Teach how to think

I teach algebra at the University of Phoenix. None of my students are in any sort of science/technical field. Nursing is as close as it comes. So I'm frequently asked the eternal question, asked of any math teacher whose students aren't there voluntarily, "What is this good for? When am I going to use it?"

Math isn't the only subject that gets this kind of questioning, of course. History, science, really almost any school subject can be. And answers like, "Math is everywhere!" and "Knowing where you came from can help you determine where to go" just aren't satisfying.

Here's the truth. I'm 99% sure my students will never again have to find the slope of a line. Just like I'm 99% sure that most history students will never need to know the dates of the Spanish-American war. But that's not why you study these things.

To do math well, you have to be able to apply a set of rules in an organized fashion. You have to be able to recognize the kind of problem you're dealing with, apply the relevant algorithm, keep all the details straight, and recognize when you're done. So if you learn to do math, you must also learn these skills. And those skills are used everywhere.

You don't take math to learn math. You take math to learn to solve problems in a structured fashion.

You don't take history to know what happened when. You take history to know why things happen. You see how people have behaved throughout history, you learn the patterns, and you see how those patterns repeat themselves.

You don't take science to know what kinds of rocks there are in the world. You take science to learn that the world operates according to predictable, deterministic (or at least probabilistic) fashion.

We focus on the details at the expense of the true overall lesson. If all we're testing our students on is how well they memorize trivia, we're wasting everyone's time. We're not teaching how to think.