In Oklahoma, the requirement usually is up to “algebra 2” - this is mostly domain and range, finding roots of polynomials, and logarithms.
IMHO, the world would be better if calculus was a required part of the high school curriculum. Like yeah, most people aren’t going to need the product rule in day to day life, but the fundamental ideas about rates of change seem like they’re something that everyone human deserves to be exposed to.
Let me ask you this, do you know how to budget?
We over provision for higher level arithmetic but don’t teach fundamental arithmetic for living successfully in our society.
I just posted a similar take, but used a lot more words. Yours was much more succinct.
Budgeting and more probabilities/statistics are where I think it should be.
Both of those directly relate to improving your life.
When I got to college, I had to take two math course, which I dreaded. Because I was a music major, one of the math classes had to be Acoustics. For the other, I was terrible at Algebra, and didn’t want that dragging me down, so I chose Statistics, since I was interested in politics, and would learn about polls.
I actually liked the class a lot, and to this day I track political polls closely. But I’m not a person who just accepts raw numbers. I want to know the sample size, the margin of error, etc. I know when a candidate is cherry picking his data, or leaning on a partisan poll, etc. It’s been very helpful through my life.
BTW, it was standard procedure for every music major to procrastinate on the Acoustics class until their senior year, and we got a cool math professor who was also a pretty decent amateur trumpet player. He didn’t want to be the guy to destroy our graduation prospects in our senior year by flunking us all, so he made the class interesting and challenging but not really difficult.
I learned a LOT in that class, and later I ended up working in sales for an audiophile classical record company, and my knowledge of sound and acoustics from that class allowed me to weasel myself into an additional part-time job helping out at recording sessions, some of which went on to win Grammys.
So Statistics and Acoustics were the math that worked for me, and I posted elsewhere that Business Math is something that I have also used a LOT, but picked it all up mostly on my own. NOT ONCE, have I ever said “I wished I paid more attention in Algebra.” Those two quarters of high school Algebra might have been the two most painful quarters of my educational career.
The emphasis on advanced math at the high school level is detrimental to many people. It instills a sense of failure and stupidity early on, reinforced by parents and teachers, and often develops a sense of hatred toward those who are good at it. People who struggle with advanced math would be far better served by teaching them Business Math. First week lesson: put up a pay stub, and start figuring out all the percentages of all the withholding on that paycheck. Every kid in that class will be riveted on the screen, even the thugs, who will want to know who FICA is, and why is he taking all their money?
And fucking Excel. Better yet teach budgeting and spreadsheet courses in one.
If people had stats, budgeting and excel it would be an incredible improvement.
Budgeting also only gets you so far in our dystopian age when you need 2 full time jobs to pay rent.
Budgeting and filing taxes, please!
*And understanding credit card debt
No banking corporation wants people to understand this.
“The most powerful force in the Universe is compound interest.”
My final year of high school (not in the US) had a finance class that had recently been split off from one part of the “current events” class into it’s own thing. We were taught how to budget and handle interest, loans, taxes, savings, ect…
Also a bunch of BS about how big corpos are great and awesome because the teacher made money on the stock market.
I do think it should be a standard class everywhere though, it’s ridiculous to not teach that stuff.
I tutor high school students in math and science. They’ve all taken a budgeting class. One of my students is taking calculus and I genuinely feel he has a better understanding of it than I do!
I am glad he has the option to take calculus, he’s one that gets bored at the place other students need. But I really don’t think many students need it or can fit it in their graduation tracks.
We also need to consider how difficult algebra was for some, to the point that a lot of adults think they hate math. I like the comment in the op that Applied Calculus skills (real-world story problems) are useful, and I think that would have more impact than two-three semesters of calculus.