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California needs real math education, not gimmicks

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Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#231

Post by cpursley »

peterfirefly wrote: post #213
cjohnson318 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we tried that in the form of scholarships. Basically, the students with the highest grades get discounts from different colleges. It's not exactly the same, but the effect is similar, and this system has been running for generations. I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty. Parents who earn less usually don't have time to help kids with their school work, or don't unde…

> I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty.I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty. True, but the arrow of causality is not from "poverty" to "low test scores". Children of poor (and sometimes illiterate) Chinese immigrants did and do quite well!

Careful, you’re not allowed to utter the “C” word here in relation to educational outcomes.

(The word is “Culture”)

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#232

Post by bandrami »

WalterBright wrote: post #100
donw wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that would make a difference. Incentives are whack across the board in education. At every level, hiring and purchasing are done on the basis of political loyalty, rather than competence or fitness-for-purpose. An entire cathedral has been built upon patronage, and that cathedral will fight quite literally to the death rather than reform itself. We're just now approaching the end-stage of what that look…

Hence the vehement opposition to the idea, sadly.

DC has been doing full school choice for 20 years now. So your bold innovative goal is to "be like DCPS in the early 2000s".

That's gonna go over great in Fairfax County.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#233

Post by localplume »

WalterBright wrote: post #83
blindriver wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You fix poverty by educating children and letting them grow up in a safe area free from crime. Educated children get put on the right path in life and lift themselves out of poverty. That's how Asian countries like Japan and Korea pulled themselves out of poverty in the matter of decades. During the 1950s and 1960s, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world, and by the 1980s, was considered an economi…

The Soviets had a good public education system. No economic miracle. Japan's and Korea's economic miracles came from embracing free markets. The same thing happened in Vietnam and China. Free markets => prosperity, every time.

[dead]

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#234

Post by andelink »

teddyh wrote: post #104

See also: A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart (2002): https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.... >

Thank you for sharing this. I had not read it before and it beautifully put to words the feelings I developed while getting my math degree.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#235

Post by denton-scratch »

astrange wrote: post #174
WalterBright wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works everywhere in the private sector. Having a base salary plus incentive pay for meeting objective goals is commonplace. Companies wouldn't do that if it didn't work. In my own company, Zortech, the staff was paid a base rate plus a cut of the gross sales for the month. > it would almost certainly result in teachers focusing all of their efforts on the best students and none of it on those who are struggling Ac…

Performance reviews aren't always based on "objective goals" and it'd be bad if they were, because almost anyone outside of sales could game them. Typically it's a kind of stack ranking based on how you performed relative to peers, where relative means in the vague opinion of your management tree.

> because almost anyone outside of sales could game them

Perhaps you haven't worked in sales? My experience of sales meetings was that most of the meeting was taken up with discussions of how to optimise commission. The sales manager was totally in on the game; after all, he got a skim of his salesmen's commissions.

In no other environment have I seen people so obsessed with juking the stats.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#236

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

bandrami wrote: post #140
WalterBright wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one solution that will work (and is vehemently resisted) is to pay teachers a base salary plus a bonus for each student that meets grade level expectations at the end of the year.

I find it weird the intensity with which people believe that teachers rather than students are the bottleneck here. If you want to add an incentive it makes much more sense to incent the students to do well.

My parents gave me a few bucks for As and Bs. My school also gave me some scholarship money based on my scores.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#237

Post by andelink »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #186
aeonik wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I struggled a lot with Algebra, I forged my teacher's signature to not retake it for the third year in a row. I didn't really "get" it until I started programming and learning stats. That's when it all hit me, then I went back and had to relearn what the hell they were talking about during my middle school years. Also, once I got to Highschool math, Algebra 2 and PreCalc, it was very easy to simply memorize formulas…

As a counterpoint, a lot of business majors seemed to think that Econ 101, let alone calc-based 410, was the hardest thing in the world. The class is all graphs but there usually no numbers—it’s all about the intersections and regions under different curves. Usually all drawn with straight lines to keep it simple in 101. I think the people that found it hard did not have the fluency they needed in mathematics. If you…

This is so true. I majored in math and economics, and even the 400-level econ classes used exclusively linear equations because the average student in those classes had no idea what an integral was. But they could calculate the area of a triangle.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#238

Post by nebula8804 »

another_story wrote: post #77
goolulusaurs wrote: post #25

In 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…

There's also an increased distance between those doing the actual work and those making decisions about how it should be done. Bureaucratic depth keeps any real change from taking place, instead leaving those on the ground level to try and work within a set growing rules. Any attempt to affect change has to be filtered through so many levels and takes so long. As a longtime teacher, I don't think there are any soluti…

>All that said, I don't know if it'll change much. The culture in America doesn't respect the value of education, nor educators in the way it used to.

Its crazy to see these stats in the link along with your comment... but at the same time see that the US leading the way(or is at least in the top tier) in technology, business, innovation, etc.

How is the country continuing to produce so much output when its mechanism for generating that output(its people) is in such dire straights? Is this a delay thing? Are we about to have a massive drop off in innovation in 10 years when these kids are the ones in their prime producing years? If that happens what the heck is the leadership/business class going to do? Their power comes from the fact that the country is producing so much.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#239

Post by christophilus »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #72
jeffbee wrote: post #24

I 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…

In the Texas in the 90s the math courses were: algebra, geometry, algebra II, precalculus and trigonometry, and calculus.

Same in SC.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#240

Post by tromp »

goolulusaurs wrote: post #25

In 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…

“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”

-- attributed to Oscar Wilde

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