601–610 of 657 posts
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And what institutions are responsible for spending half of the waking hours of a child teaching culture?
Parents and peers/communities. If the US is any indication, teachers are incapable of instilling appreciation for learning once scholastic achievement is branded "uncool".
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Oh yeah? Then why am I stuck paying a higher property tax rate than my white neighbors who inherited their house from their parents that purchased during an era of segregation?
First of all, are we talking about “systematic” or “systemic” or “structural” racism. These terms are not interchangeable. Put that aside for a second… I assume your example is talking about Prop 58. [1] Is Prop 58 racist? Of course not, the CA Constitution prohibits racist and sexist laws and the courts are very good at enforcing that prohibition. Prop 58 means a lower property tax bill can be inherited by the child…
As to estate tax exemptions, they aren't nearly as egregious. There can certainly be an argument for reparations of ill-gotten gains to level the playing field, but it's at least possible for me to accumulate wealth myself and pass it on to my children. In contrast, it's simply impossible for me to acquire and pass on the same property tax rate that my white neighbors have.
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But how would you "motivate" the formulas without knowing where they came from? Why is this the formula we use and not something else? To go back to the car analogy, I know why I need an engine, you might even say I know how to use the engine, but if the engine dies or I want to use the engine for some other purpose, I'm not equipped to do anything. I don't have "literacy" with engines, I have rote memorization of a…
Just don’t include formulas you can’t motivate simply. Will it result in students not knowing as many formulas? Of course, but who cares?
Then what? Are they going to incorrectly use anther one, a wrong one, because they understand it better?
(Searching not where one lost the key, but where the light is stronger)
Hmm, I wonder if you studied stats? It sounds as if you studied lots of math.
I did long ago, mostly forgotten, and, hmm, I don't think there's a single real life useful probability function one can understand, without knowing the underlying calculus? Except for understanding in the sense of trusting the teacher.
Which works pretty ok in medicine
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As a software engineer, I wish I had learned stats instead of calculus. Some exposure would have been great, but the high school & university requirements were way off target wrt its usefulness in computer science. It was a painful process of learning, failing, and re-taking calculus, squeaking by, only to never use it again. I was a straight-A student otherwise.
Why is this either/or? I took both calculus and statistics in college. Were you forced to choose one or the other?
Where I grew up btw we studied only calculus, integrals and stuff, no stats, in high school. (Stats in uni)
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There’s tenured Stanford professors in many subjects, such as theology. I’m sure their work is impressive within the context of the field. But that doesn’t mean it’s rigorous or has real world application. PhD publications are supposed to be a serious contributions to the field. This particular work won a major award. Stop it with the accusations of “arrogance” and naked credentialism. Any of the millions of people w…
Arrogance is skimming a PhD thesis in a field wildly different from your own and deciding you are more competent in your ability to evaluate its "rigor" than the dozens or people in that field who evaluated it that had a different conclusion. It's not an original arrogance - it's pretty common amongst the STEM educated to basically consider all humanities, philosophy, social sciences to be not "serious" fields. Just…
What a flimsy and transparent effort to insulate non-rigorous fields from criticism.
Ironically, one of the things I do for a living these days, as an attorney, is attack the credibility of credentialed experts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daubert_standard. There is a whole process where attorneys and judges without specific expertise in a field evaluate the reliability of assertions by expert by reference to accepted scientific principles. Because that’s a thing you can do! You don’t need to be an expert in a field to know whether they applied reliable methodologies.
More importantly, people will do it. If you tell them to trust stuff that doesn’t seem trustworthy based on what they learned about the scientific method in high school, then it erodes your credibility and the credibility of all authorities. There’s a lot of work out there that’s not rigorous, and we have a moral obligation to call it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science
> It's not an original arrogance - it's pretty common amongst the STEM educated to basically consider all humanities, philosophy, social sciences to be not "serious" fields.
Theology, film, German literature, European history, etc., are all “serious fields.” They’re the product of work by thousands of people over decades or centuries. That doesn’t mean they’re rigorous. Their ability to provide truth value is fundamentally limited by the nature of the discipline.
And yes, maybe engineers have a big head about it. I suspect that’s because they don’t have to brow beat anyone into recognizing the seriousness of their field or the authority of the expertise it generates. You can go up to a random yokel in a Bangladeshi village and he’ll be impressed at your STEM degree. I’ll posit to you that there is a basis for that.
In methodology, the field of education is akin to something like the field of business. It’s based on observation and case studies. It’s not wholly without value, but holding it up as a rigorous discipline that commands deference is disingenuous.
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Why would adding higher level courses drag anybody down? They aren't removing low level courses
The problem is that these higher level courses aren't 'extras', they are table stakes for getting an education. If you think a high-achieving student won't get a good education in an curriculum where they are 'dragged down' by the low-level course... Why on earth do you think that a non-high-achieving student isn't going to get 'dragged down' by being pigeonholed into the low-level course? If your goal is to just wri…
If you can run a If you think the bar is too low for the non-advanced classes, that's fine. You should be advocating for more rigour and mathematics across the board, not less. The stratification of classes is orthogonal to math education not being rigorous enough in general.
I don't know how it works in CA, but where I grew up the regular math classes were perfectly good math classes. But if you excelled in math, and wanted to focus on it, you could take the honors and AP level classes. Most of the kids in the regular math wanted to instead focus their time and energy on AP history, or literature. I found the system to work quite well. Nobody was "pigeonholed" and everyone got the fundamental education in all subjects that they needed.
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> "high-level mathematics achievement is not dependent on rare natural gifts, but rather can be cultivated" I mean, I would hope this is true. I'm not "naturally" gifted at mathematics, but like reading, writing, and other things, I can learn them in school and got quite good at them. Public education is like mass transit. Not everyone gets their own Lamborghini. Most have to take the bus. Its goal should be providin…
Actual math is irrelevant to this whole argument, just as actual literacy was irrelevant ~500 years ago. This isn't about math ability, it's about the fact that STEM is an obstacle to woke bureaucrats' projection of power.
It seems like any other guided/misguided attempt to improve the school system that has already taken feedback into account.
This entire HN thread is filled with "back in my days" and "wokism" but no one actually is disputing the content of the framework itself with actual evidence.
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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…
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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…
I’m a math tutor at a run-of-the-mill state university and I can tell you for certain that the average student in college algebra and especially in pre-calculus has to work hard to pass. Both classes have a substantial amount of easy credit like mandatory lab time, credit for filling out notes, etc. with tutors there on the clock and available, but in both classes student struggle mightily with the material and spend…
It was well known there was a side hustle for some of that. And certain proctors would at times be told to drop it if they pressed. It was notoriously an issue with the non english speaking population. They would show up with an id that was clearly not them, proctors would be told to just let them take the test, same student would still be at classes months later. Though to be fair foreign students and schools chasing that money is probably its own kettle of fish.
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Why would adding higher level courses drag anybody down? They aren't removing low level courses
The problem is that these higher level courses aren't 'extras', they are table stakes for getting an education. If you think a high-achieving student won't get a good education in an curriculum where they are 'dragged down' by the low-level course... Why on earth do you think that a non-high-achieving student isn't going to get 'dragged down' by being pigeonholed into the low-level course? If your goal is to just wri…
Why do you assume it is a zero sum game? We can have high level math courses and improve the quality of lower level ones (if you think they are problem). Or if you are saying that students shouldn't be forced into lower levels just because they aren't getting good grades, then yeah sure, let people join high level courses based on passion and not achievement. I think that's an entirely separate debate though.