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A Group of American Teens Are Excelling at Advanced Math

theatlantic.com

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Re: A Group of American Teens Are Excelling at Advanced Math

#41

Post by dineshp2 »

jerf wrote: post #37
dineshp2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the article clearly states, these math programs are only attended by the well off due to awareness and finances not being a hindrance. What about the vast majority of students who don't get to attend these type of programs? We need to come up with solutions that are inclusive and accessible to the vast majority of students. Clearly inclusiveness and accessibility are missing from these programs. The methods that t…

Well, see my other post in this thread. This is an example of exactly what I was talking about. If your only response to stuff like this is to complain about how it's not "fair", you take one step towards preventing it from even existing in the first place. Who wants to try anything new if the only thing they're going to hear is "But it's not being evenly distributed to everybody!"? This is step one . Before we can "…

I am not complaining about the existence of such initiatives. It's great that they exist and as you said it is step one.

But such initiatives cannot be a solution to a poor public school system.

Re: A Group of American Teens Are Excelling at Advanced Math

#42

Post by jerf »

cschneid wrote: post #29
jerf wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Mostly only well-educated and well-off parents get their kids into these programs. That kind of sucks," It's really important not to let 201x social concerns get in the way of this stuff. The good stuff always starts out with the rich. Always. It is virtually structurally impossible for it to happen any other way. (Not quite , but very much the exception rather than the rule.) Rather than complaining that only the r…

It's easy to want to simply to steal from the rich, as you point out. But that's not our current style of failure, it's "hey poor district, you're not up to snuff compared to the rich district. We're going to fire all the teachers, gut your union, and generally make your life hell. That's sure to make you do better".

I wasn't talking about "styles of failure". I'm talking about this very thread, where people are popping up, looking at a program demonstrating success in mathematical education, a thing proved to be difficult by well-funded repeated and repeated and repeated failure, and all they've got to say about it is complaints about how it's not fair that it's just going to rich people.

This is not the time to be worried about fairness. This is the time to figure out what works. When you have that, then worry about fairness. Demanding that all the experiments be done equally to everybody at scale produces total paralysis, and is in no small part responsible for the total paralysis we witness in school reformation right now. You simply can't do anything that way.

Re: A Group of American Teens Are Excelling at Advanced Math

#43

Post by BookmarkSaver »

venomsnake wrote: post #18
rayiner wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between "good schools" and "bad schools" is much more about the kids that go there than anything about the school itself. You're seeing this starkly in D.C. where gentrification in certain neighborhoods is shifting the student demographics from 90% low-income to 20% low-income over just 4-5 years. Test scores are shooting up, but it's not like they fired all the teachers and hired new staff at twice th…

Aren't schools financed by local property taxes in US. And the rich parents pay more in taxes and there is more resources in the system. Also well off parents could help school in other ways.

In most states education funding is local. California (and probably others) redistributes across the state.

Re: A Group of American Teens Are Excelling at Advanced Math

#44

Post by jerf »

dineshp2 wrote: post #41
jerf wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, see my other post in this thread. This is an example of exactly what I was talking about. If your only response to stuff like this is to complain about how it's not "fair", you take one step towards preventing it from even existing in the first place. Who wants to try anything new if the only thing they're going to hear is "But it's not being evenly distributed to everybody!"? This is step one . Before we can "…

I am not complaining about the existence of such initiatives. It's great that they exist and as you said it is step one . But such initiatives cannot be a solution to a poor public school system.

"But such initiatives cannot be a solution to a poor public school system."

I'd submit you're still asking for some sort of magical solution whereby we skip this step one somehow and leap directly to everybody having the good thing. But that involves skipping the experimentation phase that demonstrates the thing is good in the first place. It's why nothing, right now, can be the solution to a poor public school system... attitudes like this have utterly paralysed them.

If you want to see improvements, you've got to loosen up a bit on this fairness kick. Somebody is going to get them first. It is a mathematical necessity, because we should not do "experiments" by rolling things out to everybody at once in one shot. It's not like there's a guarantee that it's an improvement, after all.

