problem solve in general.
To be fair, that’s not specific to mathematics at all.
