Well, "Yes Prime Minister" already figured it out. The whole education system is more for the welfare of bureaucracies and teachers/unions instead of students'. And that was some 40 years ago.
California needs real math education, not gimmicks
31–40 of 386 posts
Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks
#32In my younger years, particularly during my schooling, I held a deep resentment towards the educational system. It felt overtly clear to me, as a student, that schools failed to effectively foster learning and growth. However, my perspective has evolved over time. I've come to understand that the issues I observed are not unique to the school system but rather characteristic of large institutions as a whole. The perv…
a.k.a. Iron Law of Bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_ir...
Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks
#33California k-12 public education has become a joke. Even the top rated schools are succeeding from students going to after school tutoring and not from the education in the public institution. It’s appalling how California cares more about homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and Medicare over education. Education is the single biggest factor to driving social mobility of the poor to middle class, and middle class…
I'm not sure any part of america has working education; across the board it seems to be a huge money sink that produces poor results. Gesturing to homelessness, immigrants and healthcare is clouding the issue. Those are real, pressing issues too, and it's not a binary choice of tackling one or the other.
Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks
#34Data 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?
"data science" -- science warping onto itself, forgetting that it's primary mission is to match data with reality.
Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks
#35California k-12 public education has become a joke. Even the top rated schools are succeeding from students going to after school tutoring and not from the education in the public institution. It’s appalling how California cares more about homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and Medicare over education. Education is the single biggest factor to driving social mobility of the poor to middle class, and middle class…
> Education is the single biggest factor to driving social mobility of the poor to middle class, and middle class to wealthy Is it? Any evidence that supports the idea that the quality of K-12 education matters at all?
We seem to expect it to fix poverty. We should fix poverty, and use public education to fix dumb kids.
Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks
#36The 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…
Probability density functions, or probability mass functions, are functions. Guess where you learn what those are?
Programming. We should be teaching programming and it should be mandatory at the earliest possible opportunity. And if my teenager isn't doing dynamic programming as a freshman in highschool I will be sorely disappointed.
J/k. Or am I.
I learned about functions in algebra. Seems like that concept would come in handy for stats.
Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks
#37Data 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?
How is data science not just statistics, rebranded? When I studied statistics in university we studied clustering, regression, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, visualisations, charting, general linear models... how is this different from data science? Is it just because we have more computing power, so we rebranded it? Instead of doing frequentist analyses because those are easy to do with smaller computers,…
From the one data science course I took: compared to a traditional stats class, there is a bit more focus on data acquisition and pre processing, and more usage of our of the box tools, a bit less on some of theory (I don’t recall hearing about type I and type II errors).
Of course, since it was a professional course there is probably the assumption that students already know these things…
Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks
#38I feel like the facts are a little thin. It is not really true that "For decades, American math curriculum has followed a standard sequence: arithmetic, algebra, geometry, algebra II, precalculus and trigonometry, and calculus." That may have been the local condition in some places. The high school in my city does not have and has never had any named math course except calculus and statistics. Everything else is just…
My school system had a similar progression, though trig was on its own and you either took basic calc (essentially just limits and differentials) or AP calc, or a statistics-lite course that was basically "business math" for kids who weren't on a college track but might try for an associates degree or maybe community college. Though, arithmetic and algebra 1 were just called "math" (all pre-common-core, of course).
This was at a somewhat rural school in the Midwest, for what it is worth.
Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks
#39Well, "Yes Prime Minister" already figured it out. The whole education system is more for the welfare of bureaucracies and teachers/unions instead of students'. And that was some 40 years ago.
Teachers make very little money. Society has deemed them worth almost nothing despite the fact that they're pivotal in shaping minds; the future of america, and that they do very hard, frustrating work taking care of our spawn in a country where parents treat school like daycare instead of a place to learn.
They wouldn't need a union to collectively bargain if they were taken care of properly. On the flipside, I acknowledge that it is unfortunate that teaching seems to be a drip pan to collect people who do not succeed in primary careers, and that should probably stop also.
Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks
#40California k-12 public education has become a joke. Even the top rated schools are succeeding from students going to after school tutoring and not from the education in the public institution. It’s appalling how California cares more about homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and Medicare over education. Education is the single biggest factor to driving social mobility of the poor to middle class, and middle class…
This is false. My children went to top rated public school and my older daughter is about the graduate a year early from Berkeley in math.