Re: A Group of American Teens Are Excelling at Advanced Math

#45

Post by dominotw »

dineshp2 wrote: post #36
dominotw wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The fundamental problem of education in public schools and its ineffectiveness is not being addressed. If it so ineffective, how come americans win so many nobel prizes, have thriving high tech industry ect http://graphics.wsj.com/which-country-has-the-most-nobel-pri...

You cannot conclude that the current school education is not ineffective(effective) just by looking at the number of Nobel Prize winners. The USA is lagging behind many countries in key areas( especially STEM fields). Anyway the point I was trying to make was that, these extracurricular initiatives are great, but it cannot be a solution to a poor public school system.

>The USA is lagging behind many countries in key areas( especially STEM fields).

Lagging how?

Test scores are not a good way to measure the "lag", imo.

Re: A Group of American Teens Are Excelling at Advanced Math

#46

Post by tekromancr »

cschneid wrote: post #29
jerf wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Mostly only well-educated and well-off parents get their kids into these programs. That kind of sucks," It's really important not to let 201x social concerns get in the way of this stuff. The good stuff always starts out with the rich. Always. It is virtually structurally impossible for it to happen any other way. (Not quite , but very much the exception rather than the rule.) Rather than complaining that only the r…

It's easy to want to simply to steal from the rich, as you point out. But that's not our current style of failure, it's "hey poor district, you're not up to snuff compared to the rich district. We're going to fire all the teachers, gut your union, and generally make your life hell. That's sure to make you do better".

I am not sure why you are seeing so many downvotes.

I have worked in a poorly funded chicago public school that had just that year become a "turnaround school". That's just a very cute euphemism for "we fired everyone, hired whatever assholes would work for the least amount of money (Yo!), more or less eliminated any budgets you would be working with, and are making no other real changes". I guess the logic is that if we were going to be set up for failure, we might as well do it on the cheap.

Then, a few years later, they wonder why the students who went to those schools are so far behind the rest of the students in the city.

I should also mention that many of the students going to these schools were already saddled with the disadvantages of being poor and black in Chicago, before having their entire educational world replaced with an even shittier and more dysfunctional one.

The funny thing is that I agree with both your cynicism in practice, and the parent commenter's optimism in theory.

Re: A Group of American Teens Are Excelling at Advanced Math

#47

Post by blurbleblurble »

dominotw wrote: post #31

what a strange thing to subject your kids to, shame on these parents. Has anyone done any studies on what these 'math wizards' end up doing in life. I grew up in Indian community where this kind of stuff was the norm, many of my friends won regional championships but none of them do anything remotely related to math now. Instead of associating math with magical patterns that explain the world, they now associate it w…

It's unfair to generalize about "these 'math wizards'" or "these parents" just based on the context of the article.

On the topic of "math competitions" or rewarding kids for "being the best," "being the smartest", etc... I gotta say that really didn't work for me. I'm very slow at math (in a 'big picture' way), even though I love it. So making me do that anxiety inducing speed competition actually just made me feel like I was awful at math. The whole "speed multiplication tables" thing in 4th grade honestly made it impossible for me to quickly remember my 7's, 8's and 9's calmly or easily consistently, and even to this day I still have to think about it.

So I see what you're getting at. But I'm not convinced that's all there is to the programs described in the article. While you're probably right that plenty of still parents put unwarranted pressure their kids to be good at math (or anything for that matter), I think you might be injecting your own experiences into this article a little bit.

edit: one more thought... for me, math is a kind of spiritual practice. It is a way of exploring perspectives of things that would otherwise be assumed, under the radar. So for me it's very important, even if I don't "do something with the math" to have a healthy, creative relationship with it. A lot of people are effectively superstitious about math. It's a bummer. So called "advanced math" is usually just the most elementary stuff. Number lines and venn diagrams, sets and groups... these are things that people use every day! I wish more people had confident intuition about these kinds of things so that we could elevate beyond just taking our cultural mathematical constructs and perspectives as givens and evolve them to other possibilities.

