UFB. Yeah driving over a bridge should be a coin flip whether it will fall down good idea. These people are out there folks...
It's so much more important for high-schoolers to learn basic statistics than for them to learn trigonometry -- whoever made that decision 150 years ago should be exhumed and fired— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) January 11, 2018
Then here this journo (shocking...) endorses it as if on cue:
+1— Michelle Jamrisko (@mljamrisko) January 11, 2018
with a hearty AMEN. Statistics was unbelievably useful to me, to this day. https://t.co/kRWOSI3iId
They are out there...
4 comments:
In high school, I had a summer job with the big engineering company, Bechtel, that was building a huge plant for General Dynamics in the are. I was assigned to a ciivil engineer laying out a parking lot as his rod man. I drove a stake at the appointed place and then held a rod against it while he sighted the correct level for the pitch of the surface for draining.
One morning he was late for work and the chief engineer for the project asked me if I knew trig. I said I had just completed a course in it. He gave me a test to see how much I knew. After he looked at it, he said that my engineer would be out of work for a couple of days and he was making me an "engineer."
I got a assigned a rod man and started the job immediately with a laborer assigned to me as a rod man. When the other engineer got back, he was assigned another rod man and so there were two crews on the job where before there was only one.
Not a coincidence that you also find yourself here in my opinion....
I wasn't that great at maths at school and I would just give up as soon as it got hard. I considered myself dumb at maths. But I had a rather adorable maths teacher when I was about 14 and I seemed to get much better at maths with her, but I'm certain it was not because I had a crush on her, I really do think she was just good at teaching me maths. When she left after a couple of terms I seemed to slip back again.
When I was sixteen I became an apprentice and I enrolled for a City and Guilds Electrical Technicians course, not a craft course. My maths was just good enough to get in and after two years I passed the course.
Years later I enrolled for a BTEC Ordinary National Certificate course in electronics which is considered to be very mathematical and I got in because of my C & G's Electrical Technicians certificate. The course had phase tests every two months in all subjects and an end of year test. Well, I was petrified when I had to sit the maths test which was also the first exam I took in the course. I got so scared I thought I'm never going to do anymore courses ever again after this one, but when I got my results back I found I had got 100%. I couldn't believe it and on it went like that to the end of the course where I got over 90% in most exams.
I had to do learn about computers as part of the course. The maths was in hexadecimal and we had to do long division by hand. When the exam came the teacher told us we could not use calculators so I went to the exam without one but then I saw that everyone else was using them. Well, you had to show all the working out but a calculator still helps. Anyway, I sweated it in the exam with pages of working out but I ended up getting 100%. I beat everyone else. At the end of the BTEC electronics course I got 13 Distinctions and 2 Merits.
So them I went for the Higher National Certificate which had some serious maths in it. I did extremely well in the HNC getting similar grades to what I got in the ONC but I ended up getting a Merit in maths and I was a little disappointed. Still, I fell in love with maths as a result.
The question of high school trigonometry vs. high school statistics is not one of math vs. no math. The US culture is seriously innumerate, and that needs to change. High school math is a reasonable expectation for citizens. Probabilistic reasoning is something that has everyday application for ordinary people, but which most people are not very good at. Trigonometry is not something that ordinary people frequently need to know. If there is a choice between trigonometry and statistics for a high school curriculum, IMO, statistics wins hands down.
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