121–130 of 510 posts
Ugh, I couldn't imagine being a high achieving student and having to be lumped in with people who don't give a shit about their education.
Kids take algebra in 8th grade? When the heck did this start? I didn't take it until first year highschool (using US terms).
https://www.sfusd.edu/departments/mathematics-department-pag...
https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd-math-core-course-sequence-...
And the district position statement:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uije_05H3BtVyp55oQZ7NCa2k58...
It has a “guiding principle”:
> Students’ academic success in mathematics must not be predictable on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, language, religion, sexual orientation, cultural affiliation, or special needs.
That’s amazing! While it may be laudable to hope that a math education program could be so strong that socioeconomic status and race make no difference, the rest of this is absurd. There are people with special needs who are at a disadvantage in math. The only way that their special needs would not predict the distribution of their academic success would be to have an implausibly amazing special needs education program, to redefine success, or to hold everyone else back.
If you were a hardcore racist and systematically wanted to keep Black and Brown kids uneducated, you would throw out all expectations and requirements and let them pass every year until they graduated high school with almost no education. The white kids and the rich kids will find a way to educate themselves, either through tutors or private school but the poor kids with no options would be stuck in this worthless sy…
It's absurd that you blame this on "white supremacists". This entire ethos is the egalitarian morality whereby they cannot have differentiated learning or high standards that expose differences in outcomes by racial group. This elimination of curriculum, and testing requirements, particularly as application criteria at elite colleges, is allowing for more under-performing students to gain entry to elite school while…
https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/half-of-black-students-c...
Decades of EXCLUSIVELY PROGRESSIVE policies have lead to this end result. There aren’t any Republican boogeymen you can blame for this damage these policies have created.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Kids aren’t going to work on the farm or in a factory. They need the math!!! As someone who fucking hated and still hates academical math: No, kids do not need math. Not in the sense as taught in schools, anyway. That is a straight waste of precious time. What kids need is broader context and guidance for what math is, how it applies to the world around us, how we can use it, and why it's important. Fuck quadratic e…
Totally agree. AFAICT, our math curriculum has been set for a hundred years by mathematicians. People who by some quirk of their upbringing were extremely strongly motivated to dig deep into mathematics. Naturally, the mathematicians laid out for everyone the short path to deep competence in advanced math as fast as possible. Only seems obvious to them. This path ignores the obvious fact that 99.5% of students are no…
The current math curriculum is about giving people a strong base for using math outside mathematics itself, in case they want to study physics or some other science, or engineering. Mathematicians do not generally give a shit about the computational aspect (it’s not what math is about, generally speaking) which you spend most of your time doing in math curricula until you’re at the point where further studying math suggests you are interested in math itself.
The vast majority of people who struggle in math IME have at least one of two problems: one is they struggle with it and put up some mental barrier of being “bad at math”, the other is they fell behind at some point and the curriculum kept chugging along with no chance for the student to catch up (which just makes the subsequent material fail to stick and confusing). This has nothing to do with some nefarious mathematicians’ agenda and everything to do with the school system not allowing students to progress at different rates based on proficiency.
Argh this grinds my gears. It’s the education SYSTEM that is wrong. We are working with a 150 year old way of educating kids that does not apply to our culture today. Kids aren’t going to work on the farm or in a factory. They need the math!!! For courses like algebra, etc. kids need support at home from parents. When that support isn’t available (for whatever reason), don’t water down the content for goodness sake.…
Serious question: for what? Basic algebra, yes. And basic geometry is handy in many jobs as well. But beyond that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So anyway the point is Berkeley has always done math the "reform" way and its math outcomes are much better in every respect. If Berkeley's system prevents everyone from taking calculus before 12th grade, it's not getting even halfway decent results. If they're better than the results in San Francisco, all you can learn from that is that Berkeley has extreme problems with student quality, and quality is even lower…
> If Berkeley's system prevents everyone from taking calculus before 12th grade High school in the US ends at 12th grade -- how do they teach physics without calculus?
> San Francisco Unified decided in 2015 to delay algebra till ninth grade and place low, average and high achievers in the same classes. Ugh, I couldn't imagine being a high achieving student and having to be lumped in with people who don't give a shit about their education.
I remember asking one of my teachers for a reference when I was transferring and she replied that if I hadn't been in her class she would have thought herself an utter failure because of how little attention the other students paid. Without doing much work I regularly set the curve. I'm not brilliant, but I did study some.
> "Families with resources turn to fee-required online algebra 1 courses in eighth grade, outside the public school system, or enroll their kids in private schools," Isn't this obvious result? The Russian School of Mathematics could manage to teach 10-year old kids basic algebra. And there's AOPS, there's Think Academy, and slew of local tutoring schools who can teach kids relatively advanced maths. Let alone many pr…
Edit:- They get homework they need to turn in. Early on I had to spend sometime with my daughter to help her cope. But once she had her concepts down its been pretty smooth sailing.