'Algebra for none' fails in San Francisco

My mom helped write the Texas math curriculum and had high hopes for San Diego Unified when my kids just happened to hit the roll-out years for "common core" (the math 1/2/3 you refer to). She was compelled to admit it was a catastrophe for my daughter and useless for my son.

My daughter's story is tragic. I think it basically came down to teachers just not giving a shit about the outcomes and presenting rote lessons. So when my daughter came home for help (my undergrad is in physics) I would try to explain how to solve a blazingly obvious problem (e.g. solve for x where 2x + 3 = 2y, and y is 4) she would lose her marbles, telling me that's not what her teacher said, and best I could figure, she had been taught some weird path through something geometric, and there was no way I was going to figure that out. So, my knowledge of math was completely invalidated, despite my having a more advanced math education than her teacher. This went on for a couple years and she finally failed a course.

She fixed the grade over the next quarter and we incidentally moved to another school district for my job. She excelled and got an A in pre-calc as a junior. But the new school district enrolled her in calculus and then decided they didn't have enough students to justify the section, so they cancelled it and rolled everyone into other courses. They decided my daughter had only taken 3 years of math so they had her take Algebra 2. After getting an A in pre-calc, they had her take Algebra 2. The next year she enrolled in college and they decided that she had to take a math class, but she would be best served by taking pre-calc again! What. The. Literal. Fuck!

My mom, the math teacher who wrote the Texas curriculum, and adores the whole Berkeley math education scene, leaned in to help her (mostly just to recover from the crushed self esteem) and near the end of the semester my mom called to tell me my daughter should not be pressed to do any more math. She hates it, feels terrible about herself whenever she thinks about it, and it would be best to never think about it again.

She's now a philosophy major, finishing junior year at a top college with a 3.9, straight As last quarter, and as long as we don't equatr logic to math, she can rock logic all day long

Fuck every math department. Every fucking math teacher, professor, and administrator who buys into this math reform shit can fuck right off.

Ok. So, my son. What of him? He was ahead a year when we went to that other school district. And they wouldn't have been able to keep him up with his peer group. So 18 months before the pandemic we pulled him out for home school, my mom taught him, and got him through 3 years of math in 1 year. He started high school in pre-calc.

Same parents, same grandparents. He just happened to avoid common core entirely by virtue of circumstances and is now going to UCSC as a math major, having finished every math class at Foothill Community College a semester before graduating high school.

Is there a path to take AP Calculus BC before senior year? If not, this still seems limiting.

Totally agree. AFAICT, our math curriculum has been set for a hundred years by mathematicians. People who by some quirk of their upbringing were extremely strongly motivated to dig deep into mathematics.

Naturally, the mathematicians laid out for everyone the short path to deep competence in advanced math as fast as possible. Only seems obvious to them.

This path ignores the obvious fact that 99.5% of students are not intrinsically motivated to persevere through the decade-long marathon to reach PHD level math. No one in the kids’ lives ever made it clear why this is a goal worth investing in. Even their teachers don’t know. Not well enough to explain it.

It’s not even assumed you grok the fun puzzle game that is math. Instead, math is presented as an unending series of seemingly arbitrary rules that all strictly build on each other, eventually leading to an end goal of… … …

You are simply required to memorize these rules because if you fail you are a failure. And, maybe if you are unlucky you will utilize something more advanced than basic arithmetic twice a year for the rest of your life.

The reality is that math is tremendously interesting and useful and fun. But, all the life was sucked out of it from the beginning of public education. Before the common kids had a chance to even be presented with the idea that math can be fun.

We gotta turn this around. Present math as the game that is it. Not a “gamification” to artificially push you into doing things you don’t want to do. But, something that’s actually fun to do in itself.

What percentage of children are capable of learning "the math" under ideal conditions and circumstances?

What percentage of children are capable of learning "the math" in practical conditions and circumstances?

What is the distribution of ideal ages for children to learn "the math" in practical conditions and circumstances?

What happens when those ages (for most) don't line up with the various social factors that will contrive to make certain they permanently lose the opportunity to learn "the math"?

Should my children have to wait years to learn it because your children aren't ready yet but the education system can't afford to teach it twice to two separate smaller groups? What if that means pushing it to the point where my children would age out of the education system, and they never get to learn it, even if they'll be better at it then yours will be?

The education system is wrong. You get that right. But what you fail to see is that it can't ever be made non-wrong. What you want out of it isn't the same thing I want out of it. Or that the other guy wants out of it. If we look at how the education system functions, it only ever had political goals. Those have shifted over the years as various factions found new uses for it. At first it was just a jobs program of sorts. And maybe a little ethnic homogenization program. Little snippets of cultural genocide here and there in problematic geographic regions. Then it became a unionized voting bloc. And now it's just a treadmill to keep children busy and stupid so they don't ever quite figure out what was done to them. It's government-funded daycare in an economy that increasingly can never afford for even one parent to be home during the day in the early developmental years.

And it has done all those things remarkably well, and reasonably cheap too. What's broken that you really need to fix? Sure, I'm a little sarcastic there... but why can't you see that this system doesn't have any mechanism that will allow for non-superficial reform? Those with the power to do that don't use the public education system anyway.

What's your source for "math outcomes are way better in every aspect"? Figuring this out is trickier than it seems. Not only do students vary in demographics, socio-economic factors, and English-learners, but there are also relatively way more children of professors at Berkeley schools than in SF.