# Down with Algebra II! **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [March 2, 2016, 2:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733 "2016-03-02T14:26:42Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![svd678](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/53a042/32.png) [@svd678](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/svd678)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 6:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733/21 "2016-03-02T18:21:33Z")
The last higher math I ever use is making a right angle with 3-4-5. Analytical geometry as prelude to calculus was an absolute, total waste of time. A little accounting would have been helpful through the years. ---
**Author:** ![Dendarii\_Dame](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/bbce88/32.png) [@Dendarii\_Dame](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dendarii_Dame)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733/22 "2016-03-02T18:32:51Z")
I’m not good at math at all. In my high school, much of Algebra II was a rehash of Algera I, which meant I got an A. It was the last math course I ever got an A in. Actually, it was the only math course in high school I got an A in. I got an A minus in Statistics in college only because I had the world’s most patient TA helping me. My college roommate senior year was a math major. She’s brilliant at it, but had to take a stats course to fulfill some requirement and hated it. I helped her with her stats homework and she kept saying, “This isn’t real math” over and over. (She did pass the course.) ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 6:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733/23 "2016-03-02T18:44:55Z")
> [@Dendarii\_Dame](#): > > I’m not good at math at all. In my high school, much of Algebra II was a rehash of Algera I, which meant I got an A. It was the last math course I ever got an A in. Actually, it was the only math course in high school I got an A in. I got an A minus in Statistics in college only because I had the world’s most patient TA helping me. > > My college roommate senior year was a math major. She’s brilliant at it, but had to take a stats course to fulfill some requirement and hated it. I helped her with her stats homework and she kept saying, “This isn’t real math” over and over. (She did pass the course.) Boy, can I relate. Helping my daughter with stats homework (and, before her, my cousin’s wife) made me realize that when you make things easier for non-math people, it makes it seem twisted and convoluted and needlessly complicated to math people. ---
**Author:** ![OffByOne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/45deac/32.png) [@OffByOne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OffByOne)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733/24 "2016-03-02T18:50:36Z")
I graduated high school in 1967. At that time, you needed two course credits in math to graduate\*. They never said what two math courses you had to take, so most people just took arithmetic courses and never needed to take algebra at all. Of course, I was the Math Guy (senior year: Who’s Who in Math!), so I took Alg I in my freshman year, Alg II and Plane Geometry in my sophomore year, trig and solid geometry (1/2 course credit each) in my junior year, and Elementary Analysis (pre-calc+) in my senior year. My issues were with the classes I had to take in history and civics, of which, certain values of course credits had to be met. I could have done without those, but, today I find myself very more interested in history and how governments work than I ever would have thought back then. \*Also needed were 2 credits of science, 2 in PE, 4 in English/literature, two and a half in humanities (history/gov’t, etc.). The remainder of the 20 credits needed to graduate (9.5, iirc) were electives. I don’t know how I would have collected all of those credits if I hadn’t had higher math courses to take. ---
**Author:** ![gnoitall](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bb73d2/32.png) [@gnoitall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gnoitall)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733/25 "2016-03-02T19:07:49Z")
> [@billfish678](#): > > At least one aspect of Calculus. > > Focusing on the theory, how to set up an intergral properly, what they mean, the limitations and gotchas, practicallities and all that jazz. > > Probably a good idea. “wasting” a bunch of time learning a hundred different ways to actually solve a particular integral? Not so much IMO. This is an important aspect being ignored in the proposal. Calculus opens the mind to perceiving motion and change in a different way. It’s inspired by the real world and allows intellectual consideration of nature that would otherwise be an unending mystery. Frankly, a proposal from a political hack about how to teach math smacks of “why teach the peasants anything they don’t need to work the farm?” ---
**Author:** ![That\_Don\_Guy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/that_don_guy/32/538_2.png) [@That\_Don\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/That_Don_Guy)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733/26 "2016-03-02T19:19:21Z")
I think I had a different “algebra II” than everybody else did; I think the only thing close to calculus was an introduction to limits and series. The higher-end stuff was more Trigonometry and Analytic Geometry. Of the high school math courses I had, I think the one that was the least use to me now was Geometry; it was almost all proofs of things I rarely use (e.g. “if one side of a triangle is a diameter of the circumscribing circle, then it is the hypotenuse of a right triangle”). However, making basic statistics part of the curriculum isn’t a bad idea - in fact, in 1983, the University of California changed the computer science degree requirement to require a statistics course. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733/27 "2016-03-02T19:33:28Z")
