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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

#331

Post by snvzz »

texaslonghorn5 wrote: post #118
RangerScience wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL;DR: algebra != arithmetic AKA real math doesn't use numbers I'm only good at _arithmetic_ because of making Warhammer 40k armies (true story bro). I'm good at _algebra_ because I was taught well, on top of a knack. Speed with basic algebraic operations was very helpful in many places but speed with arithmetic operations has only been helpful in board games. I don't think anyone here would disagree with your point…

Algebra does use numbers. I learned to move the numbers to one side and the variables to the other. 10x+7 = -2x+31 Move 7 to the other side (picking up a minus sign) 10x = -2x + 31 - 7 = -2x + 24 Move -2x to the other side (flipping sign) 12x = 24 Recover 12*2 = 24 via memorization, quick division (though not long division), or whatever method Therefore, x = 2. Then I drew a square and was done.

>Then I drew a square and was done.

I don't get this part.

You mean to highlight the end result? In that case, it would, most of the time, be a rectangle (or try to be).

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

#332

Post by rhexs »

wonnage wrote: post #249
abfan1127 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a founding principle is not everyone is of equal ability. The founding principle equality of opportunity. The government won't hold you back because you are a (peasant|lower caste|other arbitrary decision). i.e. Everyone gets to go to school, but not everyone learns the same (qualitatively or quantitatively).

Don't you think the government deciding you're not fit for going to college would fall into this problem?

The government wouldn’t prevent you from going to college, it just wouldn’t voluntarily pay for you to go if you didn’t test well. You could pay your own way, seek external scholarships, etc.

As of now we effectively underwrite anyone who wants to go, often at the expense of the student racking up debt for a useless degree and later the taxpayer who will inevitably have to subsidize them.

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

#333

Post by commandlinefan »

cortesoft wrote: post #48
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.

I believe the gist of the argument is that when you split students into 'normal' and 'advanced' classes at a young age, the students who are not put into the advanced classes will believe they are just naturally not good at math and will give up on trying to get better because they will think they just "don't have a math brain". Here is a short blurb about the idea: > The framework would not forbid districts from acc…

> we don't want to send the message that some kids are just bad at math

But some kids are just bad at math. Some kids are bad at sports, music, dance, etc. Some kids are good at some things and kids are good at different things.

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

#334

Post by texaslonghorn5 »

zmgsabst wrote: post #298
temp8964 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Students do learn art in K-12, but they could be considered as "bad art" by professional artists...

No — you should fact check that. Middle and high schools start auditioning and training students into “advanced” art, preparing them to go onto competitions and onto serious careers in programs differentiated from the casual art classes. Learning calculus won’t be enough as a professional in STEM either — but AP Calculus is the equivalent of audition-only advanced art classes. (Which exist all over.)

Do most public schools really have the capacity to train students for serious art careers? At least in dance and music, at the highest levels everything is purely student driven (school dance and music is typically not super competitive for the serious artist) and presumably visual art is as well. Unless you go to an arts high school, but there aren't that many of those

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

#335

Post by npunt »

ceeplusplus wrote: post #310
npunt wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, tracking students into systems like high/low early on makes it very hard to ever escape that track, as they're a sort of self-perpetuating system. That has downstream effects for one's entire life. It's a crude method of personalizing education within the context of factory education. Downsides are that kids develop at different times, have different educational needs, have home life issues that can temporarily…

From what I've seen there are three major problems with edtech that gives a personalized education: 1) A lot of K-8 education is babysitting. If you let kids do their own thing they'll just watch YouTube and play Roblox instead. Most kids are not _that_ self motivated at this point in life. It's hard for teachers to manage a classroom if everyone is working on different things. 2) Staring at a computer screen is not…

Yeah we’re early on in really nailing the formula. Butts in seats staring at screens doing single player activities isn’t a particularly compelling education environment nor one children are accustomed to biologically. We need more embodied, social, psychologically safe, and intrinsically motivating learning environments, and I don’t think the enabling technologies and designs have yet emerged to fully satisfy these needs.

That said some of these programs have solid learning science foundations and good outcomes. Teachers roles necessarily change to ‘guide on the side’ and motivator, there’s a lot more there to go into but basically it’ll take time.

