If only there were a sarcasm font, I would use it for the title of my latest post.
Has anyone else heard that there are rumblings in the American academic scene about eliminating fractions from the grade-school curriculum? To be fair, I don't think it's a complete removal, it would be more of a down-sizing.
Here's the deal...
There are estimates that if we moved to the metric system (meters, cc's, etc) we would drastically reduce our need for fractions. But here's the kicker, if we reduced the amount of energy spent teaching fractions, [the estimates say] we could gain 1-2 years in grade school math.
Think about it, when do you need fractions? How about adding 1/4" to 3 7/8". or when you want to triple that chocolate cookie recipe that you are making. If we went metric, you could just convert everything to a decimal and add the numbers with your graphing calculator.
So, all we have to do is go metric and POOF! We gain TONS of time.
Personally, I think this is one of the worst ideas I have ever heard. We don't want to teach something because it's hard?!! I managed to make it through. How about we decrease the student to teacher ratio (or fraction, or whatever) get the parents to pay attention to what the students are doing in school, and we get some kids that actually learn something.
Just recently I was watching the news and I saw something about one of the local schools complaining because in order to get a certain accreditation, they had to graduate 70% of the students. They wanted the number bumped down to 65%. This is unbelievable.
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