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US 'in denial' over poor maths standards

bbc.co.uk

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Re: US 'in denial' over poor maths standards

#11

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

jstalin wrote: post #8
noobermin wrote: post #2

I think the thing that distresses me the most is that any attempt that has been made to alleviate the situation (like the common core) has been stamped "big government" by people who seem to _not_ understand the urgency of this situation. I'm out of ideas. What do we do? EDIT: added a not. Wow did that change what I meant to say.

One size fits all is surely the answer.

"One size fits all" is the only possible answer when you have multiple, mutually contradictory goals.

The idea that even just one child out of millions might be left out means no answer that treats the problem on an individual, child-by-child basis can ever be considered.

It also rules out anything where one child might get "more" than another. (Never mind that many people are perfectly happy and comfortable despite having gotten less than others.)

Re: US 'in denial' over poor maths standards

#13

Post by noobermin »

jstalin wrote: post #8
noobermin wrote: post #2

I think the thing that distresses me the most is that any attempt that has been made to alleviate the situation (like the common core) has been stamped "big government" by people who seem to _not_ understand the urgency of this situation. I'm out of ideas. What do we do? EDIT: added a not. Wow did that change what I meant to say.

One size fits all is surely the answer.

The whole point of the common core, from my understanding was to be vague enough to let local governments decide how best to implement it. They were trying to avoid "one size fits all."

Having everyone in the same page with regards to an overall standard seems good in my book.

Re: US 'in denial' over poor maths standards

#14

Post by yonran »

joelrunyon wrote: post #3
noobermin wrote: post #2

I think the thing that distresses me the most is that any attempt that has been made to alleviate the situation (like the common core) has been stamped "big government" by people who seem to _not_ understand the urgency of this situation. I'm out of ideas. What do we do? EDIT: added a not. Wow did that change what I meant to say.

Have you read through common core? That crap is confusing.

What? I just looked it up[1]. The common core math standard looks very readable and reasonable, and it’s not even very big (93 pages). Is there anything in particular that you found confusing, inappropriate, or overly prescriptive?

For example, in Grade 7, there are about 50 requirements, one of which is “Use proportional relationships to solve multistep ratio and percent problems. Examples: simple interest, tax, markups and markdowns, gratuities and commissions, fees, percent increase and decrease, percent error.” That sounds like an appropriate thing to learn in 7th grade.

Edit: In fact, most of the time when I am reading the standard I just nod and think “yep, that’s probably about when I learned that concept” when I grew up in California, although in a few cases (e.g. using scatterplots and proving Pythagorean theorem in 8th grade) I don’t think I learned them until high school.

[1] http://www.corestandards.org/Math/

Re: US 'in denial' over poor maths standards

#15

Post by aurelian »

josephschmoe wrote: post #4

In the US, the quality of your math education is determined by where you live on the community level, usually by property value. Within 10 miles, you can have both a school that performs on par with Sweden and another that performs on par with Turkey. What does this mean? Things are way worse for the poor here than this study even acknowledges. If you're poor in America, your best chance at a good education is by raf…

Could this be explained in part by people who are good at math tending to make more money than people who are bad at math?

http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/2...

Re: US 'in denial' over poor maths standards

#16

Post by at-fates-hands »

josephschmoe wrote: post #4

In the US, the quality of your math education is determined by where you live on the community level, usually by property value. Within 10 miles, you can have both a school that performs on par with Sweden and another that performs on par with Turkey. What does this mean? Things are way worse for the poor here than this study even acknowledges. If you're poor in America, your best chance at a good education is by raf…

I totally agree and am depressed that places like inner cities have such a hard time getting more charter schools and competition that would give these kids and their families a shot at a decent education.

Is it politics? Teachers unions? Getting good admin people? What's holding back these places from getting ahead?

As a comparison, my sister lives on the outskirts of a large metro area and their school has been teaching STEM for almost 10 years now.

Re: US 'in denial' over poor maths standards

#17

Post by Pxtl »

noobermin wrote: post #2

I think the thing that distresses me the most is that any attempt that has been made to alleviate the situation (like the common core) has been stamped "big government" by people who seem to _not_ understand the urgency of this situation. I'm out of ideas. What do we do? EDIT: added a not. Wow did that change what I meant to say.

Part of the problem is that a subset of the right wing wants privatization. In order to encourage privatization, you actually want the public sector to be as bad as possible so there's greater outcry for subsidized privately-run alternatives.

Re: US 'in denial' over poor maths standards

#18

Post by relaytheurgency »

I taught high school physics for a semester and the math abilities of these students (many considered top students) were abysmal. Somehow several of these students had received As and Bs in Algebra 2 but were unable to transform f = ma into a = f/m. They also had a very flawed understanding of how to solve quadratics.

I later realized that the issue is that mathematics is often taught as procedural. Students are taught a process (a set of steps to follow) that will take you from A to B. This works very well when you can remember all of the steps but if you forget one step you will always get the wrong answer. Almost none of these students could reason abstractly about the nature of the equations they were looking at. They could only refer to prior experiences following a sort of algebra recipe.

Re: US 'in denial' over poor maths standards

#19

Post by noobermin »

josephschmoe wrote: post #4

In the US, the quality of your math education is determined by where you live on the community level, usually by property value. Within 10 miles, you can have both a school that performs on par with Sweden and another that performs on par with Turkey. What does this mean? Things are way worse for the poor here than this study even acknowledges. If you're poor in America, your best chance at a good education is by raf…

I think the interesting thing was even middle class kids demonstrated poor performance too. The problem us spread wider across the distribution rather than abysmal performance by a minority such so that it pulled down the average (to me, that never really made sense in my intuition).

Re: US 'in denial' over poor maths standards

#20

Post by kevinpet »

yonran wrote: post #14
joelrunyon wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you read through common core? That crap is confusing.

What? I just looked it up[1]. The common core math standard looks very readable and reasonable, and it’s not even very big (93 pages). Is there anything in particular that you found confusing, inappropriate, or overly prescriptive? For example, in Grade 7, there are about 50 requirements, one of which is “Use proportional relationships to solve multistep ratio and percent problems. Examples: simple interest, tax, mar…

Common core invents new arithmetic techniques that no one knows. It's the worst idiocy of reinventing the world.
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