Kingdom of Knuffel

My poor poor poor Math, always beaten up.
But then people want smart phones, and wifi, and GPS, and all the stuff that need Maths for everything. You are a misunderstood, dear Math!


Trigonometry is angles.



Yeah, stuff you need for survival is good.
But you go to school plenty of years (way too many imho) so there is time to learn for survival and also to furnish your mind with logical reasoning and historic knowledge.

Chemistry is cool indeed!
Tests not so much, tsk.

Really.
Sometimes I think you don't live in another country, you live in another planet.

If I did such a thing to one of my students, there would be a riot.
Wtf.

It's outrageous.

You're supposed to live in a modern, advanced country, but they allow schools to act this way.
Schools! Don't the know what schools are?
Schools are supposed to be temples of knowledge, which will educate the women and men of the future to make the country - and the world - a better place. Or a worse one.

Preach whatever you want, if you do this to young people what are you actually teaching them?
That all that matters is money and power, and when someone is not useful for your purposes you kick them out.
That's the example they are setting. That's the world they are trying to build.
And that sucks.

No, it's not random, I believe my colleague's daughter just became 12, she's in the 6th class and they get this "higher" math already. I think this energy would best be saved for secondary education (here above 14) and let people pick what they're good at.

Yeah, maybe they'll pick only the easy stuff, but if something's easy for one, it shouldn't mean that's also a "less" topic? Something that's easy for one, may be hard for another. I think. :>


I don't think math is stupid, but I do think/see there's a difference in minds. Some people just get these things. I try to overthink it and want stories and real life examples before I can get a grasp of it. No, pi equals 3,14etc, I wanna know why. On the other hand, I think I'm not bad at overseeing things, logical stuff. Even stat was ok, and making data visible or grouping things. I'm better at that stuff. I'd love to leave the calculations to someone else.

But I sometimes do wonder if there's any proof that some people just have alfa minds and some just beta? Or maybe there are more types? It's just like, art people seem to be a specific type, math people as well, economic people as well. As if, they all seem to look at problems in a specific way.

For that reason I had one great semester at uni, I picked an entrepreneurship course and though there were many useless things, I loved the "set up your company" for the fact that from all sort of programs students were put together. So we had teachers, automotive guys, economic students etc. It was mainly useful to finally try to put the good things of all these different people with different qualities together. :) We failed in the end btw, the product idea wasn't that great in the end and we figured out quite some troubles when you want to make a plastic product, but we did learn a lot. :) :)


Btw, history in school is another thing, nothing wrong with history, but with the measuring they want to do. Why write and essay about history when I feel it's more like storytelling. Why test if you remember the exact date on which they killed a certain person? It should be way more essay writing on certain topics, figuring out the history from different sources which are as reliable as possible instead of the multiple choice questions to see if you managed to remember one stoopid fact in an entire history. Yeah, knowledge of time is important, like. Downton Abbey, does make a difference if it's 1912 or 1812, but still. >.> That's not the whole clue.

Also, I think kids would be way more motivated if they could learn by searching, working on it as if it's a project. And different sources is more a dream here, Budapest keeps changing the books, like. Rewriting history, I hate that. >.>

We definetely take it easier here.
Understanding Trigonometry requires a good handle in Algebra first, so it's taught when they are 15-16.
Because they first get taught Algebra when they are 11-12 (1st high school year) and it's quite early for some children. Abstraction requires a mental madurity that is not taught, it's something you must wait for them to develop.

I personally don't see the point in learning it any earlier...



There are completely different ways of reasoning, and that's something you can realize just having a conversation with another person.
That leads to some of us having a mindset that makes one thing easier but another thing harder. (Nobody is good at everything.)

And that's just what you are good at, there is also what you like. Or what drives your curiosity. Which often is not the same.
In high school I was good at almost everything (but History because my memory has always been very bad) but I only liked a few areas.
My parents used to think I'd choose studying Literature or something in that line, because I've always liked it so much, but I found I was driven towards theoretical logical thinking.

The problem is imho that we emphasize some subjects while we ignore others.
There are different qualities and all of them have a value.
It's not smart saying that everybody must be taught the same few things, just because they are the ones that help most people to earn their bread.
The world is changing and we may no need the same type of knowledges we needed two centuries ago, it might be due time to get updated!