GunnyGene said:
I'm sure they don't, since math (and physics) are difficult subjects for them. Are those even taught anymore?
One of my coworkers was talking about this recently as one of her children recently started high school. You can still take math up to introduction to calculus and algebra-based physics in all but the smallest high schools in the area where I currently live. However, the only math that one is required to take in high school in my state in order to graduate are geometry and two total years of algebra, even if you did the first year of it in 8th grade as I did. Physics is not required, neither is trigonometry, statistics, or any kind of calculus class. The second year of algebra is ironically called "college algebra" even though quite a few people take it as high school sophomores, and actual college math starts at Calculus I and goes from there. This is unchanged from when I went through high school two decades ago.
Two things did change. One thing that did change a lot is how math from about 3rd grade to 6th-7th grade is taught due to Common Core. The coworker whose kid just started high school definitely filled me in on that, essentially you do not do multiplication and division, you must break it down into addition and subtraction. For example, 3x5 isn't simply 15 because you memorized it that way from the multiplication tables as I did. It MUST be done as 5+5+5 = 15, but NOT 3+3+3+3+3 = 15, for some strange reason. There were other goofier things as well, such as mandatory use of rounding to the nearest "round" number and then adding/subtracting the difference at the end instead of directly calculating it, as if you were trying to do mental math on large, non-round numbers on paper. If you had the question of 19-7, you couldn't just calculate it out to be 12. You had to round 19 to 20 and then 7 to 10, so you got 10 (20 - 10) as your first answer. You then subtracted 1 because 20 is 1 more than 19 (9) and then added 3 to that (12) because 7 is 3 more than the 10 you subtracted, and 12 was your final answer.
The other thing that changed is that everything in physics and engineering, even 20 years ago and both in high school and college, was taught solely in metric. We didn't deal with fps or ft-lb at all, it was solely m/s and joules. Of course we could look up the corresponding unit definitions and constants in standard units and when we were out of school and working on real problems in the real world, ended up working primarily with standard units rather than metric.
