Good Morning,
So last evening about 9pm while I was having dinner, one of my Inn's Staff saw a minature pineapple on the plant on my dinner table and asked if that was a real pineapple. I said yes and she then asked, can you eat it. When I said yes, she asked me - how, you wont have any fruit after you peel it. I said sure, even it is small, if you peel it properly, there will be enough of the fruit available. She said, that's not possible.
My response was that - so what you just told me is that you waste much of the fruit when you peel a regular pineapple to serve our guests. My wife looked at me and asked me - what made you say that? and my Staff said, yes, what do you mean? I said by telling that because this minature pineapple cannot be pealed without wasting the fruit, tells me that you don't know how to peel a pineapple without wasting the fruit.
The algebra in this was that I listened to what she said and worked out all the variables as I digested the information and was able to figure out all she was saying. Algebra teaches your brain to assign variables to information so that you could process information backwards and forwards.The more you understand algebra, the better you are at processing information. The building blocks of algebra is important to a higher functioning adult life as undestanding how to add, subtract, multiply and divide is to a basic functioning adult. If you don't understand algebra, you often times only process towards individual experiences and do not cross/inter relate varying facts and factors - which slows the brain from processing and understanding things from different/other's perspectives and keeping up in conversations - especially arguments. It also limits your ability to compartmentalize info and keep things separate so that information doesn't get all jumbled up and solutions are not easily produced.
I am sure that others can add more but I hope that helped.
Rest of the story - In the Caribbean, there is a saying that goes like this - take your time and peel your pine. The reason is that when you peel a pineapple you can either waste fruit and slice the skin deep to also cut out the many "eyes" that cause the itching in the mouth and throat - thus, wasting lots of the actual fruit. Or, A more time consuming way but a more fruit retention approach would be to slice the pineapple skin off as thin as you can and individually dig out the many eyes - thus retaining more of the fruit. Hence the saying - "take your time and peel your pine" - so you get more out of it.
Rob Ramson
On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 11:11 AM, Kelly Hoffman <kelly.hoffman@gmail.com> wrote:
If a kid doesn't want to go into business, accounting, construction, computer science, engineering, architecture, medicine, journalism, etc., then they probably don't need to know that much math. But a lot of kids don't know what they want to do when they're in high school (I sure didn't!!!!) so we owe it to them to give them a broad educational base so they have as many options as they deserve.
And I don't know, but I bet that just like an arts education strengthens the mind in non-arts related areas, being trained to think about variables and unknowns probably helps critical thinking skills in every area. Maybe some of the more education-oriented folks on the listserv can chime in.Just my two cents...~KPS - I support PE classes too. :)On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 7:31 PM, Brian Bradford <brianbradford42@yahoo.com> wrote:
I am still waiting for someone to explain to me why Algebra is neccessary. The Sesame Street example below can be described as addition, multiplication or comon sense. Why do we need the quadratic formula? Why do we need to know slopes, factoring, completing the square? People memorize algebra skills long enough to pass a test or a class and never use those skills again in life. How is learning algebra more essential to life than learning to swim?
Brian
--- On Thu, 8/16/12, KPW <WKPW3@aol.com> wrote:
From: KPW <WKPW3@aol.com>
Subject: [ward5] Fwd: [concerned4DCPS] Another NY Times reply to "Is Algebra necessary?"
To: ward5@yahoogroups.com
Date: Thursday, August 16, 2012, 2:49 PM
___________________KPW/K. A. P-W.The KAPoW Connection
-----Original Message-----
From: Erich Martel <ehmartel@starpower.net>
To: concerned4DCPS <concerned4DCPS@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thu, Aug 16, 2012 2:48 pm
Subject: [concerned4DCPS] Another NY Times reply to "Is Algebra necessary?"
