• BakerBagel@midwest.social
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        8 months ago

        Reactionaries fucking hate math education and are always freaking out that they dont understand their kid’s homework.

        • keepcarrot [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          8 months ago

          I’m probably not the best person to judge, but what’s changed with kids maths homework? Were these parents good at maths when they were in school?

          • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            8 months ago

            AFAIK it’s basically just that math education has been moving more advanced concepts earlier and earlier at least as an optional course. Like calculus has gone from a post-grad level thing to a normal college course to something people can elect to take in high school, algebra went from college level material to normal high school level stuff that people start getting introduced to in middle school, etc.

            But also a lot of people struggle with the most basic things in high school, graduate, then forget all of the incomplete-understanding they had by the time they have kids. It’s very likely that adults who are baffled and enraged at seeing some basic algebra problem also struggled with math in school and are embarrassed and frustrated that their skills have only gotten worse since then, on top of the possibility that they never even got to algebra when they were in school and instead went through the remedial math track that maybe reaches basic pre-algebra material in their senior year.

            • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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              8 months ago

              We should be teaching linear algebra before calculus, because the concepts are genuinely more relevant and teach you how to see systems of equations differently.

              • Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                8 months ago

                I’d argue that stats should come before either of those. A basic course in statistics would be enormously helpful to most people in navigating and understanding the modern world. It’s much more likely to be relevant to daily life for the average person than calculus or linear algebra. Basic calculus–especially differential equations–is certainly enormously useful for understanding the natural world, but statistics is relevant everywhere, and even a lot of math/science people never get any instruction on it.

          • BakerBagel@midwest.social
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            8 months ago

            Things like number construction to get kids to understand how numbers work rather than just memorizing that 7+5=12.

            So they will now teach kids that 7+5 can be rewritten as (5+2)+5 which can then be turned into 5+5+2=12.

            It’s no different than when parents threw a massive fit about “new math” in the 60’s when kids learned how to “borrow” from the 10’s place to do subtraction like 62-8

      • Sons_of_Ferrix@hexbear.net
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        8 months ago

        Genuinely I think they are. Their weird pseudo-anti-capitalism actually just strikes me as anti-modernism. The bourgeois are too woke for them they want to go back the feudal production run by an aristocracy.

        • FloridaBoi [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          8 months ago

          My Albanian friend was telling me that AfD was making some sense by claiming that the Nazis were not “real” Germany and that it was actually a constitutional monarchy that represented true Germany. bruh-moment

          So yes. At face value they are pro feudal

    • Tankiedesantski [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      PEMDAS

      Oh yeah? Well if PEMDAS isn’t woke then why are pronouns put in PARENTHESES, the number of illegal immigrants is always EXPONENTIALLY increasing, the number of genders keeps MULTIPLYING, traditional family units are DIVIDED, they’re ADDING homosexual ideology to schools whole SUBTRACTING God?!

      • drowns [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        8 months ago

        put down the lathe of heaven right now… im gonna see this exact comment in a Facebook screenshot at some point this year.

    • silent_water [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      I kind of hate PEMDAS because multiplication and division are the same thing (division is multiplication by the reciprocal) and addition and subtraction are the same thing (subtraction is addition of the negation). moreover, multiplication and addition are commutative with themselves. so it should really be PEMA. lastly, if it’s fucking ambiguous in any way, don’t write it that way. just use parentheses. the notation that puts divisors in the denominator completely disambiguates everything.

      just learn what associativity, commutativity, and the distribution law are in the first place and you’ll understand why something like PEMDAS exists. it’s a notational trick to make it clear where those laws can be applied. when you leave the realm of numbers, some or all of these laws will stop applying and you need to still learn how to calculate the answer. matrices don’t have commutative multiplication and if it won’t associate, stop and find a different way to solve a different way to solve your problem because nope nope nope nope (fucking programmers breaking associativity in binary operations because “math is hard” - no bitch, what’s hard is trying to work out what the hell your operation does).

      in summary, PEMDAS is liberalism and fuck javascript.

      • Zezzy [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        8 months ago

        We were taught PEMDAS as parentheses, exponentiation, multiplication OR division, addition OR subtraction. I don’t know if it was changed at some point but I don’t know anyone who was taught that multiplication comes before divison

        • silent_water [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          8 months ago

          I’m talking about the implied ordering from the name. I’m saying there’s no sense in including division or subtraction at all because they’re not actually different from multiplication or subtraction and we’re better off teaching the underlying laws in the first place.