math for 169 types of starting holdem hands

Yeah, definitely the notation that confuses the shit out of kids with maths. That and terrible teachers, which is why a lot of kids don't go on to A Level Maths.

I think I did something like that for my GCSE coursework actually. Iirc, top marks were given if you worked out the nCr formula by yourself (piece of piss obviously).

Originally Posted by The Bean Counter

Yeah, definitely the notation that confuses the shit out of kids with maths. That and terrible teachers, which is why a lot of kids don't go on to A Level Maths.

Wow, this is incredibly offensive and ignorant. I'm sorry to derail the thread, but I can't let this go unanswered. The idea that a sizeable proportion of bad teachers are personally to blame for kids leaving school without a grasp of simple mathematics seems to be a favorite of Michael Gove at the moment. It makes a convenient scapegoat for underfunding of schools (and huge class sizes), poverty among students and their families, a testing system set up to disengage kids entering schools at a low level of education, and a government set curriculum and inspection system that deprives teachers of any flexibility in teaching method/content anyway.

The majority of teachers work incredibly hard to cope with overfilled classes of kids who are often not at all interested in even being there and who have often not been exposed to books/science/maths or intelligent conversation until the day they arrive.

I went to a school like this, which was even threatened with being shut down while I was there. For most of my final year at the school we had a police van on one school gate and a police car on another at the end of each school day. We even had a police helicopter overhead more than once. This school was the definition of a problem school, and yet, less than 4 years before it had been one of the better schools in the area. That all changed when another underfunded trouble school nearby was closed, and our class sizes doubled overnight with the influx of new kids.

Despite all of this, I ended up getting a masters in physics at university and a fairly good grasp of basic mathematics along with that. I had exactly the same teachers as the rest of these kids. Trying to claim that a group of people who work incredibly hard to educate (often quite troubled) kids are on average bad at their jobs is not only incredibly insulting and wrong, but also damaging. If you actually want to see schools get better then stop blaming teachers and start fighting for more money to flow into education. Teachers are fucking heroes working some of the longest and hardest hours of any job in the country and they deserve our respect and support.