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An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

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Re: An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

#321

Post by paulcole »

ravi-delia wrote: post #271
paulcole wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blank slate - All humans are of equal ability This is generally true. People can find extreme examples that “disprove” this but they’re generally wrong. Most things people do aren’t that hard and people have the ability to learn to do them — they either choose a different path, have fewer choices, or just don’t care. And yes, before you ask, this includes computer programming.

> Most things people do aren’t that hard and people have the ability to learn to do them Have you considered that maybe you're just unusually talented? I know most things people do are very hard for me, and the few things I do are very easy. Learning history is an uphill slog even though I love it, but math doesn't warrant effort. For a while I just figured people that failed math were lazy and people that passed his…

As narcissistic as I am, I don’t think I’m “talented.” I’m just like everybody else — can get pretty decent at a lot of things. But also just like everybody else I like to pretend I’m talented at the things I put work into. And I like to pretend that people who are good at things I haven’t put work into are talented in a way that I’m not.

Re: An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

#323

Post by commandlinefan »

cowboysauce wrote: post #207
H8crilA wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "calculus" here mean? I'm not American, no idea what's included in that word and what's outside, in this context. Does it mean limits, derivatives, integration (Newton), maybe even some high level talk about ODEs for the "very best" schools? Anything more, anything less? Also, in case anyone is also wondering, 8th grade means 13-14 years old.

It varies throughout the country. But for me it was: * Calculus I: limits, derivatives, integrals * Calculus II: More integration techniques (substitution, by parts, table), infinite series and convergence, basic numerical methods * Calculus III: multi-variable calculus (partial derivatives, multiple integrals), vector calculus (gradient, divergence, curl, surface and line integrals) ODEs were a class you could take…

Wait, is this high school or college? That looks like 3 different courses you're listing there - I've never heard of a high school offering more than a single year of calculus.

Re: An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

#324

Post by threatofrain »

Dig1t wrote: post #316

It's kind of funny how both sides of the political aisle have extremists who find ways to argue that being dummer is better. They mirror each other in so many ways and sometimes the two extremes kind of wrap back around to the other side and have the same goals.

No, the two sides of this debate aren't mirroring their arguments.

One side (Equitable Math) is engaged in a discussion of white supremacy in Californian math pedagogy. The other side (Moses Charikar, Scott Aaronson, et al) is arguing against a weakening of math standards.

Re: An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

#325

Post by namelessoracle »

klodolph wrote: post #215
FFRefresh wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't doubt that the people crafting these proposals care. I think they truly believe they are doing the right thing. I personally think it's just increasingly popular, mistaken moral beliefs that inform these types of proposals. Some of the underlying beliefs: 1. Blank slate - All humans are of equal ability 2. Any observable differences between humans are merely the result of social factors 3. Any observable diff…

I don't think that those beliefs are a workable explanation here. These proposals come from committees and groups of people, and it's just not realistic to write off the entire group of people behind these proposals as having some uniform set of beliefs like that, especially when they give other rationales for the proposals! The current school system makes decisions in middle school (8th grade and earlier) which dete…

If you talk to these people though. They DO have bad beliefs. Let's not even talk about politics. Their goal is to get a kid a degree,(especially in groups that dont normally get degrees) and many of them believe just having the degree to get past the job resume hurdles is good and helping people.

They ignore the fact that the degree is supposed to be a proof of "This person has X skillsets at minimum". It no longer is. There is basically no job in the United States that cares if you have a high school diploma or GED other than government jobs. They are repeating this process with College right now. The College Diploma is now the new High School Diploma, and pretty soon jobs are gonna want Masters or Doctorates for entry level.

This is a bad belief, they don't (or won't) understand that they are ruining and devaluing a thing by their actions and beliefs.

Re: An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

#326

Post by danans »

rayiner wrote: post #287
danans wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you aware that the U.S. spends among the most on primary education Yes, and I'm also aware that in the US we expect the public school system to be a primary treatment center for the disadvantages and traumas associated with poverty and unequal opportunity. It's more expensive (and harder) to educate hungry, ignored, and traumatized children than it is to educate children who are well take care of. They need mor…

> Yes, and I'm also aware that in the US we expect the public school system to be a primary treatment center for the disadvantages and traumas associated with poverty and unequal opportunity. That’s true in virtually every country, because the school system is always the government’s primary point of contact with poor families. > It's more expensive (and harder) to educate hungry, ignored, and traumatized children th…

> Countries like Japan and Singapore went from being desperately poor (at a level unimaginable even to an inner city American) to developed in a couple of generations in the 20th century

Those countries did so by making absolutely massive infrastructure and human development investments in their poor populations during their industrializing phase, very similar to what the US did for its previously poor white population after the 2nd world war.

The people who face the greatest educational obstacles in the US today are disproportionately people who were also largely excluded from the huge post-WW2 investments and ensuing economic miracle, and have since faced the economic brunt of de-industrialization.

