Reply #68: I'm an advocate of requiring hard subjects in high school because

[Lydia Leftcoast]

kids at that age often don't know what they want to do. By saying, "Oh, you can skip that course, because you'll never use it," or "You don't need math/foreign language/science, because I (the parent) was never good at it,"we are effectively closing off possible life paths.

I hated math in high school, but now I know that it was because we had large classes and the teachers were unable to explain the principles to me in ways that worked for me. Later in life, I had some really good instructors who knew how to make mathematical concepts comprehensible by explaining everything several ways.

As a college professor, I had a few students every year who waited till their senior year to fulfill their language requirement because their parents had told them that languages were "hard" and "useless." Some of these students discovered that, in fact, studying Japanese was easy and fun for them, and they regretted having listened to their parents all through high school and their first three years of college.

How are you going to find out what hidden talents you have if nobody ever requires you to stretch beyond your comfort zone?

(By the way, I have never used actual algebra/trig/calculus in my current work, but the fact that I've had these subjects makes it easier for me to understand discussions of scientific topics, something that I DO encounter in my translation work.)