Re: A Group of American Teens Are Excelling at Advanced Math

#48

Post by fluxquanta »

Ntrails wrote: post #25
j2kun wrote: post #5

I am continually surprised by how many emails I get from teenage students thanking me for writing my math blog. On top of that, I try to occasionally make it out to high schools to give guest lectures. I posted an example experience from one of these online [1] and I am usually looking for other opportunities to do this sort of thing. I think that if every math graduate student who is a reasonably good teacher took a…

The sad thing is that the cool stuff isn't even always complex. It's little things, like going through how the quadratic formula is derived instead of just telling someone to learn it by rote. Explaining differentiation with a bit of the logic behind it instead of just teaching rules. But at the same time - I know I'd have/did enjoy that stuff but maybe 60% of my classes would have played up if a whole lesson was spe…

>It's little things, like going through how the quadratic formula is derived instead of just telling someone to learn it by rote. Explaining differentiation with a bit of the logic behind it instead of just teaching rules.

Once you get in the mindset of deriving equations, rote memorization becomes insanely difficult, at least in my opinion.

During my last year as an undergrad majoring in physics I got a 4.0 in quantum mechanics, but very nearly failed introductory chemistry (which I was taking to fill a science distribution requirement at a liberal arts college), despite many of the chemistry concepts just being edge cases of applied quantum mechanics.

There was also the very embarrassing case of being called to the blackboard to complete a problem in an elective course on number theory only to draw a blank on what 9 times 7 was. I understood the solution to the problem itself, but when the professor started giving me hints I had to admit in front of the whole class that my issue wasn't with the number theory proof -- it was with the multiplication table we learn as children.

Re: A Group of American Teens Are Excelling at Advanced Math

#49

Post by visakanv »

dominotw wrote: post #31

what a strange thing to subject your kids to, shame on these parents. Has anyone done any studies on what these 'math wizards' end up doing in life. I grew up in Indian community where this kind of stuff was the norm, many of my friends won regional championships but none of them do anything remotely related to math now. Instead of associating math with magical patterns that explain the world, they now associate it w…

> read Richard Feynman's bio and see how his parents inspired him to like math/science/world.

I noticed a perfect parallel between Feynman's relationship with his dad and Steve Wozniak's relationship with his, in his autobiography iWoz. It's all about encouraging and exploring curiosity, rather than trying to do well on tests.

Re: A Group of American Teens Are Excelling at Advanced Math

#50

Post by HillaryBriss »

douche wrote: post #3
dzdt wrote: post #2

TLDR : American public schools suck but there is an increasing number of extracurricular math programs that help talented kids learn advanced problem solving skills. Mostly only well-educated and well-off parents get their kids into these programs. That kind of sucks, and there are marginal efforts to reach out to poorer students. But the real story right now is, if you have kids in public school, their math educatio…

Now that I think about it, public education is great training for a future of working in open-offices. You learn to accept that you have to wake up at an arbitrary time, spend eight hours getting very little productive done, whilst being bombarded with noise, interruptions, and politics, then if you want to make any real progress, you have to do it afterwards on your own time, outside the school/work day.

One can make the case that, in California, the higher education system was purposefully, consciously stratified along career and status tiers, as you described.

Community college system = workers in the practical trades

Cal State system = office workers

UC system = technologists, scientists, managers

Big name, elite, private universities = executives and high level politicians, the people who actually run society and its institutions

And, if you look at the architecture on the various campuses, it more or less reflects that.

Also, all of the community colleges, and an awful lot of the Cal State schools are commuter campuses. You come and you go. It's not your home. You're a renter. The place shuts down around 10 pm. (Get out of here, kids.)

By contrast, the elite private schools have sufficient dorm/house space to allow most of the students to live on-site: the students have a lot more access to buildings and more or less "own" the place while they're there.

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