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California needs real math education, not gimmicks

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Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#7
post #5

As someone with a PhD in education, anytime someone uses the phrase “real education” as an attack on new approaches to teaching and learning, it’s a gigantic red flag that their argument is unserious.

The "advice" coming from these professors of education to state governments should be what is giving you a giant red flag. Reducing quality of education by lowering standards, and lying about the data, shows that it is not driven by science.

My opinion on this: the "education" establishment in the US is driven by people looking for consulting fees, as shown by someone in this post linking to Dr Boaler's absurd consulting fees.

Math standards are being dropped in the US, and the fight is coming from your colleagues. Reading is taught incorrectly and has been for decades as shown by dropping phonics based education and using "whole word association". Chinese mathematics education is several years ahead of American education, and the professors and educators are debating on if they should make American students unable to take Algebra in middle school, despite numerous countries learning algebra years before that.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#8
post #4

Data Science is a form of statistics. Algebra II is a pre-requisite for statistics. How is replacing a pre-requisite with a more advanced class is a good idea?

Simple, you teach a very low level spreadsheets course but label is "Data Science". Voila!

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#9
post #5

As someone with a PhD in education, anytime someone uses the phrase “real education” as an attack on new approaches to teaching and learning, it’s a gigantic red flag that their argument is unserious.

As someone with a brain, anytime someone uses an appeal to authority as a blithe dismissal of a substantial article, it's a gigantic red flag that their argument is unserious.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#10
The Author may have good points, but there is still a lot of value in teaching basic statistics, and I don't understand why Algebra is required to understand basic stats.

Even just learning the basic descriptive statistics and getting people fluent in reading charts can be very valuable. The fact that they may not understand the deeper nuances is fine in my opinion.

Also... I work with a lot of data analysts and data scientists, and I really question if 90%+ of them have even a faintest understanding of their calculus course material. Most took the courses, promptly forgot everything, and just learned what they needed for their job, or use tools built by people who actually know the details.

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