Oddbean new post about login | logout @134318c2 Trying to teach stats before calculus is probably a non-starter. Kids should be exposed to stats earlier, sure, but that's realistically more of a comp-sci topic for 90% of applications, and you can't teach stats-as-math without calculus. In any case trig is the worse gate-keeping subject imo. How tf are we still using the classic names for "sin cos tan" etc instead of something usefully descriptive? Most kids abandon math long before they even attempt calc.
@e41e653a Trig is such a lovely subject, but if your teacher doesn't LOVE it it's gonna be a bad time. Most people don't ever really get it... and I'm not against skipping it if there aren't the resources to do it correctly. Logarithms however? No one should escape without learning to love the logs.
@134318c2 @e41e653a I loved trig, especially all the relationships between circles and the curves of trigonometric functions. And there's so much of the world around us that relates to trig, ranging from simple things like how the pitch of a roof affects the difficulty of keeping your footing on the roof, to rainbows, sound, computer graphics, and cyclic things. I can understand skipping it if the resources are insufficient, but without it so many things become inaccessible.