“I’m 25 years old, so why am I adding and subtracting fractions?”
BY: JACOB POLITTE
Managing Editor
Originally, this edition of Jake’s Take was going to be something completely different. But recent events have caused me to rethink that original column, and honestly, I think this one will be alot more enjoyable for our readers. Basically, the following is a no-holds-barred rant.
I am a college student. Not a High Schooler. I haven’t been a high schooler in almost 8 years. And as someone who is trying very hard to proceed to the next chapter of his life, and towards financial stability, I am ungodly frustrated with some of the math courses that I have had to take.
Currently I am taking MTH 161, otherwise known as Quantitative Reasoning. That is my only online class this semester, but that factor hasn’t helped or hurt me. The class, on the surface, is pointless.
I’d like to make it very clear that I don’t blame my instructor. Teri Graville is a wonderful human being, and an excellent teacher who has earned the high ratings she gets from her students. She does her absolute best to make sure that her students understand the material. When you’re choosing your classes for a semester, she is among the best math professors that you can choose from at this particular institution.
Admittedly, I have never been the best at math. But quite honestly? I don’t think that’s the reason I’m so disenfranchised. Simply put, I’m too old to be concentrating on complicated math problems that aren’t going to help me get ahead in life.
I’ve been through absolute hell this year, so I may have a shorter fuse than I would otherwise. But I quite literally don’t care about how to add, subtract, multiply or divide fractions. I don’t care about Permutations … How are they supposed to help me? I’m majoring in communications, not mathematical engineering or statistics or whatever. I’m not going to need any of this, and you can’t tell me I ever will.
Teach me about finances. Teach me about interest rates and how they work. Teach me how to do my taxes, or how to budget my money. These shouldn’t be things that I have to go out and learn on my own. Or in the case of some of these classes, confined to a single unit in a course. It’s laughable. Just as laughable as the Personal Finance class that I actually did take in High School, which essentially consisted of a cheap booklet and my teacher watching the Cardinals game on his computer.
I realize that STLCC can do little to change the structure of these courses, but I do think that it is well-overdue for math courses at institutions across the country to be more specifically tailored to a student’s particular interests. I’m going to be writing things for the rest of my life, and I don’t need to waste my time or my money doing a bunch of stupid math problems about divorce rates (I’m not kidding, that’s been the basis for more than one of these math questions) that the nitwits at Pearson come up with.
I do need this class in order to be done with math at STLCC and eventually to get my degree, and then I likely won’t have to worry about taking another math class again. I will have to do my very best.
But the fact that so many college students are still subjected to these unrelatable, illogical math problems that they will likely never have to use again in life, is rather pointless to me. It is an unnecessary waste of time, and not just to the students. It’s a waste of time to the institution as a whole. I realize that some students may need to learn this information. But the students that have indicated that they want to pursue a career path that doesn’t require them to learn this information shouldn’t be subjected to it. It’s not fundamentally important to still be lingering around adding and subtracting fractions. It’s not going to help them.
Financial literacy is so important, and quite frankly, needs to be more focused on than it is. And that’s the bottom line.
