At a time when our society is talking about self-driving cars, phones that use facial or voice recognition and students spending endless hours playing games with friends on the internet, we find that some students are not motivated enough to struggle with algebra.  So, we have come up with some reasons why your students should embrace the study of algebra:

1.  Build Logic Skills – regardless of your future career or life – understanding the sequence of events is important for a cook, driver, doctor, firefighter, pilot or an engineer.  Algebra is necessary to help you understand what is important in a sequence of events.

2. Build Problem-Solving Skills and Reasoning Skills - understanding how to move factors from one side of the equation to the other will help you understand the balance of nature and how it is all interrelated.

3. Build relationships between mathematical concepts and equations and graphs – understanding the relationships between constant and variable parameters.  How would temperature changes affect the rate at which water will melt in the mountains? Or what is the amount of time and energy that we would need to charge our future electric cars to reach 300 miles?

4. Build the foundation for upper level subjects like chemistry, physics, statistics or calculus. There is no way to understand oxidation-reduction (redox) reactions, averages or velocities without an understanding of algebraic equations. It is the language of matter and energy. 

5. Colleges want students who understand algebra.  Thus, algebra is fundamental to score well on college entrance exams. About 30% of the ACT Math and about 50% of the SAT Math is focused on Algebra. 

6. Algebra will help you figure out how to budget your spending when you are finally on your own. It will help you balance your bank account and avoid unnecessary debt.

7. Help get you better jobs – whether you are interested in programing, sales, marketing, management or science – you will need to have solid foundations in algebra to be able to perform on those jobs. 

8. Let’s consider some practical algebra problems during the days of COVID:  

• Estimate rate of propagation of the virus in a selected geographical area. 

• Estimate the utilization of hospital beds in our community given different rates of infection.

• Estimate the human cost in our community due to the high propagation of the virus.

• Understand the effects of infection among different populations groups in our community.  

After being used by our culture for more than 4000 years, algebra is not going away. In fact, its usage is growing, and it is becoming more important in our daily lives, not to mention it is required for any high school diploma.  If any of your students need some assistance with algebra, give Vogel Prep a call.  We have experienced tutors that can help your student understand the usage of this tool so they can have a bright future and be able to land that dream job.