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Kasie Van Pelt Emily Jarema Eng. 111 B Algebra II an Elective Class? Life isn't about algebra and geometry or whatever your parents tell you. Life is about learning; by making mistakes and not duplicating them is what life is about. Algebra II is what every high school student dreads when the time comes. For some people they want it to be an elective class for those who actually need it for their career, while teachers believe that every student must know and see Algebra II whether they like it or not. Students are not allowed to show how they can find their own way but are forced to do what others tell them to do to succeed in life. Every human is different and they all learn different ways, we are not machines

Algebra II is not the class for every student in high school but in schools these days it is required and is not elective. In Wrong Answer: The Case against Algebra II by Nicholson Baker explains why students should have the choice to take Algebra II class. Some students and teachers called it the nasty gatekeeper course for the hatred of the class but for others it seems to be great, timeless, and beautiful that offers seemingly superhuman powers of interlinkage. For the students who love math and the challenge it gives during the course no math is actually taught but the memorization of problem solving tactics. For some the class has hit them so hard that some feel stupid, dumb, and sometimes suicidal. Some examples are: Algebra is the huge fucking dam that prevents me from flowing, and being a better person. Algebra. Weightlifting for the brain my ass. More like death of all happiness in the world. I really really hate Algebra 2, wish I was dead. I want to kill myself. Help? If you can? (Baker 32)

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These students are over upset for being required to do a class that might not even help them in the long run. In the class the homework is unrelenting, the algorithms get longer and trickier, the quizzes keep coming. Sooner or later, many of them hit a wall. They fail the course and have to take it again. And then again (Baker 32). It is like try to get a person with one arm to play the guitar or violin, that person will either grow to hate themselves or hate you for trying to make them and remind them of their disability to not be able to do that. Being in the class and doing the actual math that is required someone would think to do a little arithmetic and trial and error but that is not what the textbook wants. What it wants you to do is to model the problem with the percentage as a rational function and make a little graph next to the problem. A man that supported this was Arne Duncan, the United States secretary of education, who wanted students who had a below average grade to have two hours of Algebra II back to back in class. The teachers called this double-period hell, and as for the results they were not very encouraging to see. The students slightly improved but for the higher skilled students their grades actually declining rapidly, but Duncan was undeterred that everyone should learn and love Algebra II because he believes that it is a mystical portal to prosperity. Not everyone believes what he does. As Grant Wiggins says You dont need algebra for the majority of jobs. You need it for the burgeoning field of high-tech, but thats not all the jobs (Baker 34). This is true not all jobs need the Algebra II requirement but high schools require it from their students. High schools shouldnt lie to their students; no one can really force a student to think that it will be useful later in life and keeping that force dont encourage students Algebra II is just terrible. Some teachers actually believe that high school students need less math and more meaningful math and stop teaching them answers to things that they wouldnt even think to ask

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anyone. Teachers should tell kids how great math is but try not to force it. If Algebra II was an elective and colleges didnt ubiquitously demand it, fewer people would fail it, too, and fewer people might drop out of high school, and the level of cheating would go down, and the sum total of student misery would be substantially reduced (Baker 35). Saying that the course should have to be an elective class instead of the schools forcing it on the students. Another math teacher by the name of Derek Stolp also believes that not everyone should have to learn the abstract algebraic techniques that a lot of people find useless. Rising the bar doesnt always mean that the students will go up with it, they could if they wanted to but these days students dont see why and just dont. One of the first states to remove that math requirement was Ohio and saying that its bit fair to pressure on a study on a student who will have no need for that requirement in their future. One reason that the states have increased their push on the students everywhere is that America wants to be the top country staying above Russia because we dont want to look weak. For the American Government this still wasnt enough for the defenseminded workers. The government wants the students to learn the impossible for their benefit not the own students. Another article, Angels on a Pin: The Barometer Story by Alexander Calandra, further proves that students are not allowed to show how they can find their own way but are forced to do what others tell them to do to succeed in life. Alexander Calandra restates what one of his colleagues said to a student that he should give the student a zero for his answer to a physics question, while the student claimed that he should receive a perfect score and would if the system were not set up against the student (Calandra 158). The student knew what he was doing on the examination question but to the teacher he had he saw no physics in his answer so it was wrong. Alexander gave the student another chance but he wanted the student to really

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incorporate the physics into his answer and gave him six minutes to do so. When five minutes went by Alexander took a glimpse of his paper and saw nothing written on it and asked the student if he would like to give up and he declined that and said that he had multiply answers but didnt know which one to use. So Alexander let him get back to work and the student then wrote out his new answer, which read Take the barometer to the top of the building and lean over the edge of the roof. Drop the barometer, timing its fall with a stopwatch. Then, using the formula S= 1/2 at2, calculate the height of the building (Calandra 159). Then Alexander told his colleague if he would give up and give the student almost full credit. Now recalling what the student said earlier, having multiple answers but not being able to figure out which one to use, Alexander then asks the student what his other answers were. The student told him the others he could have used but then Alexander thinks for a moment and asks the student if he really knew the conventional way to answer the question and she honestly said no. The student then says that he was fed up with high school and college instructors trying to teach him how to think, to use the scientific method, and to explore the deep inner logic of the subject in a pedantic way, as is often done in the new mathematics, rather than teaching him the structure of the subject (Calandra 160). With that now in mind the student revived scholasticism as an academic subject to challenge the Sputnik-panicked classrooms in America.

The comparisons on the articles are that they both want the student to learn what they, the teachers or professors, want them to learn not to find their own way. Even though one stays on the subject of the High Schools around and the other talks about the teachers in Colleges both get to the point that they are all trying to tell students want to learn and how to learn. High schools dont explain the depth that colleges go into but try to get you in, out, graduate so they

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can do the next students coming up. In a way both article s are saying that no one should control what and how someone teaches another. A person should be their own person learning their way at their own pace and not be expected to be the same as everyone. High schools almost see the difference between the students who can learn fast over the ones that cant, then split the students up into different classes to learn at their own speed kind of. Colleges just dont care they give you an assignment and expect you and everyone else to get it done at the same time at the same speed. Which helps little because once they get to college level the speed triples on those people, sadly most of the time hurts some learning experience for the new or older students.

My opinion on this would be that the students should have the right to pick and choose what they have to learn to move forward. Not some smart person who has taught the same class over and over again reading from the same notes or textbook. Have someone that understands how the students feel so they dont feel left out by the students that can get the information fast. No one is a robot that can take in everything and store in a memory bank, we are human beings that are all different no one is the same. We should appreciate being alive and that we can understand things we couldnt even dream of when we were little. A person has their own life to live being told what to do every single day of life until you die is not right to me. Schools and colleges are forcing more from students that may not need to take a course but they want them to take the, agonizing painful, class just so they can say Yes they took that class and they went through us to do so. Every person is different, we all learn differently, and we all have a different pace we learn at. Maybe stating an opinion instead of forcing it would help and be better for everyone. Also it may lead more students to go forward to college or continue in high

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schools instead of dropping out half way through because of the stress and ungrateful students attending.

So high schools try to tell students what to learn and dont allow them to learn what they want to do for the rest of their life. The teachers and professors also try and tell you want you need to learn in college by reading it out of a book the state wants the kids to learn. Everyone has their own way of doing things, try and let them do it their way and help them not try to control or force them in doing it a different way.