@diffractie

I'm still trying to understand what it is that people think they never learned about taxes? What a percent is? How to read a table? Those are important skills.

Making up fake tax forms and slogging through them sounds like some kind of educational torture to me.

Also... what the heck do people mean by "how to do taxes" anyway? It's an *algorithm* How could that take more than 10min to understand?

When I see that meme what I take from it is that a lot of people remember the word "parallelogram" from math class and they don't know what the significance of it was or why they had to be so stressed out about it. They also recognize that taxes involve doing math. Maybe they suppose that it's through math that rich people pay so little tax?

@futurebird

I think it might be shorthand for something like
• how percentages work
• the different numbers on a typical payslip and how to check it
• what taxes are / how the government sets them / roughly which things in the physical world are maintained via that flow of money
• the related laws which could get you into trouble
• a bit of familiarity with the most likely admin-processes you're going to have to do.

From my school, I did get the percentage skills Not the rest.

@Dss

I try to be patient but ... a major reason we teach geometry is it's the easiest way to really understand the concept of similarity, ratio and proportion.

You know, the main thing you need to get to "do taxes" ... take a percentage.

I often forget that there are many people who do percentages as algorithms and have no intuitive sense of the difference between 2% and 0.02%

I've seen students show up in calculus who didn't really understand fractions OFTEN. And we must fix that first.

@futurebird

I think it might be shorthand for something like
• how percentages work
• the different numbers on a typical payslip and how to check it
• what taxes are / how the government sets them / roughly which things in the physical world are maintained via that flow of money
• the related laws which could get you into trouble
• a bit of familiarity with the most likely admin-processes you're going to have to do.

From my school, I did get the percentage skills Not the rest.

@unchartedworlds @futurebird

There's a persistent myth that earning even just one dollar into the next tax progressive bracket means you pay the higher rate on all of your income.

I spent like half an hour trying to convince a friend with a struggling local business that he did not need to worry about this if his store had more success. Eventually I just gave up.

@Dss

And since I don't like it when people say "not enough people know X" but then don't explain X.

% is a symbol that means out of 100

2% is 2/100 or 0.02 without the %

You can multiply by a percent, like any other number to find that percent of a number.

"2% of $200 is $4"

(2/100)*200=4 or
0.02*200=4

So what is 0.02%? Same math replace 2 with 0.02

(0.02/100)*200=0.04 or
0.0002*200=0.04

"0.02% of $200 is $0.04 or 4 cents."

Also... what the heck do people mean by "how to do taxes" anyway? It's an *algorithm* How could that take more than 10min to understand?

When I see that meme what I take from it is that a lot of people remember the word "parallelogram" from math class and they don't know what the significance of it was or why they had to be so stressed out about it. They also recognize that taxes involve doing math. Maybe they suppose that it's through math that rich people pay so little tax?

@futurebird @Dss I used to teach the "etymology" of %, as /oo or
/100, with the 1 0 moved up(anyone know why? I don't!)
And o/oo for per thousand.
I don't think I've expressed it well here tho!

@futurebird If it takes someone 10 minutes to understand how American income taxes work, they're far more intelligent and perceptive than I am.

I think you may be underestimating how much anxiety this creates for some folks. I would have LOVED it if any of my high school teachers/college profs had spent even 10 minutes talking about this stuff. I really relate to all the "why did we study X but not doing taxes" content - it's always felt like a major missing chunk of my education.

@sidereal @futurebird I feel like if you gave kids instructions on how to trisect an angle and they managed to follow those instructions, they would be completely competent to follow their instructions on how to file taxes. It's not that it's difficult, it's that they feel overwhelmed. They need practice to just be whelmed.

Also... what the heck do people mean by "how to do taxes" anyway? It's an *algorithm* How could that take more than 10min to understand?

When I see that meme what I take from it is that a lot of people remember the word "parallelogram" from math class and they don't know what the significance of it was or why they had to be so stressed out about it. They also recognize that taxes involve doing math. Maybe they suppose that it's through math that rich people pay so little tax?