> I’m pretty sure they didn’t (and still don’t) have a bunch of school psychologists on staff.

They have far less crime and trauma to deal with, are not awash with weapons, and had very strong communal support systems. They were/are also quite authoritarian. Those are very different societies with very different circumstances. You can't directly compare the situation in post war Japan and Singapore with inner city America. By dint of our own history, issues of education and equity actually quite a bit harder here.

Re: An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

#327

Post by khazhoux »

vkou wrote: post #211
khazhoux wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand if you're saying that every kid is equally good at math. Or, similarly, that every kid that the same capacity for it or ability to pickup math concepts. Because it seems to me that if you have experience with any sampling of children where N>1, you'll see that's simply not true.

> I don't understand if you're saying that every kid is equally good at math. I'm not, there are always extreme outliers and exceptions, but I do believe that the vast majority of children can meet the incredibly low bar for mathematics education that is considered normal in North American schools. I also believe that teaching them to be afraid of math, (and having their teachers be afraid of math) is a major contrib…

I would agree with this. The standards aren't super high -- from my POV as someone who always excelled in math. But it's clear (to me, at least) that even the "incredibly low bar" is actually quite challenging, at every grade level, for very many students.

Speaking of teachers... my own grade-school math development, decades ago, was stunted by the fact that my teacher didn't know anything about linear algebra. I asked her for help deciphering my "Amiga 3-D Graphics Programming" book, and she concluded that the vector and matrix notation must be a bunch of typos. Arrgh!

Re: An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

#328

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

fartcannon wrote: post #196
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this really true, in practice? For example, given its importance in every day life, I think everyone should understand test sensitivity and specificity, and how these relate to but are quite different from predictive value positive and predictive value negative. All of those topics can be understood with basic algebra. Similarly, I recall my introduction to biostatistics class I took at an Ivy League institution,…

At some point, someone was saying precisely this about literacy. And it was as true then as your comment is now. You only need some range of function around the baseline education to operate in society. But if you want society to progress, then everyone needs to learn to read and write.

Bad analogy. Being able to understand statistics at an everyday usage level is the equivalent of being able to read and write. Understanding calculus needed for statistics is the equivalent of needing to understand Latin or comparative linguistics. Noble and useful pursuits for sure, but you can get far with an educated society that just knows how to read and write even if they're iffy on the Latin roots of it all.

Re: An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

#329

Post by jimmygrapes »

legalcorrection wrote: post #65
daveslash wrote: post #10

Sorry for being out of the loop and asking a (possibly) dumb question: What is the stated reason that the CMF suggested these changes? Is it about budgets? Is it because some people might think these classes " aren't that important? ". The open letter seems to suggest that it's about closing gaps between privileged and less privileged - is that it? Honest question - I'm not trying to stir the pot.

Quoted post unavailable.

My (anecdotal but common) presumption is that the disparity often comes from a cultural / behavioral divide, which is increasingly blurry along racial lines but still distinct enough to recognize usually. By behavioral I mean things that are disruptive to standard teaching, like, during a lecture or presentation, students are spending time on phones or chatting with each other or listening to music or drawing or walking around. General "I don't care, I'm going to do my own thing" behavior. Sometimes the behavior is based in a cultural or subcultural expectation or standard. What methods or authorities do teachers have to enact behavioral change in such cases?

In most cases, none at all. If any attempt isn't derided as racist (or other -ist/-phobic accusations) it's viewed as authoritarian/inhumane. Decades of legal precedent and risk aversion have caught up to education, perhaps rightly so. I don't think there's any chance in hell of going back to paddling and such, so we need to come up with newer ways to enact behavioral change. In order to do this, I think we have to stop being afraid of slights against culture. Unity of purpose, of many one. Diversity is not a strength if there is no unifying principle among the diversity.

Re: An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

#330

Post by MatteoFrigo »

deanCommie wrote: post #130

Irrespective of specific educational curriculums, I'm curious what does HN think about Calculus? I absolutely loved learning Calculus in high school in Math and 1st and 2nd year of University. I consistently got 97+% on my grades. And I've never had to use it in my Computer Science degree or my 20 year Software Engineer career since. Am in a bubble because I don't spend much time in the Machine Learning domain?

It depends upon where you think calculus starts.

If you take the position that calculus is the concept of limit and all its consequences, then things like exp() and log() are calculus and it's hard to get anything done in CS without those. In this view, saying that quicksort is O(n log n) is a statement of calculus.

If you say that calculus is derivatives and integrals, then I'd say that calculus is not that important in a digital world, and that discrete math is much more useful. However, discrete math is harder than calculus, but you can use calculus as an approximation to the discrete answer (i.e., compute the integral if you don't know how to compute a sum, or use a derivative to approximate a difference). Ironically, this is the opposite of the old attitude that the continuous answer was the true one and the discrete answer was a poor man's approximation to the true one.

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