An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Apr 26, 2022, 9:01 PM UTC

FFRefresh wrote: post #166

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…

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…

> Blank slate - All humans are of equal ability

Not only does the earlier version of the framework explicitly reject this view, it cited specific empirical studies that the broad approach targeted (which I gather had not changed in the revisions which is why the complaints remain despite some revision to details) was better for people across the ability spectrum.

Similar points apply to each of your bad-faith assumptions about the underlying beliefs.

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

#362

Post by namelessoracle » Tue, Apr 26, 2022, 9:03 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #353

namelessoracle wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can't get a college degree without passing the College Algebra weedout course (let alone Calculus, which is required for the bulk of STEM courses), and you can only realistically pass College Algebra by getting a lot of rigorous math in K-12. Lowering the bar is doing every student a disservice, and the most vulnerable students will be the hardest hit.

You'd think that but there are work arounds.

Yes pretty much every college requires "college algebra". But some schools have "college algebra for stem majors" vs "college algebra for non stem majors". Guess which one is easier, has lots of bonus credit and extra curricular stuff to earn extra credit. (You attended the college showing of "vagely related math movie?! Here's 10 points on your final!") And also grades on a curve. Also you only need 69.5 (and sometimes just a D!) to graduate.

There's also other cheats/hacks. Like lots of state schools will let you transfer from a community college with credit for your "core courses", and some of those have questionable standards. There's also the fact that college algebra usually has some kind of test out or online option. There was a whole sub industry of "pay you to take the online test for me" at colleges for stuff like college algebra. Some of those courses did have some kind "you have to take 1 test in person so we know its you" rule. But they didnt check super heavily that you were actually that person other than a cursory examination of your drivers license name matched who was supposed to take the test. (and oh boy let me tell you about how covid and masks interacted with all of that)

Dont get me started on the "Statistics for Sociology" that was different than actual "Statistics" (but fulfilled the Stats requirement for the degree)

This is also ignoring that taking College Algebra to begin with IN COLLEGE. Was a major sign you were not a Stem Major. Stem Majors took that in high school and were taking at minimum precalculus. (and even that was viewed as the slow lane, you should be talking Calc 1 as a red blooded STEM freshman)

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

#363

Post by cortesoft » Tue, Apr 26, 2022, 9:05 PM UTC

nafix wrote: post #117

vkou wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds like more woke nonsense You are right that this is a lot of nonsense. Specifically, 'you aren't good at math/math is hard' is the nonsense meme that gets hammered into student heads so frequently during school that most of them actually start to believe it. It's not some kind of novel woke nonsense, though, it's how math instruction on this continent has been happening over the past X decades. The wokies are…

Like I said, sounds good to a layman in general terms (just how you explained it). But the actual implementation is half-baked, short-sighted, and favors a weak/easy solution rather than something more well thought out and complex.

Ok, so what would your approach be to address the issue of huge groups of kids underperforming what they are actually capable of?

I feel too often the people who play the 'woke nonsense' card think that we should just allow the current failings to continue, and any work to help struggling groups is wrong.

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

#364

Post by orangecat » Tue, Apr 26, 2022, 9:05 PM UTC

paulcole wrote: post #321

ravi-delia wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

As narcissistic as I am, I don’t think I’m “talented.”

Huh. To me it seems more narcissistic for someone to say that they have no special talent and that their success is entirely due to their superior work ethic and years of study and sacrifice.

I’m just like everybody else — can get pretty decent at a lot of things.

That's a very different claim than "innate talent doesn't exist".

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

#365

Post by troupe » Tue, Apr 26, 2022, 9:05 PM UTC

hintymad wrote: post #307

deathanatos wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me & my sister grew up, like you say, in the same family, same parents, same pressure. We largely went to the same schools, even. She probably acceled further, academically, than I did. (She probably went to the more prestigious college, her GPA/SAT/etc. were better, she earned a doctorate, while I got a BS…) Without pointing to a vague notion of "we're different people", I think there's a few key things that were di…

To digress a bit: good education will be a finite resource as we have finite number of good educators and good schools. I don't think it's possible for everyone to access good education, especially given that we have different definition for "good education". Saying everyone should go to MIT (or any scarce education resource) is like saying living in beach property is human right. Maybe so, but it'll be a different t…

Books are a finite resource, but not really limited for any practical purposes at least in the US. Used books are inexpensive, libraries are readily available, most things out of copyright are available online, etc.

Education is following as similar course. Things like MITs open courseware, edX, etc. are making it increasingly easy to get the educational content from top teachers regardless of how limited these teachers are.

(Having access to an education is not the same as actually getting a degree, and getting a degree isn't always the same as getting an education.)

But there has probably never been a time in history where more people had free or inexpensive access to the top educational content in the world.

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

#366

Post by ravi-delia » Tue, Apr 26, 2022, 9:05 PM UTC

paulcole wrote: post #321

ravi-delia wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I mean, by hours at this point I've definitely put more time in to math than any other subject, but it was easy from the start! Maybe I'm enough of a fuckup that it intensifies differences in ability which would otherwise be too small to notice - like math took close to 0 effort to do and want to do, so anything else is unbearable. Doesn't square with just how much effort I put into history though.

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

#367

Post by snvzz » Tue, Apr 26, 2022, 9:06 PM UTC

texaslonghorn5 wrote: post #355

snvzz wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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).

I was joking, I meant the QED box.

I know about QED, but I am not familiar with the concept of "QED box".

A cursory web search yielded nothing.

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

#368

Post by ravi-delia » Tue, Apr 26, 2022, 9:07 PM UTC

klodolph wrote: post #281

ravi-delia wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like in this case fundamental attribution error would go the other way, no? The explanation you offer is that there aren't circumstantial factors dominating the decision (the beliefs on this particular issue), but a fundamental flaw in how committees work. To be clear, I agree that this is an inevitable result of the decision-making structure, I've just only ever seen fundamental attribution error referring to…

That's an interesting way of looking at it. I would never describe someone's beliefs as "circumstantial", and I would also never think of being on a committee as something "intrinsic".

Ah, now I get it! I was thinking of the committee as the entity, not the people on it. Then the question is "why did the committee make a bad call?" where "the topic in question coincidentally misaligned with the views of the members" is the specific cause and "committees always make bad calls" is the general cause. But looking at it from the perspective of the people makes it clear what you were going for

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

#369

Post by Der_Einzige » Tue, Apr 26, 2022, 9:09 PM UTC

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?

Also you don't need calculus to "do" ML (even deep learning research!)

I got to the point of writing my own toy neural network from scratch, seeing backpropegation, figuring that I'd have to use the chain rule myself on my forward pass, understanding what "automatic differentiation" was and why it's important, and decided "screw that I'm not putting myself through this hell again" and decided to look into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative-free_optimization

You can literally just find your own hetrodox subset of scholars in your field who are like "calculus? pfft!"

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

#370

Post by usaar333 » Tue, Apr 26, 2022, 9:10 PM UTC

texaslonghorn5 wrote: post #13

Ultimately the solution is better STEM foundation at the very very early ages. Universal pre school would probably be very useful. Empirically [edit: n = 1 or 2], it seems that drilling basic arithmetic and then multiplication tables early in pre K and earlier elementary will give students a better intuitive math foundation to do algebra very well. That would enable everyone to go into more advanced classes at the sa…

There is little evidence universal preschool would reduce academic variance later on. On cognitive measures (though not necessarily social/emotional), randomized trials of such programs tend to show fade-out (no difference between control and treatment groups) within several years.