A Question About Algebra
By Dr. Eugene Maier |
Last month I did an afternoon's workshop on teaching algebraic thinking at a conference of adult educators. Midway through the workshop someone asked if I personally knew anyone who used algebra in their job. I couldn't think of anyone at the moment. Neither could anyone else. Someone thought there were some engineers or physicists who did, but they didn't know when or how. When queried, nobody in the room could recall ever using algebra in any part of their lives outside the classroom.
"If in a group of 30 adults nobody uses algebra and doesn't know anyone who does it can't be very important; so why," the question came, "do we try to teach algebra to everyone?" I confessed I had no ready answer to that question, other than it's required to survive school.
The Oregon Department of Education graduation standards as well as Oregon University System admission standards require a year of high school algebra. The reason as near as I can figure out is that one must take first-year algebra in order to take second-year algebra in order to take trigonometry in order to take calculus, the capstone course. Given the vast number of high school freshmen that are squeezed into this algebra-to-calculus pipeline and the few college students that come out the other end, it hardly seems worth the effort. Especially if all one has to show for it is the standard first-year algebra course in which one learns to manipulate symbols according to prescribed rules that are, at best, dimly understood.
At worst the result is boredom or confusion, and a distaste for all things algebraic. Those for whom this happens are in famous company. "I despised algebra," Eisenhower recalls in At Ease: Stories I tell to Friends. "I could see no profit in substituting complex expressions for routine terms and the job of simplifying long, difficult equations bored me. I by no means distinguished myself." In Dreams, Memories and Reflections, Jung tells of his terror as he sat watching his algebra teacher at work: "He would scribble a few letters on the blackboard. I had no idea where he got them and why he did it--the only reason I could see was that it enabled him to bring the procedure to what he felt was a satisfactory conclusion. I was so intimidated by my incomprehension that I dare not ask any questions. Mathematics classes became sheer terror and torture to me."
At the other end of spectrum are those of us who learned the rules and found no difficulty in manipulating symbols and getting things to turn out right, rewarded by the distinction one gained from getting good grades in math. We weren't doing anything that now-a-days couldn't be done more efficiently and accurately by an electronic symbol manipulator. We were simply slower versions of machines, programmed by our teachers to carry out procedures without worrying about meaning. What I gained from the experience is questionable, other than a false impression of what mathematics was about. (I remember being somewhat chagrined when I discovered--after committing myself to majoring in math and deciding that I wanted to be a mathematics professor--that mathematics was something other than mastering evermore complicated algorithmic procedures. But then I discovered it was a much more creative and absorbing subject than I had ever imagined.)
For the most part, things haven't changed much, other than the size of the textbooks. The contemporary 700-page text in use in a local high school is filled with boxes of definitions, formulas and techniques and pages of worked out examples, telling the student what to write down and how to think, followed by pages and pages of exercises to practice what they've been told--I counted over 265 elementary factoring exercises, over 300 exercise concerning the arithmetic of rational expressions and some 260 exercises manipulating radicals. One can understand why th