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

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#791

Post by DropInIn » Thu, Jul 20, 2023, 4:41 AM UTC

johnnyanmac wrote: post #790

DropInIn wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing keeping age peers from hanging out and being friends, just because they're at different levels in different subjects... In actuality it's more likely that socialization would improve as kids weren't forced through stress periods where they were not permitted to socialize, grouped arbitrarily and explicitly set against each other in various programs (eg - sports, group assignments, etc).... And that's…

>There's nothing keeping age peers from hanging out and being friends, just because they're at different levels in different subjects Nothing tangible. But your peers you do work with very much influences the kinds of peers that become your friends. But that's tangential to the real point I was making: socializing around a bunch of different peers your age in a specific nigh mandatory environment helps develop a sens…

Applying behaviors borne directly of the current structure on to the outcomes from an entirely different structure is not the way we reason, is it?

It frankly couldn't do worse than what we have, as the current structure ensures suffering and pain for the majority as a result of the social structure established by the norms and systems.

At least under my suggestion those who would excel Could excel and get the hell out before they were irreparably harmed and held back by the fools and willfully stupid as we have now, let alone the fact that the "less capable" would have a real chance at leaving with a modest education rather than being shoved through and ending up in The real world either zero capacity for real thought, understanding and employability.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#792

Post by DropInIn » Thu, Jul 20, 2023, 4:43 AM UTC

RecycledEle wrote: post #780

DropInIn wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's thier fault if we never gave the support in K-12? You do see the glaring failure in your "reasoning", right?

I agree with you that I was wrong to say "It's their fault." There are people who get screwed by life. The main way they got screwed was when life taught them whining was better than working hard. We need to stop screwing people that way. We need to hold a hard line on the principle that they can succeed or fail in a free market, and we will not reward whining. This means eliminating all entitlements for adults. I'll…

Tell me you're privileged and don't actually have empathy in a long winded diatribe < that's not what I asked for but that's what you gave me....

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#793

Post by johnnyanmac » Thu, Jul 20, 2023, 5:47 AM UTC

DropInIn wrote: post #791

johnnyanmac wrote: post #790

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's nothing keeping age peers from hanging out and being friends, just because they're at different levels in different subjects Nothing tangible. But your peers you do work with very much influences the kinds of peers that become your friends. But that's tangential to the real point I was making: socializing around a bunch of different peers your age in a specific nigh mandatory environment helps develop a sens…

Applying behaviors borne directly of the current structure on to the outcomes from an entirely different structure is not the way we reason, is it? It frankly couldn't do worse than what we have, as the current structure ensures suffering and pain for the majority as a result of the social structure established by the norms and systems. At least under my suggestion those who would excel Could excel and get the hell o…

>Applying behaviors borne directly of the current structure on to the outcomes from an entirely different structure is not the way we reason, is it?

It's an inevitable result of reasoning. I can't know what I don't know. Short of the laws of physics, we can never truly predict the behaviors of a new universal model from scratch.

Regardless, I don't think human nature would change that drastically as a result of students being able to pace their learning. Greed, selfishness, and general malice may be lessened but not eradicated. Social castes would probably still exist as a remnant of various luck and circumstance of the elite established centuries ago.

>It frankly couldn't do worse than what we have

I never really disagreed, I just simply want to point out a less talked about point in the current educational system. It's not simply an institution of acedemia, nor a "glorified day care center" as others cynically put it. There's soft skills you don't really get except by engaging with other people, some you don't like. Some you may even outright hate.

I feel any alternative system that doesn't keep those soft skills in mind may face further issues down the road, even if it may or may not end up better than the current timeline.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#794

Post by sfn42 » Thu, Jul 20, 2023, 8:39 AM UTC

johnnyanmac wrote: post #775

sfn42 wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody's spending their vacation studying if they can avoid it.

>if they can avoid it. meanwhile, my parent put me in summer school almost every year in some capacity. At least summer hours and classes are relaxed compared to the gauntlet of 6-7 different subjects 8 hours a day.

Seems like you couldn't avoid it.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#795

Post by sfn42 » Thu, Jul 20, 2023, 10:30 AM UTC

RecycledEle wrote: post #781

sfn42 wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of kids are just stupid.

Plenty of kids get away with being stupid. If those same kids knew that they would have to provide for themselves once they turned 18, they would be studying and learning to work. A welfare society trains children to be stupid. A free market trains children to work.

Intelligence and education are different things. You can't train intelligence - you can teach some tools or frameworks for reasoning and such and that can help but some people will understand them and others won't.

As a simple example just look at how many people think math is useless. Even having spent 10+ years with people trying to bash it into their heads they still can't figure out any of the infinitely many useful things you can do with math.

Education is the result, intelligence is potential. Stupid people have less potential for results. Doesn't mean some of them can't pull a Forrest Gump, nor that they aren't valuable members of society. Just means they suck at learning (at least some) things so their time is better spent doing other stuff.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#796

Post by nemo44x » Thu, Jul 20, 2023, 10:41 AM UTC

tootie wrote: post #764

nemo44x wrote: post #755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that chart shows is how they have successfully ganked more and more money from taxpayers. Where does it show outcomes have been improved or that the outcomes of kids from single mothers (those that have been "lifted out of poverty") are improving relative to traditional families? The outcomes I see VS 75 years ago is that incarceration rates are through the roof, premature death due to drug use is through the roo…

75 years ago? For reference, Ruby Bridges is 68 years old as of today and active on Instagram. If you think too many single moms are the biggest cultural shift of the last 75 years, then you are just drawing absolutely arbitrary connections. Drug use, drug convictions, drug deaths are a big shift from then for sure. Some of that is deliberately abusive policy-making by legislators who had been constitutionally barred…

Means tested welfare actively discourages marriage in poor people. As we’ve added more and more of these programs the divorce rate of poor people has skyrocketed. This has actively destroyed their communities and made them reliant on the state.

