Middle School and High School students often wonder why they are required to take math and science courses

>English
Both academic streams will be doing this to the highest standards, for those who want to do research in literature etc. the commerce/law/politics route will be suitable. I imagine the lighter math and no physics/chemistry will allow all liberal arts majors to start university at what is currently a junior level at minimum.

>Neurobiology
Normal science background? All life sciences could do with more mathematics and mechanics in their curricullum, currently mathematical biology is being dominated by mathematicians and ChemEs when all life science degrees should be incorporating mathematical bio and group thoery in their undergrad programmes.

>inb4 muh balanced education
The students who are capable of being both specialized and well read in a wide variety of fields will necessarily also be capable of self-study. A tight and overly full formal structure only serves to hold them back.

The joke was it turns the acronym into SEMEN you turbo autist

1) There's the common "You don't have to do anything in life except eat enough not to die". Math is really cool and it's a shame some people miss out, just like Art.

2) Math teaches critical thinking very well. No other subject will wack you nearly as hard for being careless, especially if you try to teach yourself.

3) The particular application for the sequences and series part of calc2 is this: Taylor series give analytical solutions to "impossible" problems (like the n body problem) and Fourier series show up everywhere in engineering. Furthermore they show how calculus can sometimes be useful in discrete math (honestly, as a comp sci student that section had the opposite effect on me. I finally saw something that really applied specifically to my major from calculus.)

4) Math is actually critically important for anyone who wants to be a good engineer or computer scientist (or whatever you call them when the graduate). Math is how you communicate a lot of complex abstract ideas. This is important because you won't work in a vacuum without other people and only on what you studied. Successful people work with other's and understand other people's problems enough to contribute to solutions (especially in computer science, computers can get pretty fucking boring if you don't have problems for them to solve.)

Kek

>Of course, give all students ample opportunity to get into any stream.

The German system does not do this. Also, even the lowest streams seem to require about as much math as the typical American highschool does.

This is a common response in most classes if not all and at several levels of education. "Why do I need to learn this?"

It is more important to see how this question emerged than to answer it with this or that.

It has to do with what is asked of the students, the place that we put them as not-knowers, not-doers, that must be fixed in order to function in a world that is advertised as a very practical world, in which there is something to know and something to do. Therefore all that they must learn is something that shall be useful later on. Even though the question appears to pretty much any discipline, it will be more noticeable in math, physics, chemistry classes, sometimes biology, the ones deemed thes most difficult to come by, not at all by accident. If you learn something you consider useless in an art class or a language class, it might not strike you as a special waste of time, because you know full well that you can function in that world that is sold to you without any artistic technique or sensibility. Math and science teachers are in a position of pressure. If their students move to the next stage without knowing a specific thing those students will be in more and more trouble with the next teacher. They know it because they've been through it. So the pressure is passed from above to bottom, promising great returns over great difficulties. It doesn't mean this promise isn't true, nor that it is false, it suffices to acknowledge it exists. And conflicts arise when at the same time you are told to be useful and told to do something that is not at all clear to you what it is for.

cont

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The teachers answer it in various ways. Some might take the authoritarian route and just tell the students to work on it, it doesn't matter if you'll use it or not. That is at the very least an honest answer. Others will give real world examples in the attempt to justify it, sometimes succeeding at it. Others still would say it is useful to continue on with the very subject, procedures that are already inside a given problem, like maps such as the periodic table to help you visualize what you can do, or grids, or like a boring beaurocratic report can help in the precision of an experiment, for example.

I believe the true issue is that this question is asked when the teacher already spent some energy on the subject. The question always seems to arrive too late, at the end of the class, leading to the feeling of "...was it all for nothing?" to both teachers and students, to different effects. Thus, that issue is: why did teacher let it get to that point? Was it not clear from the start? Why would one have to explain it, if it was present early on? The teacher may have felt the difficulty of not knowing it, but do the students know? And how would they know if the teacher doesn't show them?

The situation should be inverted. Not that you are doing something and the question is how you'll use it. But that there is a desire to do something and a way to do it is by using this tool. The question "where would I use this?" becomes "what would I use here?". And so the teacher wouldn't have to explain the benefits of learning it, they would be obvious.

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PS: another important question is: when they do not ask "why do I need to learn this?" to their teacher, does that mean they know why they are doing it or does it mean that they don't know and do not care enough to ask it?

kids are curious, they ask a lot of questions

Just like they are required to learn about Engliish, foreign language, and the humanities, it's good to try to craft broadly educated individuals. Unfortunately, this doesn't work when your average person has zero intellectual curiosity and sits around asking "why do I have to know this to work retail?"

>I have transcended it in every way conceivable to mere mortal men squabbling in the dirt of earth

thats fucking gold right there

>has zero intellectual curiosity
>sits around asking

Do you notice anything strange in your text?

>>i kek'd
>i ked'd
My fucking sides.

Every single post in this thread is worthlrss, condescending or both.

The real and only answer is that you take the classes to learn how to learn.

In life, we are all faced with uncertainties and choices to make. For many, the unknowns are "hard" and cause anxiety. Being unable to cope, or not making a good decision to a problem can impact your daily life.

You take classes not because you need to know the material to be a functioning human, but because it forces you to take action about something you know nothing about.

