Wow

One more WAT? from the person educated in a different system.

Perry, who is taking organic chemistry, just asked if someone could explain vectors to him, and claimed he had never seen them before.

I'm like... WTF? You didn't do those math? Vector spaces? Matrices? Eigenvalues and eigenvectors?

Nope, he says.

Dh immediately chimes in "No linear algebra in high school!"

Whoa.

Now, granted, I was on a math/physics track in high school, but we did all that. Not in as great depth as we did again at uni, but we certainly did linear algebra. I was quite surprised that it isn't done in the US (all of my kids and dh took the highest level of algrebra at their schools, none had it, dh has a degree in mathematics). The precursor stuff is certainly taught, but we went as far as an introduction -note INTRODUCTION- to tensors and tensor analysis.

I checked the current programmes for France for high school, math/science track, and they still do most of it. Don't go quite as far as we did (we got some differential equations and we had a unit on logic, ugh) but they get some python programming, but it appears that linear algebra is still being taught at the hs level.

I will never forget my first day in math as soph equivalent, so the first year of the math/physics track. The teacher walked in, introduced himself and wrote on the board: "Introduction aux espaces vectoriels". Hello vector spaces, hello WTF do you mean n fucking dimensions, hello why the hell didn't I go into the math/biology track? But that was not the worse that year had to offer. The worse was the section on logic. OMG, I hated that. To this day I cannot see some of those symbols without cringing. The nasty circle with the plus sign gave me nightmares.

Everyone once in a while, a difference in education like that hits me and I go "huh!" and the rest of my family goes "huh?!" back at me.