Here's What Ontario's Grade 9 Math Course Looks Like & It's What You Wish You Had Learned

At the beginning of June, Stephen Lecce, minister of education, announced that grade nine students would be getting a new math curriculum this fall.

The new curriculum is aimed to help prepare students for the future with courses on financial literacy, coding, data, and more.

With students learning the skills needed to do adult tasks, such as how to take out a mortgage, it's everything that you wished you would have learned when you took math back in high school.

Here's everything you need to know about the new course.

What's Changing?

Perhaps, the biggest shift in the new curriculum is that it abandons the concepts of academic and applied math, replacing them with a single course that all grade nine students will learn together.

On top of this, both French and English math courses will be taught the same, and focus on seven main subjects; Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) Skills in Mathematics, Mathematical Thinking and Connections, Number, Algebra, Data, Measurement and Geometry, and Financial Literacy.

The updated program will focus on creating "real-life connections" by giving students the tools they need to apply the math they are learning to their daily lives.

Some examples of this include teaching students how to use a credit card, learning to code, and learning to use both metric and imperial units which are often used in skilled trades.

Financial Literacy will teach students how to budget and more

Unlike past curriculums, grade nine students will now be taught to assess financial situations and learn how they can make life decisions by "applying an understanding of the context of the situation" and using applicable math skills.

Some of the lessons outlined include how to modify budgets, compare interest rates, and calculate down payments.

On top of this, students will learn about the appreciation and depreciation of assets, like a car. As well as the "effects that different interest rates, lengths of borrowing time, ways in which interest is calculated, and amounts of down payments have on the overall costs associated with purchasing goods or services."

Learning about debt, how to use a credit card and how to take out a mortgage or rent will also be included.

Coding will now be taught in grade 9 math

Millennials are bound to feel like their technology-challenged grandparents in the future thanks to the curriculum's unique focus on coding.

According to the Ontario government, students will now "use coding to demonstrate an understanding of algebraic concepts including variables, parameters, equations, and inequalities."

As well as "decomposing situations into computational steps in order to represent mathematical concepts and relationships, and to solve problems."

While coding wasn't mandatory for grade nine math students in previous years, it will be a big focus moving forward.