- Tony Wagner article - need more information. I'm willing to accept that grades are not the most suitable measuring tool, but his alternative is not very well defined.
- The NYT article would be put to better use by wrapping fish or lining bird cages. As information, it's pretty much a failure. This failure was particularly egregious:
Even in jobs that rely on so-called STEM credentials — science, technology, engineering, math — considerable training occurs after hiring, including the kinds of computations that will be required. Toyota, for example, recently chose to locate a plant in a remote Mississippi county, even though its schools are far from stellar. It works with a nearby community college, which has tailored classes in “machine tool mathematics.”
As a professional technologist, I can tell you that if you have to construct programming that uses any sort of computation, you MUST understand and be able to construct basic algebraic expressions correctly, because everything has to be stored as a variable and manipulated as such. If someone has to show you how to do that, they'd rather show you the door first. You've picked the wrong field.
So, why teach it to every child in high school, when some people will grow up to be "poets and philosophers", as the article says? Because it's necessary to understand your mortgage and your student loans. Because it gives you choice in case you find out that poetry and philosophy don't pay.
