[jamesbkel]

One of things that I have found to be a disappointed with the US education system is lack of statistics courses in High School. In most cases, the extent of stats/prob education is limited to AP Statistics, which most students will not take and probably scares off many otherwise bright students because of the "AP".

I find this particularly troubling since I remember as a student that my peers would constantly complain about math courses using the rationale "Am I ever going to really use this?". Both sides are arguable for certain subjects (I can't remember the last time I really used trigonometry, but I do think that learning it helped me to reason better in other domains). However, I find it troubling that statistics is not mandatory/highly encouraged, yet it is something that applies to an incredible amount of everyday activities.

[neilc]

One of things that I have found to be a disappointed with the US education system is lack of statistics courses in High School.

Absolutely. Teaching HS students trig but not statistics makes zero sense.

That said, the way statistics is taught is absolutely awful (probably even worse than most math education), so I'm not sure it would make much difference.

[jamesbkel]

That is a valid point.

One of things I noticed when I was in HS (~10 years ago) was that since it was such a new phenomenon to teach stats in public HS, the teacher was essentially learning alongside us. This was no fault of his own, but simply that when he was training to teach, the value of teaching everyone basic stats was not appreciated.

I can only hope that trend will change.

[__float]

I'm currently in an AP Statistics class (the only statistics class my school offers--and I didn't take it by choice). There's still plenty of "Why does this matter?" in the classroom, and the sad part is, my teacher doesn't know the answer.

She's one of the worst teachers I've ever had, and it's a shame. She definitely does know what she's doing, but she has absolutely no ability to pass that knowledge on effectively. In some ways it's no different than the argument this article makes about more "traditional" high school math classes--except for the great abundance of story problems, with which most students have very little prior experience.