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True, but in any educational system worth a tinker's damn this would not a required question because anyone graduating from high school should either know this or have had some help with this type of problem long before they graduated.
Well,
1) Some people just aren't very sharp....or at least not in that topic.
2) The schools cannot force you to learn or put in any effort. If the parents aren't on board then you have pretty much no control of the situation.
Really, what do you do with a 14yo gang banger putting in no effort? Screw him, try to teach the kids that want to be taught because if you embarass the kid publically or get on his case you are potentially facing a bullet in the back or at a minimum your car is going to accidentally combust. Teachers have to be realists in a failed social setting.
It's like handing someone a hand scythe and telling them to harvest 1000 acres of wheat...and complaining about how long it's taking and the quality of the job. Meanwhile, the next farm over is using a combine.
Seriously? How stupid does a high school student have to be to get this question wrong, let alone fail this exam (and people do!)? There was a thread created that asked "If our educational system in America is so terrible why is graduating from High School so hard"? Seriously?
And people on this forum are claiming that my standards are too high? It is no wonder why American students get blown out of the water compared to European and Asian countries with regards to Math and Science.
Americans are physically incapable of comprehending the meaning of negative numbers. That's why the deficit is somewhere South of 12 trillion dollars and is STILL never presented by the government as a negative number.
1) Some people just aren't very sharp....or at least not in that topic.
2) The schools cannot force you to learn or put in any effort. If the parents aren't on board then you have pretty much no control of the situation.
Really, what do you do with a 14yo gang banger putting in no effort? Screw him, try to teach the kids that want to be taught because if you embarass the kid publically or get on his case you are potentially facing a bullet in the back or at a minimum your car is going to accidentally combust. Teachers have to be realists in a failed social setting.
It's like handing someone a hand scythe and telling them to harvest 1000 acres of wheat...and complaining about how long it's taking and the quality of the job. Meanwhile, the next farm over is using a combine.
Then why does this country still have a program as idiotic as No Child Left Behind.
Leave the losers behind and let those who excel do so. It's the only way this country will be able to compete in the world market. If things don't change we will soon become the third world and Asia will take our place.
Americans are physically incapable of comprehending the meaning of negative numbers. That's why the deficit is somewhere South of 12 trillion dollars and is STILL never presented by the government as a negative number.
Then why does this country still have a program as idiotic as No Child Left Behind.
It's a vote getter!
"The Act requires states to develop assessments in basic skills to be given to all students in certain grades, if those states are to receive federal funding for schools."
I would expect a high school senior to know the answer, but I find that the older I get, and the more advanced math that I take, the more I forget the basic stuff (although I do know the answer to this one!). Heck, my ecology professor -a person with a Ph.D. who claims to have received As in all three Calc courses he took as an undergrad- has trouble remembering the stuff outside of the standard equations used by ecologists.
But this is not even really "math" math. This is logic.
My best friend was terrible in math, but she could handle logic problems. This problem requires no problems, no formulas, nothing. Just substitute 12 for N and see what happens. Any student who can't figure it out really shouldn't be allowed to pass their math class.
In my opinion, it's more of a math problem that any of those story problems ("Trevor's car gets 20 miles per gallon, he's going 60 miles per hour..."). What the question does is it takes a concept that's intuitively obvious to virtually everyone ("the opposite of 12 is negative 12") and puts it in mathematical language. If the student isn't trained to recognize that language as such, he won't know what the question means.
I agree, math to me is half trying to figure out what the question is asking you so that you can write out the equation, then solving it. The latter part is usually pretty simple, it's figuring out what the problem is asking you that's usually the challenge.
Ultimately, employers judge which kids have skills/knowledge worth anything to justify a well-paid job
The stunningly high un/underemployment rate among recent grads of various elite lib arts colleges like Harvard reveals value of such "skills", even with a prestige diploma
And many of these Asian/EU countries with allegedly stronger math/science in HS mysteriously have laughably weak engineering colleges/grad schools and lack smart entrepreneurial engineers to create the Apples and Googles of the world...which are nearly all based in CA suburbia...
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