Why is algebra important in High School to College?
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I never understood the question of “why are we learning X in school if we don’t use in real life?”. Well what about training your brain to do something more than driving a car and making toast? That’s like saying “I don’t know why I’m lifting weights in football practice if there’s no weights in the field”.
I never understood the question of “why are we learning X in school if we don’t use in real life?”. Well what about training your brain to do something more than driving a car and making toast? That’s like saying “I don’t know why I’m lifting weights in football practice if there’s no weights in the field”.
Algebra is the study of functions/graphing with variables, Cartesian planes and such, it’s very important to learn because a lot of things in life can be represented using algebraic relationships.
Algebra is the study of functions/graphing with variables, Cartesian planes and such, it’s very important to learn because a lot of things in life can be represented using algebraic relationships.
I will ignore the use case where people need to understand algebra for technical work (accountants, engineers, etc.) I’ll talk about the common man.
High school Algebra focuses on a really core idea in math: If you have an invariant, manipulations that don’t change the invariant are special.
And this is a really really instinctive thing to do.
Lets say you know that you change t-shirts once a day. Then if you want 7 days till laundry day you’ll need at least 7 t-shirts. What if you have to change t-shirts twice? Well then you’ll need 14 t-shirts.
You have kids and need to get them to school at 8am. Breakfast takes 15 min to make, and the kids take 10 minutes to get to school. You want 10 minutes of buffer time. You’ll have to make sure they get up by 7:25am.
You know your living situation costs 1500 a month. You know you spend around 200 dollars on food a week. You make about 3000 a month. Well then you have about 1800 a month to freely spend on other stuff.
So if this is so instinctive, why do we have a formal class? Practice, generalization, and abstraction
You need to practice this, because without practice your skills are trash.
You want to be able to generalize this, because sometimes you have more complex problems
You should learn how to abstract this because then you’ll realize that the important part of problems have nothing to do with the context of the problem, but instead are related to the problem itself.
I will ignore the use case where people need to understand algebra for technical work (accountants, engineers, etc.) I’ll talk about the common man.
High school Algebra focuses on a really core idea in math: If you have an invariant, manipulations that don’t change the invariant are special.
And this is a really really instinctive thing to do.
Lets say you know that you change t-shirts once a day. Then if you want 7 days till laundry day you’ll need at least 7 t-shirts. What if you have to change t-shirts twice? Well then you’ll need 14 t-shirts.
You have kids and need to get them to school at 8am. Breakfast takes 15 min to make, and the kids take 10 minutes to get to school. You want 10 minutes of buffer time. You’ll have to make sure they get up by 7:25am.
You know your living situation costs 1500 a month. You know you spend around 200 dollars on food a week. You make about 3000 a month. Well then you have about 1800 a month to freely spend on other stuff.
So if this is so instinctive, why do we have a formal class? Practice, generalization, and abstraction
You need to practice this, because without practice your skills are trash.
You want to be able to generalize this, because sometimes you have more complex problems
You should learn how to abstract this because then you’ll realize that the important part of problems have nothing to do with the context of the problem, but instead are related to the problem itself.
The consistent problem solving practice that comes with algebra is to your brain as a consistent weightlifting regimen is to your muscular growth.
The consistent problem solving practice that comes with algebra is to your brain as a consistent weightlifting regimen is to your muscular growth.
1. It teaches fundamental math concepts which are important for any number of fields, notably engineering and sciences but also trades. It’s also a stepping stone along the way to more advanced mathematical methods including calculus, differential equations, statistics, etc.
2. It teaches critical thinking and problem solving, involving you having to learn how to break down a problem in to steps, sometimes requiring a fair bit of creativity, in order to get to a solution. It also doesn’t require anything but a pencil and paper which makes it more amenable to reach more students than subjects requiring labs.
3. In my college at least, literally everyone back in the day had to graduate with some level of calculus. Now that could have been taking ‘math for lower life forms’ in stead of ‘honors calculus’ but it was still calculus. I still remember to this day a student struggling through a tutoring session wailing ‘But X was 3 in the LAST problem!’. Don’t be that person. Take algebra. I never took calc in high school because I took Algebra 2 over again my freshman year because I felt I didn’t understand it well enough. When the calc teacher asked why I wasn’t in her calc class my senior year I explained why and she replied that she wished more of her calc students had taken algebra again.
1. It teaches fundamental math concepts which are important for any number of fields, notably engineering and sciences but also trades. It’s also a stepping stone along the way to more advanced mathematical methods including calculus, differential equations, statistics, etc.
2. It teaches critical thinking and problem solving, involving you having to learn how to break down a problem in to steps, sometimes requiring a fair bit of creativity, in order to get to a solution. It also doesn’t require anything but a pencil and paper which makes it more amenable to reach more students than subjects requiring labs.
3. In my college at least, literally everyone back in the day had to graduate with some level of calculus. Now that could have been taking ‘math for lower life forms’ in stead of ‘honors calculus’ but it was still calculus. I still remember to this day a student struggling through a tutoring session wailing ‘But X was 3 in the LAST problem!’. Don’t be that person. Take algebra. I never took calc in high school because I took Algebra 2 over again my freshman year because I felt I didn’t understand it well enough. When the calc teacher asked why I wasn’t in her calc class my senior year I explained why and she replied that she wished more of her calc students had taken algebra again.
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