I just had a peek at the listed topics of an A level math text book and none of the topics covered strike me as absurdly esoteric. Of course it depends on the level at which it's taught, but some of these topics I definitely covered in middle school in China and don't stick out to me as high school level.
I don't mean to shame anyone since a huge part of how difficult a subject is in how it's taught.
That being said, the proliferation of computing in recent decades has certainly made it more important for the average person to be more numerate than before, much like how he proliferation of printing made it more necessary for people to be literate than before.
I personally don't really truck with the whole "people won't use this" argument because it's also trotted out when arguing against arts education and that's why we have a huge percent of the population with zero media literacy who can only get the most literal meaning from media.
As someone who did A-Level Maths, and is a major fun love Maths guy, I don't think much any of it has relevance to most peoples' lives. Admittedly the 'proofs' more than anything might be a cool way to teach critical thinking.
The headers definitely undersell the difficulty of the content, they are not middle-school level. I was deemed the most mathematically exceptional in my classes, and Maths A-Level was hard. Anyone still struggling with Maths at GCSE stage will not get much further being forced to sit in A-Level classes..
I can totally get behind criticism that this Tory policy won't actually achieve the goal of teaching kids more advanced math. I can't get behind the idea that teaching kids more advanced math isn't a good goal.
Wait a sec. Hold up. This is what everybody is pissing and shidding and cumming over being too difficult? This was baby level math I learned when I was 14, way way back many decades ago. And a huge chunk of it is absolutely essential to understanding, uh... the world.
Then again, it's a Tory policy. By definition it's dogshit. It's probably going to teach kids how to calculate the value of a human life based on their skin colour economic value.
I did the course. I find it very unlikely you were doing Mathematical proofs, solving and integrating recursive functions, imaginary numbers and multidimensional number planes, formulating general solutions to sequences and series, playing with arctan etc, at 14. the contents page are just very broad areas, and not an insight into the difficulty of the actual content. You do cover all of these topics to 'some' level in earlier, mandatory education.
People are reading the topics and not understanding there is an enormous difference in complexity of the basics of these topics and the ADVANCED level of these topics. A2 maths is absolutely advanced. All of these broad categories are also covered in GCSE to a very basic level, the difference is the complexity.
yeah I look it up, I did most of them and more in less than 2 years (that is in Canada). You can question on the utility of the subject but you can't really say it's hard lmao.
But then again, I aced multiplication table in my country of origin before elementary school
I just had a peek at the listed topics of an A level math text book and none of the topics covered strike me as absurdly esoteric. Of course it depends on the level at which it's taught, but some of these topics I definitely covered in middle school in China and don't stick out to me as high school level.
I don't mean to shame anyone since a huge part of how difficult a subject is in how it's taught.
That being said, the proliferation of computing in recent decades has certainly made it more important for the average person to be more numerate than before, much like how he proliferation of printing made it more necessary for people to be literate than before.
I personally don't really truck with the whole "people won't use this" argument because it's also trotted out when arguing against arts education and that's why we have a huge percent of the population with zero media literacy who can only get the most literal meaning from media.
As someone who did A-Level Maths, and is a major fun love Maths guy, I don't think much any of it has relevance to most peoples' lives. Admittedly the 'proofs' more than anything might be a cool way to teach critical thinking.
The headers definitely undersell the difficulty of the content, they are not middle-school level. I was deemed the most mathematically exceptional in my classes, and Maths A-Level was hard. Anyone still struggling with Maths at GCSE stage will not get much further being forced to sit in A-Level classes..
deleted by creator
I can totally get behind criticism that this Tory policy won't actually achieve the goal of teaching kids more advanced math. I can't get behind the idea that teaching kids more advanced math isn't a good goal.
Wait a sec. Hold up. This is what everybody is pissing and shidding and cumming over being too difficult? This was baby level math I learned when I was 14, way way back many decades ago. And a huge chunk of it is absolutely essential to understanding, uh... the world.
Then again, it's a Tory policy. By definition it's dogshit. It's probably going to teach kids how to calculate the value of a human life based on their
skin coloureconomic value.I did the course. I find it very unlikely you were doing Mathematical proofs, solving and integrating recursive functions, imaginary numbers and multidimensional number planes, formulating general solutions to sequences and series, playing with arctan etc, at 14. the contents page are just very broad areas, and not an insight into the difficulty of the actual content. You do cover all of these topics to 'some' level in earlier, mandatory education.
Right? Christ.
People are reading the topics and not understanding there is an enormous difference in complexity of the basics of these topics and the ADVANCED level of these topics. A2 maths is absolutely advanced. All of these broad categories are also covered in GCSE to a very basic level, the difference is the complexity.
All of the topics are also covered in GCSE before 16, the difference is not the topics but the level of complexity in the topics.
yeah I look it up, I did most of them and more in less than 2 years (that is in Canada). You can question on the utility of the subject but you can't really say it's hard lmao.
But then again, I aced multiplication table in my country of origin before elementary school