Calculus serves scientists well, and I am not advocating that we junk it in high school entirely, but Dr. Arthur Benjamin, a mathemetician, makes a succinct and compelling argument here for making statistics, not calculus, the pinnacle of high school math.
(If I were the Czar of Mathematics, I'd ban calculators before senior year in high school, replace digital clocks with their analog, more useful, parents, and make counting to 10,000, one second at a time, mandatory before finishing elementary school.
I might even make counting to 100,000 be a requirement for high school graduation. Every year I offer an A+ to any student that counts aloud to 1 billion, 1 second at a time, and every year a few try it.)
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3 comments:
I feel guilty that I barely try to keep track of what I found where anymore, but it is getting overwhelming.
Dear Tom,
You are a consummate linker--as fine as your words are, I also enjoy your blog because of its extensive links.
I am coming around to the idea that if I link to the immediate source I found, then anyone interested can link all the way back to the original, especially for things like TED talks that are meant to be disseminated.
I can't think of the last time I linked something. I'm really bad about giving people credit for their ideas. It's not laziness as much as it is an inability to distinguish between my own synthesis and everyone else's ideas.
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