> [@That\_Don\_Guy](#): > > Of the high school math courses I had, I think the one that was the least use to me now was Geometry; it was almost all proofs of things I rarely use (e.g. “if one side of a triangle is a diameter of the circumscribing circle, then it is the hypotenuse of a right triangle”). There is once school of thought that says that it is precisely the proofs themselves, and not the things that are proved, that make studying geometry so useful, because it trains the mind in deductive reasoning and thinking logically and recognizing what constitutes a valid proof. In favor of this view, one could cite such authorities as Abraham Lincoln and, arguably, Plato. [QUOTE=Abraham Lincoln] At last I said,- Lincoln, you never can make a lawyer if you do not understand what demonstrate means; and I left my situation in Springfield, went home to my father’s house, and stayed there till I could give any proposition in the six books of Euclid at sight. I then found out what demonstrate means, and went back to my law studies. [/QUOTE] [QUOTE=Plato] Let no man ignorant of geometry enter here. [/QUOTE] ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 7:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733/28 "2016-03-02T19:37:09Z")
I went through Calculus in high school. I have never used anything more complex than basic algebra or basic geography since then. I’ve used my Basic Stats class a thousand times more. ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733/29 "2016-03-02T19:47:23Z")
My high school algebra is nearly 50 years in the rearview mirror, so other than that Algebra II included trigonometry, I really can’t remember what material went in Algebra I and what went in Algebra II, so it’s hard for me to take a stand one way or the other on the value of Algebra II. I agree that the point of college-track high school math (and certainly that includes Algebra II and everything up from there) is to keep students’ life options open until they discover what they really want to do with themselves, since math skills are expected in a fair number of majors and careers. Students who know they aren’t college-bound, though, don’t need any of that. But **everybody** should have an introductory statistics course. ---
**Author:** ![GargoyleWB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gargoylewb/32/199_2.png) [@GargoyleWB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GargoyleWB)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 7:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733/30 "2016-03-02T19:48:12Z")
> [@billfish678](#): > > At least one aspect of Calculus. > > Focusing on the theory, how to set up an integral properly, what they mean, the limitations and gotchas, practicalities and all that jazz. > > Probably a good idea. “wasting” a bunch of time learning a hundred different ways to actually solve a particular integral? Not so much IMO. I’m an engineer and, though never directly solving algebra and calculus problems by hand, I have to frequently read and interpret math functions and occasionally write code that implements these functions in a workable way. I’m expected to have an intuitive knowledge of the scope, bounds, pitfalls, benefits etc of what an expression can and cannot do, even if I never do the brute force chalkboard drudgery to get from point A to point B. If a student never had algebra, and never learned the number theory concepts of linearity, rationality, etc then there is no way that they could be expected to excel in technical engineering, science, or programming careers. I think algebra and calculus should be less proof and derivation focused (leave that for background reference only) and more “applied math” focused. Also, less time spent on laborious by hand solving tricks that are effectively obsoleted by computers. Students should be graded on the implementation and evaluation of concepts more than whether they tripped up memorizing the ‘integration by parts’ cookbook steps correctly. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733/31 "2016-03-02T20:09:52Z")
> [@That\_Don\_Guy](#): > > However, making basic statistics part of the curriculum isn’t a bad idea - in fact, in 1983, the University of California changed the computer science degree requirement to require a statistics course. I’d even go so far as to suggest that at a high school level, it doesn’t even need to be a calculation-heavy, “math-in-disguise” course (like my undergrad statistics course for my computer science degree was). The things I’d think you’d need to know would be things like what distributions are, what standard deviations are (and how they relate to distributions and just how common something really is), confidence intervals, sample sizes, central tendencies, variance, mean, median, mode, correlations, etc… But there’s no point at that level, to make some poor kid grind out R-squared on a dataset , or actually calculate what a standard deviation is, etc… The actual calculations themselves are either easily done by computers, if someone really needs to do them, or the results are given to you in most cases. Understanding the results is what is most important to most people, but for some reason, there seems to be an entrenched idea that there’s a lot of utility in making someone grind out the work on some of these things. If I seem bitter, it’s because I always understood the statistical concepts well, but was never good at the actual calculation part. I got a C in undergrad, where we had to grind all that shit out, and a runaway A in grad school, where our prof let us use Excel (or whatever statistical program we chose) to do the scut work, because he was more interested in our use of the statistical concepts. ---
