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In reply to the discussion: What class do you dislike the most in JrHigh or Senior High. Mine was Chemistry. I could not for the life of me master [View all]PoindexterOglethorpe
(25,950 posts)When I was in high school, my math program (UICSM, and I hope someday to post that and someone will know what it is [University of Illinois Committee on School Mathematics] but alas, in some 6 decades, I've never met anyone who's ever known what it is. Sigh.
Anyway, here's the real thing. In the third year of UICSM we were doing calculus. I was not doing very well at all. I scraped by with a D in the final semester.
Several decades later I was back taking math classes at my local community college. Tested in to Algebra 2, in no small part because of UICSM where we proved EVERYTHING in geometry. And had a wonderful foundation in algebra. So anyway, in the community college I passed algebra 2, college algebra, then I decided to take a statistics class. It was wonderful. So then, I decided to take calculus. I'm probably the only (at the time 47 year old woman) person who ever took calculus for fun. And it really was fun.
Here's the perhaps most important thing. When I'd walk through the halls of my school, I'd encounter math teachers, and I'd ask them, "Why is it that now I'm getting calculus, and back in high school I didn't get it?" To a person they said, "Oh Poindexter. People don't understand that math is developmental. And most 16, 17, even 18 year olds' brains are not ready for calculus. Give them a year or two, maybe even three, and they'll get it."
Wow. Ever since then I often tell parents not to stress out if their very smart high school students just don't get advanced math. Not to worry. In a year or three they will.