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Comment by eat_veggies | Hacker News Reader

As a student currently in "the system," I think the biggest problem with the math curriculum is that unless you're in an accelerated program, math progress stagnates until seventh grade, where they introduce algebra (way too late imo) and then it stagnates again, repeating the same algebra year after year.

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I agree. Colleges and Universities end up teaching basic math concepts and playing catch-up instead of being places of higher education. It must be costly to be keeping this up.

It is costly, which is exactly why Universities and Colleges favor it.

That was my experience as well. In 7th grade I did the Saxon Algebra 1 book, then my school changed curriculum and I spent the next four years rehashing what I'd already learned, excruciatingly slowly, until I took Calculus senior year.

There was a lot of dicking around with TI-83 calculators, and drawing graphs to solve equations, which frustrated me since I'd already mastered the symbolic manipulation to do it faster and more easily.

Algebra directly to calculus? No trigonometry, geometry or statistics?

Do you need statistics in order to do calculus? They seem independent. I didn't do much statistics at high school because it didn't interest me as much, but I did calculus.

In fact you'll find more applications of calculus in statistics than statistics in calculus won't you? Seems the wrong way around to do statistics first.

As I recall, my statistics class used calculus, at least for some of the proofs and derivations.

I think they are independent, I never took stats but took calculus in high school :)

Just seemed surprised that OP seemed to imply his high school offered only two courses... Algebra and calculus.

Mine offered algebra 1,2, stats 1,2 geometry, trigonometry, Calc 1 and 2.

Of course also pre algebra if you didnt take that in middle school...

Most of geometry and trig was covered in that algebra textbook. The rest, I picked up more from shop and programming classes than I did from my high school mathematics courses; trig is incredibly useful for e.g. planning out rafter designs for building construction, and when the programming environment you are using for graphics consists primarily of poking pixels, and doing collision tests by hand, you become very familiar with geometric equations.

Stats remained something of a blind spot.

When I went through middle/high school about a decade ago, the curriculum for honors students in Texas was: algebra in 7th/8th grade, geometry/trigonometry in 9th grade, pre-calculus (aka calculus lite) in 10th grade, advanced algebra 11th grade, and in 12th grade you had the option to take calculus or statistics (or both).

From my experience, at least, my math education was astoundingly good. I went to a top 50 US university and immediately went into advanced math classes my freshman year and felt fine. The problem, though, is that I followed the "honors student" curriculum. The "regulars students" curriculum didn't include advanced algebra, calc, or stats, and the quality of geom/trig/algebra education that was included wasn't that great.

Another problem is that this was just my experience in Texas. Other states have different curriculums, which makes the whole exercise of saying "education in the US is ____" very difficult.

I remember I wold finish my 5th and 6th grade math tests in 10-15 minutes out of the allotted 60, because the problems were so easy and challenging myself to go as fast as possible was the only way to not be bored.

I'm grateful of my math teacher for both those years for not reprimanding me for my brashness and encouraging me to solve number puzzles (one of those 0-9 tile sudoku-like things with math equations on laminated paper) for the rest of the period every time. RIP I was lucky to have you.

It's funny because in the real world, if the test was a project and you find is he'd in 25% on schedule. You would keep your job and others get fired. But in school, if you go a 100% in 15 minutes and another kid 90% in 60 minutes... You get the same reward. An A.

In the real world the kid who got 90% in 60 minutes becomes your manager when he realizes he's better off managing people than writing code.

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