**Author:** ![Sunny\_Daze](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunny_daze/32/438_2.png) [@Sunny\_Daze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunny_Daze)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 8:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733/32 "2016-03-02T20:17:26Z")
I liked Algebra. I liked Calculus. I also was pre-Med in college, so I needed that stuff. I can appreciate that not everyone wants or needs the material, but isn’t that why there are separate tracks? Or is that something not all schools offer? (I’m guessing the latter.) ---
**Author:** ![Morgenstern](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Morgenstern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Morgenstern)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 8:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733/33 "2016-03-02T20:25:02Z")
I wish my HS math teacher had been something other than an ancient, humorless, boring, monotone who wore the same dirty, tattered coat every day. ---
**Author:** ![ZipperJJ](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zipperjj/32/211_2.png) [@ZipperJJ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZipperJJ)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 8:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733/34 "2016-03-02T20:32:46Z")
I really liked math until Algebra II. I rocked geometry and algebra I but I was completely lost in Algebra II. The only thing that class taught me was how to be a better cheater. I squeaked by with a D. I was able to avoid whatever math was for seniors. Calc? I had extra study hall, because I had enough credit to not take math. My BFF, on the other hand, flourished in Algebra II and it was a total turning point in his education. Before that he was just a regular, if not under-achieving, student. In Algebra II he was suddenly considered a genius and it even did well for his social life (all of my smart friends from our Smart Kids Educational Tract finally knew who he was). My BFF went on to be a computer science major and I went on to journalism. I was stoked because I could take Spanish instead of math in my freshman and sophomore years. That requirement has since changed in the school catalog. We’re both software programmers now, however. But he does more math-centric stuff and I do more user-experience stuff. And I have a way better command of the English language than he does! ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 8:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733/35 "2016-03-02T20:40:02Z")
I like math. I’m in a math heavy field. I use multivariate calculus (which I basically self-taught. I never took vector calc). I agree that basic stats would be far better for the average person to learn. Algebra 2 is useful, but it’s not worth teaching given that there’s other better things. Especially since I recall Algebra 2 being… weird. Most of the stuff I don’t use, and a lot of the stuff I do use was retaught in context far better. It took me forever to connect Domain/Co-Domain/Image/Range to programming, and even when I did it wasn’t super helpful. Asymptotes are probably more interesting, but I’ve never been sure why we teach them before calculus since the entire thing is secretly limit analysis. It was this weird mishmash of topics that I’d almost sum up as “calculus without calculus” with a smattering of unevenly applied baby’s first real analysis thrown in. Edit: Note this is all Algebra 2. Algebra 1 was mostly okay. Solving for variables, quadratics, rational numbers, basic rate equations, exponentials and compound interest, etc. ---
**Author:** ![Blaster\_Master](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/cab0a1/32.png) [@Blaster\_Master](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blaster_Master)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 8:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733/36 "2016-03-02T20:46:09Z")
I loved Algebra II in high school, in fact, I loved all the math I took through college too, with the exception of Calc III, and I took pretty much every math class I reasonably could, Number Theory (SO much fun), Linear Algebra, Stat, etc. As a Comp Sci major, I don’t use advanced math too much in my day to day job, but I did in some of my projects in grad school and my PhD work (that I didn’t finish) or in my fun projects, and I’d like to get into a job more like that. All of that said, I agree that Algebra II just isn’t useful to most people. IMO, Statistics is FAR more useful to the average person and it’s depressing how little the average person understands about it and can get misled, deliberately or accidentally, into making poor decisions or bad purchases as a result. They absolutely should still offer Algebra II and Calc to students in more advanced math tracks, but at least a basic understanding of statistics should be part of a high school education. Frankly, I’d put it higher than most of what I learned in Geometry to, in terms of what I find useful in everyday life. ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 8:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733/37 "2016-03-02T20:59:16Z")