Saw a post the other day: "I'm so glad I learned what a parallelogram is and NOT how to do my taxes in school."

Generally, people who say such things don't know what a parallelogram is OR how to do their taxes. They have been failed twice. They were presented with the signifiers of a liberal arts education but received none of the substance.

This isn't their fault and replacing alienating signifiers of a liberals arts education with signifiers "trades training" won't do what they think.

@futurebird when I was younger I'd parrot this complaint but then I remembered the few times I was given real world advice as a teenager I simply lacked the real world experience to actually comprehend it, and I didn't truly understand the value of money until I lived on my own actually budgeting my own money to my own competing expenses.

For an example, in middle school I remember an assignment where they had us put down what we think various normal expenses cost like rent, water, electricity, and groceries. I don't remember what the point of the assignment was just the teachers laughing about how we had nearly zero idea of what anything actually cost and assigned high amounts to forgettable bills and low amounts to the most painful ones. I think it might have been a budgeting assignment? I honestly don't remember. But what I do remember is as kids who didn't have actual financial obligations we had no clue what anything cost so giving financial advice was kinda meaningless

@futurebird when I was younger I'd parrot this complaint but then I remembered the few times I was given real world advice as a teenager I simply lacked the real world experience to actually comprehend it, and I didn't truly understand the value of money until I lived on my own actually budgeting my own money to my own competing expenses.

For an example, in middle school I remember an assignment where they had us put down what we think various normal expenses cost like rent, water, electricity, and groceries. I don't remember what the point of the assignment was just the teachers laughing about how we had nearly zero idea of what anything actually cost and assigned high amounts to forgettable bills and low amounts to the most painful ones. I think it might have been a budgeting assignment? I honestly don't remember. But what I do remember is as kids who didn't have actual financial obligations we had no clue what anything cost so giving financial advice was kinda meaningless

Also, and I have thought about this, because I take education very seriously, making lesson plans on "how to do your taxes" for 8th graders (when you generally learn about parallelograms) sounds like such a horrible idea.

The kids would be bored out of their eyeballs. I do teach my seniors about things like banking, loans, reserves etc. but many "applied math" topics are boring and difficult to adapt into excellent lessons.

@futurebird a 5th grade teacher in .ca.us starts the first day of school with kids applying for jobs ( cleaning, grade accounting, banking, librarianing, ... ) that pay fake money and charges rent for desks

No job pays enough for rent, so they all have do side jobs like extra movie or book reports to make ends meet

not taxes per se, but accounting and budgeting

Students can save and buy their own desks, then buy other desks. He quickly learned he had to institute rent controls

@Dss

And since I don't like it when people say "not enough people know X" but then don't explain X.

% is a symbol that means out of 100

2% is 2/100 or 0.02 without the %

You can multiply by a percent, like any other number to find that percent of a number.

"2% of $200 is $4"

(2/100)*200=4 or
0.02*200=4

So what is 0.02%? Same math replace 2 with 0.02

(0.02/100)*200=0.04 or
0.0002*200=0.04

"0.02% of $200 is $0.04 or 4 cents."

@futurebird @Dss oooh, cool, I do that correctly

I don't have to do percentages that often, but when explaining it to kidling at some point I said y percentage is y/100, so multiply by y, then divide by 100

Dividing by the percentage would multiplying by the inverse? e.g. 200 divided by 2% would be 200 * ( 100 / 2 ), which is 10,000 and gives you the amount that 200 is 2% of?

I just convinced myself mathematically that that is correct, but uncertain of the grammar/logic describing it

@sidereal @futurebird I feel like if you gave kids instructions on how to trisect an angle and they managed to follow those instructions, they would be completely competent to follow their instructions on how to file taxes. It's not that it's difficult, it's that they feel overwhelmed. They need practice to just be whelmed.