About half of middle class US public school students don't want to learn any math at all. There are many HS students who can't answer "What's half of 20?" or factor the number 15.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/
There are many HS students who can't answer "What's half of 20?" or factor the number 15.
Part of me sees that and immediately thinks "That can't possibly be true". Another part of me reminds the other part that I used to feel the same way about the statement "many working programmers can't write FizzBuzz". And then I was on the interview team for my employer a couple of jobs back, and we routinely asked candidates to write FizzBuzz. And many, including folks with 10, 15+ years of documented coding experience, and/or Masters or PhD degrees in C.S., could not do it. And that's even when they were given a laptop with an IDE open, with the skeleton of the program in place, with strategically located comments saying "your code goes here" and suchlike.
I don't know what to think about humanity sometimes. The same race that put people on the moon, helicopters on Mars, Voyagers beyond the edge of the Solar System, invented the Internet, nanotech, lasers, etc. has people who can make it to (and through) high school, and still can't come up with "what's half of 20" or, apparently, write FizzBuzz???
> I don't know what to think about humanity sometimes.
If it's any solace, selection bias is a thing. Those applicants that can't Fizz Buzz? They rarely get hired, and are rarely kept on for long when they do get an offer. Spoolsky made the argument like 20 years ago that as a result they flood the zone, and produce a massively biased applicant stream.
After the Boston Marathon bombing, one of my buddies (masters cum laude in history) posted a long series of socially conscious rants about white elites unfairly demonizing the suspects for being brown people. I had to explain that Chechnya is right in the middle of the Caucasus mountain range. "Oh."
They had to fudge the demographics in the 1930 census because so many people from Georgia, Texas, etc identified themselves as South American.
I knew a guy who spent weeks drooling over bargains in a UK computer magazine without realizing that £ was not a dollar sign.
My buddy in Santa Fe gets into arguments with customer support people over whether New Mexico is part of the United States.