> [@friedo](#): > > On the one hand, I sympathize with arguments about resource allocation, and that learning Algebra II might not be the most efficient use of time for many students. On the other hand, I really don’t like this very modern idea that the sole purpose of schooling is to train people for job skills. > > How many people have jobs where they have to analyze the meter of a poem, or know why the Battle of Hastings was important, or speak a second language? Most people don’t, and yet these discussions about reforming curricula always seem to focus on math rather than history or English or foreign languages. For some reason, the study of those are widely recognized as valuable, whether one “needs” them or not, and they should be. Because we don’t study history or poetry to get a job. The purpose of a liberal education is not to churn out people with a particular set of skills, it’s to teach people how to think and how to be well-rounded, reasonable people. Mathematical and logical reasoning is part of that, even if you never need to do math at your job. > > Whether the ideals of liberal education would be better served by substituting Algebra II for stats, I have no idea. I will note that I’m while I also found Algebra II and Trig to be somewhat difficult, I breezed through AP Calc easily. (Though the mistakes that I did make in calculus were all algebra mistakes.) > > So obviously my point of view is not the same as someone who failed algebra after multiple attempts, or had shitty teachers (I was mostly lucky in that department) or a phobia of math. But I do wonder why it always seems to be math topics in particular that are the focus of articles like this. I definitely agree that we shouldn’t teach solely based on utility. But not all of stats is going to be useful. Hell, we can still teach geometry, most of which is only dubiously useful in a direct sense. But stats is so important that I think subbing out algebra 2 for it makes a ton of sense. Algebra 2, IMO, should just be discarded for calc since as I said above, I recall the subject matter just being calculus topics in a weird vacuum without the background knowledge to understand or derive anything you were being taught. But hey, people taking kinematics without calculus too somehow. I don’t know how, I suuuuucked at physics in high school until I took the calc version in college. Obviously some of that was having seen some of the material before, but having the background to meaningfully talk about the mathematics was astoundingly helpful for putting things in context. Algebra 2, I feel, is the same way, most of the topics are just horrible without the background. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 9:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733/38 "2016-03-02T21:27:35Z")
> [@bump](#): > > The things I’d think you’d need to know would be things like … what standard deviations are > … > But there’s no point at that level, to make some poor kid … actually calculate what a standard deviation is, etc… The actual calculations themselves are either easily done by computers, if someone really needs to do them, or the results are given to you in most cases. > > Understanding the results is what is most important to most people, but for some reason, there seems to be an entrenched idea that there’s a lot of utility in making someone grind out the work on some of these things. I semi-disagree. I think you get a lot better understanding of what standard deviations (for example) are if you’ve actually calculated at least one or two of them. You see how the calculation involves taking into account how far each individual number is from the mean, for instance. That said, the less “grindier,” the better: working through a simple example is one thing, but I suspect it doesn’t help, and possibly hurts, the conceptual understanding gained by doing so if the example involves a large number of data values, or big ugly numbers. As a practical matter, I wouldn’t expect a statistician to calculate a standard deviation “by hand”; but I’d question his understanding of statistics if he was _unable_ to. Kind of like I’d expect anyone adding a bunch of big numbers together to reach for a calculator, but if they couldn’t do something like 13+22 without a calculator, I’d think they don’t really know what addition is. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733/39 "2016-03-02T21:30:48Z")
> [@Jragon](#): > > Algebra 2, IMO, should just be discarded for calc since as I said above, I recall the subject matter just being calculus topics in a weird vacuum without the background knowledge to understand or derive anything you were being taught. _Is there_ a standard definition of what “Algebra II” is? I get the impression that a lot of us are coming at this with widely differing ideas in our heads of what “Algebra II” involves; and it doesn’t seem worthwhile to debate whether or not it should be taught if we don’t even know what it is. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 10:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733/40 "2016-03-02T22:53:22Z")
> [@friedo](#): > > The purpose of a liberal education is not to churn out people with a particular set of skills, it’s to teach people how to think and how to be well-rounded, reasonable people. Mathematical and logical reasoning is part of that, even if you never need to do math at your job. Fully agreed. I don’t understand why math has to justify its existence for practical reasons and yet we don’t do the same with the rest of the curriculum. I have never, in my entire life, had any use for the three years of Spanish I took. I have never use my knowledge of history or other social studies in my job. Although parts of English have been useful, I have never written a standard 5-paragraph essay in my adult life. Obviously the answer is that learning these things make me a more well-rounded individual, and one that’s more capable of functioning in a complicated society. The same is true of math. Learning to think abstractly and precisely is important for everyone, not just technical people. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/down-with-algebra-ii/747733.md?page=3)