NY Times SchoolBook BlogParent's SignatureBefore Dropping Algebra, Fix Math EducationAug. 14, 2012, 12:16 p.m.A recent opinion essay in The New York Times by Andrew Hacker, asking the question "Is Algebra Necessary?", drew hundreds of comments. Some of SchoolBook's contributors went further and have written their own essays in response. What's your opinion? Respond to our query below. (We would especially love to hear from students or recent graduates.)As a parent with three children rising through New York City public schools, I'm sympathetic to the argument by the Queens College professor Andrew Hacker that "elite" colleges often saddle students with large debts for little discernible benefit in salaries or social status over their less-prestigious brethren.Lorraine LeveyMatthew LeveyWhether or not my kids earn 3.8 GPAs and score 2,200 on their SATs, Dr. Hacker's claim that they can obtain an excellent college education for less than $200,000 resonates.Regardless of where my children attend college, I know they will need a well-rounded preparation in their primary and secondary schools. They might become doctors or engineers, poets or professors. But wherever life leads them, they'll need to be able to appreciate Shakespeare, understand standard deviation, and explain the laws governing the conservation of energy.Thus I was taken aback by Dr. Hacker's recent essay in The New York Times asserting that algebra is meaningless and should be dropped in favor of more practical math.There are many ways to succeed in college, but none of them require algebra? It was important for Andrew Hacker in the late 1940s and when I attended junior high in the late 1970s, but now my son doesn't need it? He'll just look up the answer on the Internet?If my child was accepted at Yale, a friend once assured me, I would not turn it down and I'd find a way to pay for it. But whether he attends a "top 25" school or a community college, he will have to work, participate in the life of his community, and understand complex questions like the healthcare and defense dilemmas we're intent on burdening him with.To meet these challenges he'll need a solid grounding in the critical theories under-girding our world, including the abstractions one learns in algebra.Using set theory, Sesame Street offers a brilliant example of why abstraction matters. After repeating the word "fish" six times to take a room service order from a group of penguins, the hapless hotel clerk learns he can just say "six fish" and it means the same thing."Does it work on other stuff?" he asks. "Say cinnamon rolls, cream pies and spark plugs?"This leap, the ability to appropriately generalize from a specific example, is at the core of a high quality education, be it in literature, art, history or math.But to generalize well, children need a solid grounding in the facts. In the case of math, this means both strong computational fluency and a good understanding of the underlying critical theories. Some students will gain this insight faster; others will have to work harder. Either way, I'm not willing to let my children's schools off the hook for teaching this effectively.Dr. Hacker is certainly correct when he observes we do a mediocre job teaching math; over the last decade in New York City our children have shown modest progress on national math tests like the NAEP. But as a parent and taxpayer, I'm disappointed that he thinks the solution is to stop teaching foundational math like algebra.Clearly the first step is to improve instruction. The University of California-Berkley professor Hung-Hsi Wu has long criticized the "textbook standard math" that we use in New York City (and across most of the U.S.).Dr. Wu's 30-year analysis shows that we teach math "as a jumbled collection of tasks.""It would be reasonable," he says "to attribute a good deal of students' non-learning of mathematics to their being fed such jumbled information all the way from kindergarten to grade 12."Like many educators, Dr. Wu hopes the Common Core will lead to a more coherent approach to math instruction, but he does not suggest dropping algebra.We also need improved assessment. It's hard to tell how instruction is working when the tests don't tell you what the students are (or are not) learning.SchoolBook readers learned about the faulty polygon that disgraced this spring's fifth-grade math test. I've found other basic errors in previous state math exams.More significantly, a Brooklyn Technical High School math teacher Patrick Honner notes both the 2011 and 2012 Regents exams contained "mathematical errors, poorly constructed questions, underrepresented topics, and 9th-grade questions on 11th-grade exams."If the New York State Department of Education can't even ask the right questions, is it any wonder students find algebra challenging? In the 'no excuses' culture that dominates education reform these days, it is simply shameful that Albany can't produce higher quality tests.Before dropping algebra in favor of more 'useful' mathematics, we would do well to first examine how we deliver and assess the most fundamental aspects of math education.If we can get these basics right, we'll discover that algebra isn't so tough after all, and that our students are better equipped to contemplate, and contribute to, the world around them.Matthew Levey is the father of three New York City public school students. He is the co-founder of Bright Track, an educational advisory service, and a former Community Education Council president.__._,_.___
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R. Ramson
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