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

scottaaronson.blog

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

#581

Post by Siira »

aaplok wrote: post #421
hintymad wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how these people could consistently ignore facts. Case in point, I could earn way more than Scott Aaronson or had way more social privilege than him, but you'd think I'm crazy if I claim that I can be as good at maths or quantum computing as Aaronson.

That kind of arguments goes in favour of the CMS. If you assume that only a handful of geniuses can do maths then as a society it makes little sense to allocate resources toward something completely inaccessible to the masses. Designing the education system for Scott Aaronson to the detriment of everybody else would be a mistake socially and economically. That is how these people think, not some nonsense blank slate…

It actually is possible that geniuses are rare but still contribute a significant fraction to the society. (Which means allocating resources to them will be the socially optimal choice.)

Not that taking calculus takes a genius, as evidenced by more sensible countries.

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

#582

Post by mdavis6890 »

WalterBright wrote: post #550
Spivak wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet people don’t feel the same way about “Calculus for Engineers” despite it also being a ridiculously dumbed down course full of rote memorization of formulas, “procedures,” and “strategies” with the bare minimum of hand-wavy theory. Compared to the courses for maths students it’s just as much pretending to learn calculus. dae STEM has got to be one of the most exhausting memes on the internet. Hell, I’m 3/4 of…

FWIW, I feel the same way about "Calculus for Engineers". Even though I'm an engineer. It just screams "dumbed down". I want the real thing.

I don't think that's fair. I can't say anything about Calculus for Artists, but Calculus for engineers won't be dumbed down. It will be focused more on the practice of using calculus to solve real-world problems, while a 'regular' Calculus course will be focused more on the development of theory, proofs, etc.

Both have their place.

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

#583

Post by lern_too_spel »

smugma wrote: post #337
klodolph wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

Boaler taught sixth and seventh grade math before becoming a professor of education. She might know how to teach pre-algebra concepts, but I do not believe she understands which high school math is most useful.

A lot of students in the US learn physics without calculus, which is basically useless. It's just a set of magic formulae to plug and chug. We should not go further in that direction but instead go in the other direction.

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

#584

Post by zozbot234 »

TexanFeller wrote: post #502
zozbot234 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How the heck can you call college algebra a “weedout course”?! I was a math major and skipped over it to start college in Calc 2, but I saw my friends tutoring those intro classes and saw the work my professor-friends put into trying to make basic algebra accessible and get them over the line. They really did everything they could. Many students still struggled though because public high school utterly fails most peo…

> They really did everything they could.

That's probably true. But there's just not much that you can do to teach years of junior high and high school math in a single college class, to students who never got the chance to seriously engage with that material because their school replaced actual math courses with this new "data science" thing (or for countless other reasons which would fully apply even today). "Weedout course" might not be the intention, but it's definitely the real-world outcome.

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

#585

Post by leaflets2 »

cuteboy19 wrote: post #414
klodolph wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 situat…

> The USA accounts for 4% of the world population, and 40% of the top 100 universities in the world that is just inertia, carried over from the time when the US was the only superpower. More and more Chinese universities enter this list every year.

It'd be interesting with a graph over time

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

#586

Post by leaflets2 »

rayiner wrote: post #460
nosefrog wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> affluent Virginia suburb, until I got into a top STEM magnet high school TJ? :P

I couldn’t think of a less douchey way to express that the math education was rigorous compared to even a good American high school.

What's TJ?

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

#587

Post by bawolff »

ryandrake wrote: post #301
pishpash wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty simple: - calculus if you want to do engineering - discrete mathematics if you want to do CS You can teach these in university, it's not a problem. Calculus doesn't need to be taught in high school to everyone but it should be available and it should be the goal state in terms of curriculum pace for everyone so that you should have no problem taking it by the time you are 17 or 18 (which is what we're tal…

> - calculus if you want to do engineering > - discrete mathematics if you want to do CS I'd guess the vast majority of software development jobs are like "gluing one API layer to another" and "writing simple-to-complex CRUD apps". Neither calculus or discrete mathematics really helps if your goal is to simply make a computer read data from database X and display it in webform Y. I found all of the math required by m…

If you're studying turing machines would calculus really be useful in your day to day?

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

#588

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

klodolph wrote: post #339
rayiner wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 situat…

> "In the 1980s it was Japan."

For those of who were around in that era and watched as the US auto industry and consumer electronics industry were devastated as their Japanese counterparts ran rings around them, Japan did eat America's lunch and with considerable gusto. Sony products were everywhere, as were Toyotas and Hondas.

Japan doesn't support your case. (Neither does China really.)

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

#589

Post by voz_ »

phillipcarter wrote: post #41
voz_ wrote: post #26

Quoted post unavailable.

This is a real laptop class kind of statement, to borrow terminology from one of the more prominent anti-"woke" investors. Living in California is expensive as hell, especially for younger folks with no inheritance, and the state operates at varying levels of dysfunction because it's got 40 million people in it.

I am not sure what you are accusing me of. If there is some class structure panned by an investor, I would advise you be very wary of it.

There are only two classes - those who exploit and rent seek, and those who work. I work.

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

#590

Post by zozbot234 »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #588
klodolph wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 situat…

> " In the 1980s it was Japan. " For those of who were around in that era and watched as the US auto industry and consumer electronics industry were devastated as their Japanese counterparts ran rings around them, Japan did eat America's lunch and with considerable gusto. Sony products were everywhere , as were Toyotas and Hondas. Japan doesn't support your case. (Neither does China really.)

Isn't Toyota making cars in the U.S. now? Aren't iPhones proudly "designed in California"? The old factory jobs were doomed by technical change either way, so picking up the slack and looking for newly-opening opportunities (including in consumer tech) was an entirely sensible response on the U.S. side. But that requires fixing the dysfunctional K-12 public education system.
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