Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity • Hacker News Board

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#431

Post by linksnapzz » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 7:07 PM UTC

throwanem wrote: post #420

CamperBob2 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. These "equity" arguments are indistinguishable from a deliberate attack.... the sort of attack you'd expect from a country that, having been unable to either compete with the West or conquer it, is well-known to have resorted to memetic warfare.

> I don't know.

Robert Conquest’s Third Laws of Politics:

"The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies."

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#432

Post by headcanon » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 7:07 PM UTC

flappyeagle wrote: post #329

headcanon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you need to get a tutor from a remote country. I would just enroll them in an after-school math program like Kumon. But yes, enhancing the education after school in general is likely what motivated parents with means would do.

Isn't Kumon just drilling basic stuff?

yeah its a lot of drills, I hated it as a kid but it worked. I didn't use it for algebra or beyond but I'm pretty sure they have it.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#433

Post by ghaff » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 7:08 PM UTC

currymj wrote: post #274

You can imagine the following perspective: - Most people don't need to learn calculus at all, and it's fine if the few weird students who do start when they get to college (maybe the advanced students can learn single-variable calculus in high school). - For pure signaling reasons, taking calculus in high school has become very important for college admissions. - In order to take calculus in high school, you need to…

(A) problem is that, if you're going to start getting very specific about what math kids need to learn if they're not going into STEM, you end up with a pretty short list and you end up, in practice, with not really learning math or developing numerical intuition at all. (And let's ignore the fact that I directly used very little of what I learned in university engineering either.)

When was the last time I did a geometry proof? Used trig? OK, I use some algebra now and then though probably not simultaneous equations. Not calc.

But I'm pretty sure the path is not to make numerical literacy basically optional. Why know how to multiply in a world with calculators? Well... Though I wouldn't argue with more emphasis on things like basic stats and probability early on.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#434

Post by daniel-cussen » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 7:08 PM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #391

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with the goal of improving opportunity for all I'm chatting with some friends who are parents in the Bay Area. Their admittedly very Californian response is that at least this should reduce competition for college spots. (Their kids are obviously going to get tutoring.)

I'm not sure it will — there are still plenty of schools elsewhere that offer advanced coursework, and their graduates can more than fill the freshman class of elite colleges. For example, I grew up in Sacramento, and our public schools had a tracked program from 2nd grade. Pretty much all of us took algebra/geometry in middle school, and those who were advanced were taking precalc or calc by 9th grade. It has been a…

Tracking helped me in particular by making my homeroom (the British school equivalent, j called a class) more civilized, n fair to students w less academic talent than me. Given the tracking in English n at one point, briefly, Mathematics, it meant the other boys had a shot at getn the best score in the class or at all enjoying leniency in grading, which my presence as a future Erdosian mathematician made impossible, n their parents would deny them privileges n beat them sometimes if they weren't excellent students, so they'd bully me for monopolizing the academics completely. The girls did not, because i believe there was not an expectation they be the best student n plus i was very good-looking to them, though not to myself. Future model too. But the bullying was the main challenge, no matter what they threw at me the academics were nothing in difficulty compared to the bullying. So for that reason alone tracking helped me out, n the homeroom out too.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#435

Post by toast0 » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 7:09 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #300

toast0 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it is the case, while avoiding the privileged ones to run ahead is not ideal, the alternative of doing nothing is even worse (which is in practice what a lot of people criticizing this measure prone: they did not have any plan to change anything before the subject was introduced). > I think that the idea is not to "dumb down" the kids, but to have a goal that everyone can achieve instead of a goal that is imposs…

Let me get this straight. We're behind the rest of our class and we're going to catch up to them by going slower than they are? -Bart Simpson People who fall behind don't need a slower pace. They need to move faster. That means not just more attention but longer hours. But there is only so much time. A school wanting to maximize its graduation rate needs to spend less energy on teaching people who are good at a subje…

> That means, counterintuitively, that kids who are good at math should be spending less time on math, not more.

Maybe it's the right thing to do, but you're not going to get a lot of support for letting the kids who are good at school go home after an hour. All the students are expected to spend the same amount of time sitting in a math class. Might as well try to have something for them to do other than throw paper airplanes after ten minutes and distract the kids who need the whole hour.

