Edu

on Is Algebra Necessary?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/opinion/sunday/is-algebra-necessary.html?smid=pl-share

'[D]efenses of algebra ...are... unsupported by research or evidence, or based on wishful logic...It would be better to reduce not expand the mathematics we ask young people to imbibe'

I was interested, that research would be explained, faulty logic analyzed. A page of evidence follows implicating algebra in the high school dropout rate and the college dropout rate.

In most colleges, out of the 40 courses taken to get a bachelors degree only one needs to be a math class (and maybe one a science course). They are often classes like the author speaks of - quantitative reasoning, citizen statistics or the philosophy, history or art of math. The problem is, in order to be eligible to take that one math class, you have to pass the accuplacer, the placement test most incoming college freshman must take. If you fail it you have to take algebra. 'The requirement of higher mathematics comes into question' because of this.

Shall we reduce the requirement from one class in college to maybe 1/2 a class? Eliminate the eight grade level Accuplacer placement requirement. Reduce it to maybe just long-division?

Unfortunately the same argument to eliminate algebra could also be made for reading and writing. At my alma-mater, UMASS Boston, the biggest bar to graduation was the writing test that everybody had to take: desks lined up wall to wall in the gym. The topic was unknown til the moment you opened the packet, in my case it was a question on an excerpt from a novel by Jamaica Kincaid and another from a non-fiction source.

Turns out it is pretty easy to graduate from high school not really knowing how to read and write. You can even be in the National Honor Society in Boston Public Schools. It is a little harder to scam the math.

The job of the urban high school teachers of english/humanities classes is to tell the students what the book was about and how it shows how a character has overcome adversity. And then we tell them how to write it down. Then they pass all the high stakes exams and they are declared successful.

Even my best students were quick to admit that they never really read the books. Why would they? But they could tell the story. Give them a passage from the story they just told and they would be flumoxed. Beyond the scripted writing and their personal narrative they were unable to respond in writing to something new. I'm not sure how they get by in college. Maybe the adjunct don't have the time to read papers or check for plagiarism as they teach 6 classes for $27,000.

It is hard to write if you don't really read, hard to frame a problem if you cannot reason abstractly.