241–250 of 748 posts
With such an overwhelmingly negative response in the comments on these things, you have to wonder who actually supports this stuff and how is it possible that such a small group yields so much power
Social media bias. If you are happy with your work, you spend your time working. If you love your family, you spend time with them. If you have a rewarding hobby, you enjoy pursuing it. If you are a bitter miserable loser with nothing else to do, you spend your day shitposting on Twitter.
Here's a revolutionary idea that pretty much all of the world adopts, if students are having trouble with a topic, get them to do more of it, instead of running away from it. I always find it hilarious that the pre college education in US is so messed up. Instead of doing Algebra 1, Algebra 2, calculus, geometry as one subject that you do in a year and then completely forgetting about it till the next time you have t…
I mean, most of that sequence builds upon itself, except geometry.
A: If there's a geometric interpretation :-)
I was doing algebra and Russian math word problems in 4th grade (maybe earlier, it's been a while). What exactly is the logic of pushing back mathematical training to later grades? [1] 1: https://www.edhelper.com/geography/Russia_Math1.htm
And Mozart was writing concertos at 5. Prodigies existing shouldn't define how we educate people.
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> Not a huge leap from there to the concept of equations, inverse operations, and solving for unknowns. Unfortunately, for a child it typically is a huge leap. There are certain abstractions that young children simply cannot do. The ability to do certain abstractions is distributed along a bell curve (edit: of age), and maybe your child is on the very far left of that curve, but most kids won’t be able to handle the…
The only thing distributed along the bell curve is adults who are willing to help the kids. Yes for some kids it will come pretty easy, even at very young ages, but even very young children can learn these concepts if you would just spend some time teaching it to them. When you have a system set up to force one adult to teach 30+ children you will never be able to spend the time required to ensure everyone gets the c…
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> I always find it hilarious that the pre college education in US is so messed up. Instead of doing Algebra 1, Algebra 2, calculus, geometry as one subject that you do in a year and then completely forgetting about it for the rest of the high school, how about you do a little bit of everything every year from grade 8-12. Problem solved. I don't understand. US high school kids only do math one year out of the 4? And n…
Math in US high schools ends at what most countries would consider a middle school level. Algebra 2 is generally the only requirement. The vast majority of students graduate without ever even knowing what calculus is.
I went to high school in California, I was able to take all the way up to what was called Calculus BC, which covered up to learning integration techniques. This was in a bay area high school that was underfunded, and the majority of our senior class didn't graduate.
But the vast majority of students stop at Algebra 2, and struggle through it.
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Good for you. I met kids in 4th grade who struggled with their multiplication tables. What do you do for them?
Spend some extra time figuring out why they're struggling. But I suspect what you have in mind is something else, something more along the lines of leaving them behind.
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> Not a huge leap from there to the concept of equations, inverse operations, and solving for unknowns. Unfortunately, for a child it typically is a huge leap. There are certain abstractions that young children simply cannot do. The ability to do certain abstractions is distributed along a bell curve (edit: of age), and maybe your child is on the very far left of that curve, but most kids won’t be able to handle the…
The only thing distributed along the bell curve is adults who are willing to help the kids. Yes for some kids it will come pretty easy, even at very young ages, but even very young children can learn these concepts if you would just spend some time teaching it to them. When you have a system set up to force one adult to teach 30+ children you will never be able to spend the time required to ensure everyone gets the c…
Many decades of cognitive science disagree with you.
See Piaget for one of the earlier researchers on this topic. Even though his original ideas have been refuted or refined, the basic premises of his ideas are still prominent among the large group of modern researchers that some people dub neo-Piagetians.
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> The students with a delayed introduction caught up so quickly that the delay didn’t matter Yes and there are some kids that act up or learn to hate education and the system for being forced into what amounts to remedial classes. Sometimes the brightest children are the most difficult precisely because they're not being challenged. The ideal would be to have every student learn at their own pace. Some children could…
Gifted programs do very little or nothing as far as most studies can tell. Any gains in scores are very small, and they don’t appear to make any meaningful difference in student engagement or motivation. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/01623737211008919 https://www.nber.org/papers/w17089 These programs are relatively expensive, and there’s a strong argument the gifted programs should be overhauled, or that t…
So much more was expected of us, that of course we came out learning more. 8th grade was a 20 page research project. 6th grade math was algebra, in 7th grade we learned logarithms and binary math.
When I went back to mainstream academics in high school, the difference was stark. In one of my city's top schools, students were still reading books out loud during class. Expected reading assignments were around a couple dozen pages a week. Math was all repeating what I had learned in middle school. Essays were a fraction the length and difficulty.
And in high school I knew plenty of smart kids who were bored to tears and misbehaved. Hell I watched one kid in Latin class piece his own nipple. (The teacher did nothing, possibly because said student was also pretty darn good at Latin...)
I wonder how a study is going to account for "smart kids who dropped out of school from sheer boredom".
Another aspect to examine is that behavior problems in gifted programs were, IMHO, much less than in mainstream classrooms. When all the students in the classroom are there to learn, no big surprise, learning gets done. Students turn in HW on time, listen when the teacher talks, and have expectations of not only themselves, but of each other.
Yes, gifted programs need to be accessible across socio-economic levels. The fact that I had to be bused to the rich part of town to go to a gifted program is a great example of classist and racist policies in action.
> while being fairly expensive.
I fail to see how gifted programs cost any more than regular programs. You are literally taking the highest achievers and placing them in a separate classroom for a few core subjects. For middle school and high school, there are no additional teachers, no additional programs in place, it is purely a cohort.
> and they don’t appear to make any meaningful difference in student engagement or motivation.
As someone from a poor working class family, gifted programs gave me the opportunity to rise up out of generations of being poor.
Gifted programs need to be made available to everyone who qualifies.
The fact is, one college graduate can help elevate an entire family. Every student needs to be given the chance to reach their full potential, and for some, that means placing them in an environment which has an expectation of academic excellence and lifelong achievement.
Edit: I just reviewed the study my local school district did to justify shutting down their spectrum program. None of the reasons (!!!) had to do with student outcomes.
My parents immigrated from Romania and were part of the Florida Romanian community. Many were poor, didn't really have a great support system, and didnt really get America. Many of the kids in that community just dropped out or didn't do well in school and that's largely because of a poor home life and just not having access to anything. All the countries that have great education systems also have great support systems for families.
Algebra isn't hard (though it is time consuming imo), you can pass all the tests with memorization since it's applying a few patterns over and over again. Delaying it isn't going to make people better at it.
The program is called Equitable Math and it frames current mathematics pedagogy as a mechanism by which White Supremacy is sustained.¹ Note that in a very long multi-part document on White Supremacy, there is absolutely zero mention of Asians, despite that they are somewhere between 15.5% to 17% of the state population.² Program goals includes the de-emphasis of Algebra for middle school and Calculus for high school.…
The recommendations are quite sane--seek student understanding over the correct answer, use examples students can relate to, etc. It's basically a few dozen pages of very sensible (perhaps even cliche) guidelines.
But throughout it's couched language claiming the opposite is white supremacy. Eg. grades stress getting the correct answer over comprehension, and are part of a White supremacist model.
I can allready see how the debate is going to end up, with each side talking past each other. The reformers will claim that the only reason you're opposed to it is because you support White supremacy. The traditionalists will say it's using race as a cudgel to silence opposition.