IMO, how they teach math in school (at least when I went to HS) is part of the problem. I recall all my math courses being extremely dry and boring with no attempt at showing students how it applied to the real world. The funny thing is that I recall my uncle telling me a story of how his math teachers showing students how to play black jack (or some other card game) to demonstrate how probability works. Interesting how we know call that 'gamification.'
The 3 levels or streams you are referring to used to be called Advanced for university students, General for college or trade school level and Basic for everyone else. The sad thing is that ALL students no matter what level they take need the basic financial skills especially budgeting no matter what they choose as a career. As far as I know, they de-streamed (or removed advanced, general and basic) in grade 9 around the same time grade 13 was eliminated. That also create the 'double cohort' problem where kids were graduating the 5 year and 4 year HS program and applying to post-secondary at the same time.
That is another issue with math in HS. Most of the time, math is some reason taught with little or zero creativity. Is it that hard to take some of those questions and meld it into something kind of interesting? Very dry when it's just a set of numbers.
Since the past 10 years are all about cell phones, tablets, Facebook and such, twist some of the questions to do with those gadgets. At least make it kind of interesting. The only time I remember taking A&G, Calculus and Finite (took them all) where the questions were at least kind of interesting was finite. Although no teacher actually taught us blackjack, at least the questions often had to do with cards. You have 3 jacks, what's the probability of pulling a 4th one given you have two discards and such. I don't remember any A&G or calculus material that had a hint of interesting material..... at least none of my teachers tried.
I'm not a teacher, but working in business as my career, in order to get your point across it's not strictly about numbers. In fact, most people HATE when someone comes by or is in a meeting and all they do is whip out a spreadsheet. Although financials are important, in order to get your point across you got to convince people with a story, factors, consequence, and make it interesting etc....
You don't just go up to someone and say.... hey, look at my spreadhseet. It says $1,000,000. That is a good number IMO. Bye.
To get the crowd interested and ensure people understand..... how did you get to $1,000,000? Why is $1,000,000 important? What happens if we do something else, what $$$ do we then get? Less? more? What do we have to do if we want to get to $2,000,000? What's the story? Does anyone disagree and why?
Get people engaged and you can get your point across easier. Be boring and just make people stare at an Excel doc and half your crowd will doze off.... even if $1,000,000 is correct and a good number people should be happy about. Shouldn't teaching be one part material and one part presentation/teaching skill? Instead, it seems the teachers focus on the material (which they are right probably 99% of the time), but do teachers take presentation classes? Do they take speaking classes? Doesn't look like it.
As for the double cohort year, my HS years were way before it. But that graduating year of double grads must have been weird. How did all the colleges and universities support that year? Did they purposely open up admissions to smooth it out, or they pretty much held firm so you have a large amount of students who got denied?
