Meandering Monday: volume 2

One of the things you here most from kids struggling with higher level math is "are you really going to have to use this in the real world?"  You know, I never heard an answer to that growing up.  In my previous job I found myself using things like geometry, algebra, trigonometry all the time to figure things like prices, profit and construction specs.  

Now I am back in school, a little wiser of the world and I realize that even the mundane of functions, logarithms, polynomials, radicals, etc, etc, play a role in everyday life.  There was a time in our country when school was not completely taught in a classroom.  Kids learned math by taking their crops and livestock to the market with their parents learned to add, subtract, multiply and divide through monetary transactions.  Now we teach in schools with 20 to 30 kid classrooms and it has forced us to teach to a common denominator.  We have reduced math to a series of definitions that must be memorized and regurgitated.

Even as I sit in this college level class, filled with a lot of engineering and pre-med students, we skip the practical applications of what we are doing.  Each chapter in the book has a section included that teaches real world practices of the math we are learning.  To this point, our professor has skipped all of this.  How easy would it be to say, this is the equation you use to keep a building from falling down (or something along those lines).  


Now, is this a solution to all of kids frustrations with Math?  No.  But if you can peak a few more kids interest in the field of Math, (which opens up the world of science) maybe we can stop the downward spiral of our kids math and science scores when compared to the rest of the world.