[ExI] Fwd: year round school

[Adrian Tymes]

I disagree about the lack of value of algebra.

If you're going into business, or any financial field, you'll need
algebra.  (Then again, much of modern finance is basically a subset of
computer science and thus STEM.)

Fashion, or any clothing field?  If you need X amount of fabric for 3
dresses, how much will you need to make just 2?  And many other surface
area related questions.

Civic activism?  If you can help 1 person every X hours, or Y people every
8 hours, which is a better use of your time?

Sports?  Aside from the intuitive calculations done on the field mid-game
("at what angle do I send the ball so it will land where I want it to"),
these days there seems to be no end to sports-related statistical analyses.

Law?  News flash: when they call it the legal "code", that's a very similar
sort to software "code".  It takes the same sort of thinking to find the
loopholes.

And that's not getting into making household budgets, and other such
algebra-enabled tasks that most adults are expected to be capable of
regardless of employment.

On Fri, Nov 13, 2020 at 11:32 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> my letter to a legislator, head of the Education committee - your
> thoughts?   bill w
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> From: William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
> Date: Fri, Nov 13, 2020 at 10:48 AM
> Subject: year round school
> To: <ddebar at senate.ms.gov>
>
>
> Dear Sir,
>
> I have a Ph. D. in Experimental and Clinical Psychology and taught for
> over 35 years.  The idea of a 'summer slump' comes from studies on memory
> that do indeed show that students will do more poorly or even fail on tests
> that they took just a few weeks or months ago.  Even at Harvard.  But, they
> were not given the chance to study for them again - they had to take them
> cold.
>
> That absolutely does NOT mean that those memories are gone forever.  No.
> Memories that last more than a day or two are with us permanently, though
> the longer we live the harder it is to retrieve them, mainly because of
> competition from later memories.  There are some good reasons to have year
> long schooling, but the 'summer slump' is not one of them.
>
> The very best thing the Legislature could do to help students is to start
> school later in the day.  At that age they are mostly night owls and wake
> up slowly, so that learning at 8 o'clock is difficult.  They are there,
> they are awake, but their brains are still fuzzy.  There are many studies
> done by physicians and psychologists that validate those conclusions.
>
> I do not think it matters with year long schooling how long the breaks
> are.  I would be in favor of adding hours of school to the ones we have now.
>
> Just on a tangent:  requiring Algebra is just wrong.  Fewer than 5% of the
> high school graduates ever use it.  I am in a chat group with a bunch of
> engineers and they concur - no value to students unless they are going into
> science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM), and those students will
> certainly take algebra, precalculus, and calculus if offered, along with
> geometry, solid geometry, trigonometry.  Requiring algebra keeps many
> students from graduating.  A waste of minds, in my opinion.  And a lifelong
> hindrance to job prospects.  Of course it differentially impacts minority
> students.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> William F. Wallace, Ph. D. University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
> Brandon MS
> _______________________________________________
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> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
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>
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