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

#336

Post by deanCommie »

TimPC wrote: post #282
deanCommie wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person quoted ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Boaler ) is a "Nomellini-Olivier Professor of Mathematics Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education" who "won the award for best PhD in education from the British Educational Research Association" I'm not saying I agree with the proposed California Framework. As a formerly gifted maths student, I hate it. But let's not dismiss the rigorous work of an a…

A Professor of Mathematics Education is a role that fits into a woke section of academia and generally publishes woke forms of advocate research. Many people can study mathematics education without studying much mathematics at all. When the Mathematicians and Scientists are screaming that the policy is nonsense, I'm not convinced by an advocacy researcher saying it's rigorous work.

https://twitter.com/sfmnemonic/status/1504687870006620163

Can you make specific arguments instead of devolving to shorthand dogwhistles that are completely up to the interpretation of the reader.

The term 'woke' has no meaning, depending on the context it's anything between "We should shame all white people for the crimes of their ancestors" to "We should make a movie with a female lead".

By using it, you leave it ambiguous as to where on the spectrum you fall.

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

#337

Post by smugma »

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…

While I agree that the proposals are bad, I don't blame "committees full of government employees". One of the lead proponents/authors is distinguished Stanford Professor Jo Boaler. It's interesting that a lot of the arguments made in favor of the changes are done in the name of equity, but Boaler herself has been put on the wrong side of racial equity, threatening to call the cops on a Black Berkeley CS professor. This article [0] is gossipy, but it's both interesting and relevant how "Nice White People" can hurt the minority groups they are supposedly trying to help. Hurt by taking away opportunities to take calculus, and hurt by threatening legal action against one of the few minority CS professors at a leading research institution.

[0]: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Stanford-professor-Ka...

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

#338

Post by zozbot234 »

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…

> The current school system makes decisions in middle school (8th grade and earlier) which determine whether or not each particular student will be able to take calculus in high school. This is, simply put, insane.

It's not clear that this is the case. The "current approach" is to offer Algebra I in middle school, which ought to leave plenty of time for students who want to shape up in math and be prepared for HS calculus to do so. Push advanced math later in the curriculum, and you just expose the students to even higher-stakes dilemmas. Lowering standards is no solution, since you'll just end up with lower education quality for all students, that will make it even harder for them to catch up to reasonable levels. This is the broad background of OP's letter.

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

#339

Post by klodolph »

rayiner wrote: post #184
kurthr wrote: post #27

From the original letter: While well-intentioned, we believe that many of the changes proposed by the CMF are deeply misguided and will disproportionately harm under-resourced students. Adopting them would result in a student population that is less prepared to succeed in STEM and other 4-year quantitative degrees in college. The CMF states that 'many students, parents, and teachers encourage acceleration beginning i…

> If it is well-intentioned, what was the intention... to dumb down math in high school? Bingo. It's well intentioned, but the intentions aren't to ensure that America can keep up with a rising China. It's shocking to me that people in California aren't more worried about this. About 15 years ago, I was talking to an engineer at Juniper/Cisco. We were joking about how Huawei had copied one of their router designs dow…

In the 1960s, it was the USSR. In the 1980s it was Japan. Now it's China.

I'm not trying to suggest that the US is fine and we shouldn't fix anything, but if you look at the world by comparing test scores and grade levels in mathematics, you're going to come to some very warped perceptions about what is important. I'm speaking as someone passionate about STEM education, who got a B.S. in mathematics.

The whole situation is warped. The USA accounts for 4% of the world population, and 40% of the top 100 universities in the world. That's fucking weird. I don't have an explanation for it. I'm just saying that the different signals we use for evaluating how good our education system is functioning are giving us radically different pieces of feedback, and our understanding needs to be correspondingly sophisticated.

There are all these narratives about how China is going to eat our lunch (like Japan in the 1980s, or the USSR in the 1960s) and while I don't feel comfortable betting on long-term US hegemony, and while I do think we should put more work into our mathematics education, I do think that looking at the world through high-school mathematics test scores is going to give you anxiety more than it's going to give you an accurate picture of what are problems really are.

To take another statistic into account, there are actually many STEM graduates in the US. What do we do with this information? How do we change our policies? It's unclear.

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

#340

Post by alimov »

zozbot234 wrote: post #121
alimov wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “…no self-respecting teacher wants to be stuck teaching underperformers.” If you look at people that are not academically inclined and call them under performers then maybe that’s part of the issue. I think everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and if someone is more inclined to do vocational training rather than the standard track I think their strengths and interests should be developed / encouraged. An educator…

> If you look at people that are not academically inclined and call them under performers then maybe that’s part of the issue. It's not me doing that, it's education schools telling prospective teachers that their students will just be "learning their math by themselves", and the teachers can simply be facilitators. It must be a comfy job teaching math class to little Carl Friedrich Gauss and the like, but what about…

Sorry, I should have worded that better.
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