Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Is Algebra Necessary?

I taught chemistry to pre-nursing majors (year-long survey course, otherwise known in the trade as the G-O-B course, for 'general-organic-biochem') and most of those students could not:

a) turn a simple real-world problem into a mathematical expression of any kind,
b) solve VERY simple equations, even those previously set up for them, of the variety; 3x = 21,
c) recognize the words "quadratic equation,"
d) correctly use simple proportions to solve for scaled quantities, or
e) work with metric units using dimensional analysis to perform unit conversions correctly.
My child could do most of those things by the time she was in second grade, and could do them with mastery by the time she was in 6th grade.


These were college students, recall. People who were studying to become nurses.

I weep for the future...

Also unspoken is that not everyone gets what they want. Very few people (relatively) who want to become brain surgeons are capable of doing the job to begin with. It's not very nice to delude those students well into college-- better to let them get over their disappointment early and make other plans. At least that's my opinion.

Same thing goes for college in general. Maybe if you can't handle basic algebra, a university isn't the place for you, if you see my point. I hardly think that the reasonable thing to do is to lower the standards to make college more inclusive. Lowering barriers to access, I'm all for, make no mistake-- but lowering expectations, I'm dead set against.

The world needs skilled tradespeople, too-- and not everyone can learn to be highly skilled there, either. The difference is that nobody is trying to suggest that I should feel like a failure for my lack of ability every time I take my car to my mechanic.

Kind of makes me grumpy that we seem to have lost our minds completely in the past generation, at least re: what constitutes "success" educationally.