What do you wish more people knew about?

submitted by panel30 from self.AskSaidIt

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[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

As I tried to explain: Understanding functions as a concept ain't "easy" but mighty nonetheless.

So even nowadays, I wouldn't put calculus the same as most mathematics on middle-school curricula.

e.g.: See, addition itself is a function.(Even more in fact, it is an operator in a mathematical sense: So once, we have associativity (left or right, this is a simple decision by definition) "out of our way", we could dive into, how to sum up most curves, values and basically everything continuous, which 99.5% of useful appliances in fact are because continuity is a very weak assumption about a function. (Especially once you got some corollaries in your arsenal, that are as easy to prove, as to understand)

When compared with differentiability, which usually is taught first, it is in fact quite easy to understand, but kind of hard to grasp, once you look at applications. Differentiability itself nonetheless is kind of a "hard" assumption, that puts about 80% of "real" applications out of its focus, as long as you have to apply it on a middle-school or undergrad-level.

So, if you want to hear my unsolicited opinion:

I'd divide math-classes in middle-school, about 9th grade.

Those "who want" and those "who don't" and I'd go easy on both of these groups.

[–]panel30[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

unsolicited opinion

I solicited your opinion! Thank you for sharing it.

I don't understand a whole lot about math right now, but I think maybe I understand a little bit about what you're trying to explain. That changing the way these concepts are taught could help interested students learn them better. Maybe if somebody else with a background in math education reads this later they will be able to understand better. Or maybe I'll understand better later if I look back on this after exploring math more at some point, if I do that.

I wanted to understand why you feel this would be so valuable. Could stop a lot of wars from happening sounds really good! Unless I misunderstood what you meant. I think I don't have a good grasp of how math stuff generally can be a big help.