Where is balance Academic priorities 250

Barb,

Suggestions?

Remember, while I had plenty of influence, the kids made up their own minds what to work on. What in YOUR neighborhood has people's lives depending on the analytical solution to a calculus problem that can't simply be solved with sufficient accuracy with a trivial numerical approximation?

I was at one time the top freshman calculus student at the University of Washington after getting a perfect 800 on the College Entrance Examination Board's Advanced Math test. In the following ~40 years, the *ONLY* practical use I have made for non-numerical calculus methods is a couple of times for computing optimal methods, e.g. how to divide up the bins in a complex sort to make it run as fast as possible by differentiating an equation for the total effort, setting the first derivative to zero, and solving for the minimum-maximum conditions. I have not recovered nor will I EVER expect to recover the time I put in learning all that stuff, as I could have even done these couple of tasks numerically at the cost of another couple of hours of work.

The only "disservice" here is in not subjecting my kids to the same useless education as I received. Of course, if they find themselves needing this, they will either pick it up for themselves, or find someone to solve the equations for them.

However, this has not been "lost" as the kids have learned other things that you are doubtless clueless about, when they could have been learning calculus, e.g. they have completely cured some "incurable" medical conditions in people they know after major medical insbreastutions have given up on them.

Once we were living in an area with a large homeless population, so their "lab" became finding ways to get some of these people jobs and homes, not through broad social change, but one-on-one by understanding them and their situations. Eventually a "$200 plan" emerged, where for ~$200 in direct expenses a typical homeless family would wind up in a home they owned and working at a job they could stand. We did this for several families having kids who were friends with my kids. Certainly this skill is worth more than calculus?!

It really sounds (to me) like you *COMPLETELY* missed the central point here. A motivated top-down education produces POWERFUL people with unique skills, in trade for a variety of essentially useless knowledge that is routinely used to put kids to sleep in school, which can be picked up as (if ever) needed. Top-down methods don't teach them any MORE, but it does teach them more USEFUL skills, the very existence of which befuddles may who learned calculus instead. No wonder so many kids are now on Ritalin given the boring and useless education our schools now dispense.

Steve Richfie1d