>The real and only answer is that you take the classes to learn how to learn.

No you dont.
Otherwise all those classes would be called study skills, critical thinking, logic and philosophy and not Physics or Math which by the way never show you how to study the subject but only give you material on which to apply whatever skills you figure out on your own.

Actually it is. The development of critical thinking skills is the main purpose of highschool math and science.

That's why the act/sat measures based on aptitude rather than knowledge.

The subject matter is literally pointless for the majority of kids in school.

I really like your way of thinking. I agree with you, and your P.S. is quite intriguing.

>The development of critical thinking skills is the main purpose of highschool math and science.

Again, if that were the case they would teach you critical thinking, logic, philosophy, argumentation, debate, psychology, persuasion skills, study skills and not Math, Biology, Physics and Chemistry which require the critical thinking and study skills to learn it but do not teach the critical thinking or study skills but do expect you to figure it out on your own.

Are you too stupid to realize that you don't have to study things like this directly? We can learn to think critically and form arguments without taking classes on that specifically, just as we can play sports to get in better shape rather than lifting weights.

When I was in middle school and high school I wondered why I ever had to take classes not related with math, science, or writing.

>you don't have to study things like this directly?
>f critical thinking skills is the main purpose of highschool math and science
>critical thinking skills is the main purpose

I dont see any body builders playing sports all the time if their main purpose is to build body.
If something is your main purpose you go for it directly.

Also:
>Are you too stupid to realize
Way to lose in rational argument/communication instantly.

But these kids aren't body builders. These kids are borderline overweight dads who just need a little exercise so they don't have a heart attack, and it's easier to join a local soccer league for adults than join a gym and devote 3 days a week. They might as well maximize their time by learning reasoning and being exposed to other subjects.

You don't study biology for the sake of biology. You don't study physics for the sake of physics. There's this set of natural physical phenomenon that is encounter every day. Math, biology, physics, and chemistry are all models and representations attempting to explain, organize, and predict these phenomenons. Critical thinking are tools to which we use to shape models and representations. But what's most important are the phenomenon these representations are trying to explain. Unfortunately only a few teachers actually understand this concept.

non math person here. can someone pls explain this?

I'll try to do it. Keep doing poorly on exams though, scoring half my assessment scores everytime.

Can't help re-checking everything and losing time.

what are you, 5?

Because, as an increasingly technological and scientific (and thus mathematical) democratic society, it pays to educate all citizens in, at the very least, the basics of our civilization.

We teach them how to write and parse complex language so they can make an attempt at understanding important legislation and court decisions.
We teach them history and government so that they have a basic understanding of the foundations of our political system, as well as its general mechanisms.

Likewise, we teach them science so that they can understand and have the foundation to make reasonably educated decisions about legislation involving science, such as genetically modified organisms, nuclear power, etc and so forth.

Math is taught so that they can understand science, but also because it's interesting and stimulates development of the brain, the same reason we teach old poetry, fiction, etc

The one thing that really needs to be reintroduced to public schooling, however, is sketching / draftsmanship. Unlike most arts, it costs very little, but it provides the same intellectual benefits of a creative outlet, as well as helping to develop children's and adolescents conception of three dimensional space.

the sum of all natural numbers converges to -1/12

Fucking how? It's obvious that it diverges to infinity.

if you have a sum that it's like 1-1+1-1+1-1+1 it's either 0 or 1, right? so we say it's equal to 1/2 in average

if you do some little tricks you end up realizing that the sum of all natural numbers is -1/12

But the average between 0 and infinity is infinity/2

Which is still infinity.

1-1+1-1 is just n-n+n-n+n

1+2+3+4+4 is just n+n+1+n+1+1+n+1+1+1

if you rearrange it, you can reach -1/12

just look up a youtubevideo with the proof

I thought you weren't allowed to re-order infinite sequences as you please?

Isn't the point of a sequence that they come in a specific order, rather than just being a set?

That guy's wrong, and either dumb or operating on a deep level of irony to amuse himself.

The joke's about Ramanujan summation:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramanujan_summation
...which is not at all the same thing as adding up numbers.

Basically, you take a calculation that correctly finds the value of a convergent series, then you apply it to a divergent series as if it still works. That's the Ramanujan summation. For the series of the natural numbers in order (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 ...), it comes out to -1/12.

It's actually useful for some things, but it's definitely not the same thing as an actual sum. -1/12 isn't something that's equal to 1 + 2 + 3 ..., it's something that's equal to the Ramanujan summation of that series. Some very stupid pop-math people explain it as if it is an actual sum, as if 1 + 2 + 3 ... = -1/12, which is where the humor comes from in the joke about the guy stealing a twelfth of a dollar.

I'll bet the people that got that from the first read were dying.

Thanks for the explanation.

>infinity/2

Here we fucking go.

>I'll bet the people that got that from the first read were dying.
Not really. It's one of those things that people only laugh at so that you know they're in on the joke. It's like whenever someone mentions Fermat and some asshole feels compelled to say "I have a proof but it's too big to fit in this post! I know who Fermat is! Laugh!"

limit of n/2 as n approaches infinity

happy :^) ?

Makes sense.
Even in text books they usually over over whatever it is first and then at the end give you real world examples. It should probably be the opposite.

Don't get it

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