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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

Completely unsurprising. (Former?) Math nerd and common core hater here; having watched myself and other kids go through all of this; beyond EARLY algebra, maybe earlier we literally should not teach any math that doesn't have an immediate and obvious use to children.

(My biggest pet peeve is how Common Core teaches fun -- but unnecessary for learning -- math nerd tricks. I LOVE math nerd tricks, but they should be discovered independently and entirely optional)

Now, the silver lining here is; we have a thing that does hit a lot of advanced high-school math easily. Just let them kids learn video game programming and be done with it.

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Advances math helps with developing logical thinking and in general makes you smarter.

But I agree we could achieve same results by teaching more practical skills. Maybe, programming (data structures and algorithms) over calculus?

I would say data structure and algorithms are not more practical to actual literal children. Better off letting them cook/bake, where they have to work out ratios, temperatures, giving one third more or quartering other portions, etc etc. let them do scoring, figure out how to split 300g of chocolate between 5 friends and the like.

Calculus is so important for understanding the natural world. Being able to reason about rates of change is a valuable skill.

That said, spending a bunch of time memorizing stupid identities to compute integrals is probably not the best way to teach introductory calculus.

Do something crazy and teach kids to write their own QP solver. That will force them to learn quadratic functions, vector norms, solving linear equations using LU decomposition, dot products, vector matrix and matrix vector multiplication, convexity, Lagrangian multipliers, etc.

The quadratic programming solver can be used to calculate ordinary least squares for linear regression and controlling robot arms in real time or linear model predictive control.

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