Anyway, I suggested 2x the pupils for the fast math class, so that the normal math class got more resources. If you've got smaller schools, it's harder to allocate resources, and that's understandable, but a lot of schools have enough kids to push the ratios around to get more attention to the kids that need it.

It's unnecessary for all high school graduates to have taken AP Calc; but it's a waste of students' time for those who could have made it through that not to have had the opportunity. Just like it's a waste of students' time for them to be in classes that are beyond their current level so much that they can't catch up and then just passing them because there's no alternative, so they just zone out. Admittedly, the daycare function of school doesn't really care about wasting students' time, but that's only part of the function of school.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#436

Post by candiodari » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 7:10 PM UTC

Workaccount2 wrote: post #400

AlanYx wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is my best guess about the line of thinking that motivates these "no advanced math" policies. You've explained the thought process of the "reformers" fairly well, but there is another additional element that's important as well: a sizeable contingent of people believe that advanced math itself is intrinsically bad or negative. Usually this is either because math is fundamentally exclusionary in some core way, o…

At it's very foundation liberal ideology cracks pretty badly if "Everyone is born equally capable" is false.

But the only way to make people equal is to sabotage, sabotage and sabotage. And, of course, if parents have the means, this won't work. This is just robbing a lot of lower class kids from any chance of getting higher, just because not everyone will make it.

That's stupid.

Of course sabotaging kids is also slightly cheaper, and creates the need for more administrators, the ones making these decisions, to decide exactly what is "equitable".

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#437

Post by nemo44x » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 7:11 PM UTC

msravi wrote: post #389

wnc3141 wrote: post #46

A common phrase of the "soft bigotry of low expectations" is at work here. Those held to lower standards will fall to lower standards, deprived of the resources and support to achieve. The article attached provides a fantastic explanation. https://www.educationnext.org/teachers-should-replace-the-so...

From the article: > It does not matter if they grow up in foster care or a two-parent family. But it does! Very much. I just don't understand why the US tries everything other than fixing the most glaring cause. Lots of problems can be fixed by encouraging and aggrandizing stable two-parent families instead of getting schools and teachers to fill proxy parenting roles.

[flagged]

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#438

Post by lispisok » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 7:11 PM UTC

mabbo wrote: post #92

It's hyperbolic and not a totally fair comparison, but reading this, I had to go find and reread "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut. https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge... When the means to achieve equality is to handicap the strong, we're going the wrong way. It would be more expensive and harder to try instead to invest in and help those with additional needs. But nobody is interested in…

>When the means to achieve equality is to handicap the strong, we're going the wrong way.

A lot of people in the equity/equality movement have been following "the means justify the ends" for quite some time now and that approach has been growing in administrators. One of the reasons the supreme court ruled against affirmative action is the implementation of affirmative action in college admissions turned into shameless racism.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#439

Post by gwoplock » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 7:12 PM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #5

The Dallas experiment is interesting, and it’s not surprising at all that the students actually learned more than if they had been in less-advanced classes. The question I have is what the grades look like for the kids who were somewhat involuntarily included in the class. In junior high, grades don’t matter all that much, but come high school it could be worse to have lower grades in more challenging courses, depend…

>but come high school it could be worse to have lower grades in more challenging courses, depending on how hard the GPA hit is.

At least when I was in high school, the regular, pre-AP and the AP classes each had a different grade scale. Core classes were a 1.0(70%)-4.0(100%), pre-AP were +1 (1-5) and AP were +2 (2-6). So in theory they were taking into account how difficult the classes were. Since this was in the DFW area, I'd expect something similar in Dallas.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#440

Post by cobbaut » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 7:12 PM UTC

djbusby wrote: post #379

MostlyStable wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lengthen the school _year_ sure, but I'm skeptical that lengthening the school _day_ won't have, at best, mixed effects, especially given all the studies on sleep etc.

Start at 10am, go till 4pm?

European here, I went to school from 8:20 till 16:05. You guys really have school starting at 10:00? Who takes care of the kids after parents go to work and before school starts?