The welfare state should reward and incentivize marriage. The tax system does for middle and high earners and you see lower rates of single parenthood. The fact you can lose benefits if you’re lower income and married is the worst possible incentive.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#797

Post by tremon » Thu, Jul 20, 2023, 11:08 AM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #435

sandworm101 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All the students are expected to spend the same amount of time sitting in a math class

But why? This is a very dysfunctional way of allocating teaching time, especially if the classes are not split along learning ability. What ages are we talking about here?

At my school, we didn't even get subject-specific time slots until 13/14 years: before that, we all spent the same time in class but everyone worked on their own subject. The teacher's job was to make sure that every child spent time on each subject according to their needs, not according to alotted time.

And after that, when we did get separate classes and separate teachers for the different subjects, only 70% of our school time was scheduled for the whole class; the other 30% was for teacher "open hours": the students were expected to fill that time according to their own needs.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#798

Post by Scubabear68 » Thu, Jul 20, 2023, 11:42 AM UTC

themitigating wrote: post #756

Scubabear68 wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that school systems in NJ as a rule are not state run, but locally run. Quality varies wildly by district. In fact, real estate prices vary in direct proportion to quality of schools in NJ towns very closely. We happen to be in a lousy district. Yes, Covid uniformly hurt all schools. But don’t presume to know our kids, our schools, or our context. Our public schools have always had lousy standardized test result…

Edit: I know school quality varies between district but I only knew your state. You also mentioned that it's about money but then complained about your tax dollars being wasted. Wouldn't an increase in spending help your district? What would happen if you spent half of what you paid for private schools on tutors and kept your kids in public? ---- edit end Your fixation with standardized tests is unusual for this site…

Pretend this wasn’t education, but literally any other field.

You want KPIs that you can measure that are based somehow on reality.

The problem with public education in the US is teacher’s unions fiercely fight against any sort of KPI, because they would then be evaluated on actual results. They much prefer to have bullet proof tenured jobs for life with no accountability.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#799

Post by tootie » Thu, Jul 20, 2023, 2:10 PM UTC

nemo44x wrote: post #796

tootie wrote: post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

75 years ago? For reference, Ruby Bridges is 68 years old as of today and active on Instagram. If you think too many single moms are the biggest cultural shift of the last 75 years, then you are just drawing absolutely arbitrary connections. Drug use, drug convictions, drug deaths are a big shift from then for sure. Some of that is deliberately abusive policy-making by legislators who had been constitutionally barred…

Means tested welfare actively discourages marriage in poor people. As we’ve added more and more of these programs the divorce rate of poor people has skyrocketed. This has actively destroyed their communities and made them reliant on the state. The welfare state should reward and incentivize marriage. The tax system does for middle and high earners and you see lower rates of single parenthood. The fact you can lose b…

Citation needed. Absence of a legal marriage does not preclude co-habitation and co-parenting. Especially for parents who may be doing something for the benefit of the children. Furthermore, if you created incentives to marry, you'd just be inundated with fake marriages done for financial benefit (a la citizenship marriages). Go google the phrase "medical divorce" as another data point. If you are worried the system is being gamed, adding more rules and loopholes is unlikely to solve anything. And you have to ask what outcome your are trying to incentive. This thread started talking about educational outcomes for kids. Marriage is not a particular useful end unto itself. I'd posit that just adopting universal healthcare would increase the marriage rate and do so by improving outcomes.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#800

Post by nemo44x » Thu, Jul 20, 2023, 2:40 PM UTC

tootie wrote: post #799

nemo44x wrote: post #796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Means tested welfare actively discourages marriage in poor people. As we’ve added more and more of these programs the divorce rate of poor people has skyrocketed. This has actively destroyed their communities and made them reliant on the state. The welfare state should reward and incentivize marriage. The tax system does for middle and high earners and you see lower rates of single parenthood. The fact you can lose b…

Citation needed. Absence of a legal marriage does not preclude co-habitation and co-parenting. Especially for parents who may be doing something for the benefit of the children. Furthermore, if you created incentives to marry, you'd just be inundated with fake marriages done for financial benefit (a la citizenship marriages). Go google the phrase "medical divorce" as another data point. If you are worried the system…

Just do the most basic Google search. Here, I'll start for you:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK230345/#:~:text=This%2....

However, a majority of the newer studies show that welfare has a significantly negative effect on marriage or a positive effect on fertility rather than none at all. Because of this shift in findings, the current consensus is that the welfare system probably has some effect on these demographic outcomes.

Based on this review, it is clear that a simple majority of the studies that have been conducted to date show a significant correlation between welfare benefits and marriage and fertility, suggesting the presence of such behavioral incentive effects.

But it's also just obvious.

And then the effects of kids from single-mother homes:

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/are-children-raised-with-....

This is all widely known and generally agreed on. That the outcomes of kids from single-mother homes are far worse than married coupled homes when you control for income, etc.