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An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

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Re: An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

#431

Post by michaelt »

klodolph wrote: post #313
rayiner wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you and OP differ only in that he thinks the people on the committee have these beliefs, while you’re implying that they’re afraid of “political pressure” from people who hold these beliefs. Which I suspect is correct.

I was thinking less that they are "afraid" of political pressure, and more that responding to political pressure is one of the things that these committees do, by design. Political pressure is a manifestation of the population's problems / beliefs / perceptions. It's wrong to bow completely to political pressure, but it's also wrong to ignore it.

I agree with you somewhat, but I think there's an important distinction to be made.

If a political decision-making process concludes "men account for more road traffic deaths than women, but we've decided that gender can't be taken into account when pricing car insurance" that's fine; the facts have remained the facts, and a political decision has been made by a political process.

But if the same process concludes "men and women cause the same number of road traffic deaths" the process has gone off the rails despite the fact the outcome is the same because in one situation the facts have been acknowledged and the decision to act contrary to them made knowingly; while in the second situation that isn't the case.

Re: An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

#432

Post by WalterBright »

namelessoracle wrote: post #362
zozbot234 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't get a college degree without passing the College Algebra weedout course (let alone Calculus, which is required for the bulk of STEM courses), and you can only realistically pass College Algebra by getting a lot of rigorous math in K-12. Lowering the bar is doing every student a disservice, and the most vulnerable students will be the hardest hit.

You'd think that but there are work arounds. Yes pretty much every college requires "college algebra". But some schools have "college algebra for stem majors" vs "college algebra for non stem majors". Guess which one is easier, has lots of bonus credit and extra curricular stuff to earn extra credit. (You attended the college showing of "vagely related math movie?! Here's 10 points on your final!") And also grades on…

> pretty much every college requires "college algebra".

Caltech didn't. In fact, they expect you to know calculus before entering. I didn't, and that nearly capsized my college career before it left the dock.

Re: An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

#433

Post by rayiner »

fn-mote wrote: post #420
rayiner wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is a paper from her thesis work: http://math.coe.uga.edu/olive/EMAT6990Sp10/JRME1998-Jo_Boale... It’s mainly a qualitative analysis that wouldn’t pass for rigorous in any real scientific or engineering field.

I find this kind of shallow dismissal of a tenured Stanford professor's work based on their thesis unproductive. Engaging with their current, relevant work would be more appropriate. This is exactly what the GP is saying - many of us don't like the conclusions, but just blowing off a whole body of work in a sentence is pretty arrogant.

There’s tenured Stanford professors in many subjects, such as theology. I’m sure their work is impressive within the context of the field. But that doesn’t mean it’s rigorous or has real world application. PhD publications are supposed to be a serious contributions to the field. This particular work won a major award.

Stop it with the accusations of “arrogance” and naked credentialism. Any of the millions of people with an undergraduate STEM degree (mine is in aerospace engineering) learns enough about the scientific method to distinguish “rigorous” work from non-rigorous work. It’s actually kind of an important thing they try to teach.

Scientists and engineers who don’t call out non-rigorous work that claims the mantle of “expertise” are shirking their moral obligations and helping to erode the credibility of science as a larger discipline.

Re: An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

#434

Post by Lev1a »

Lev1a wrote: post #176
TulliusCicero wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deciding the future of your life in 4th grade (when students are evaluated in Bavaria, at least) is maybe not great. Was living in Munich for five years and I'm glad we left before our son got sorted. There's also a strong racial/class component to who gets into Hauptschule/Realschule/Gymnasium, surprise surprise.

Here in M-V I had to go through "Orientierungsstufe"¹ which I partly blame for my learning difficulties and anger issues later in school, since in those two years we later had to find out that we missed 1-1,5 years of material and/or learning methods depending on the subject. I mean... e.g. in Philosophy the teacher was absent for most of those two years resulting in us having to entertain ourselves for those "lesson…

Clarification (can't edit the above post anymore):

> our parents called in

should be

our parents were called in

Re: An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

#435

Post by paulcole »

Aunche wrote: post #297
paulcole wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blank slate - All humans are of equal ability This is generally true. People can find extreme examples that “disprove” this but they’re generally wrong. Most things people do aren’t that hard and people have the ability to learn to do them — they either choose a different path, have fewer choices, or just don’t care. And yes, before you ask, this includes computer programming.

>Most things people do aren’t that hard and people have the ability to learn to do them That's true, but it's the small minority of tasks that require real intelligence that often matter the most. A regular person can probably be trained to 95% the skill of an anesthesiologist just by following instructions, but then they would kill the patient during edge cases. The same thing applies to programming too. I had an in…

> A regular person can probably be trained to 95% the skill of an anesthesiologist just by following instructions, but then they would kill the patient during edge cases.

You’re making the mistake of assuming anesthesiologists are something other than regular people with training.

Re: An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

#436

Post by bendbro »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #419
300bps wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are quite literally billions of people that are richer, smarter, better looking and/or more physically able than I am. I'm glad for it. I would never want to bring anyone else down to meet me at my level on any metric.

It doesn’t bother you sometimes that some people starve while others hoard wealth that rivals the gdp of entire countries? I don’t want everyone to be the same, but unbridled disparity seems equally as bad to me… especially considering how arbitrary it can be.

Nobody should care about disparity, people should care about maximizing benefit for every American. I'm not saying it is easy to evaluate this, but it is obviously all we should care about. The existence of gazillionares is fine so long as individual wellbeing in this system is higher relative to other potential systems.

Re: An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

#437

Post by troupe »

hintymad wrote: post #400
troupe wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Books are a finite resource, but not really limited for any practical purposes at least in the US. Used books are inexpensive, libraries are readily available, most things out of copyright are available online, etc. Education is following as similar course. Things like MITs open courseware, edX, etc. are making it increasingly easy to get the educational content from top teachers regardless of how limited these teach…

Education content is definitely ample now, including text books and references. we even have great communities to get answers to our questions. Unfortunately the bottleneck of education just switched to access to good teachers. A good teacher inspires students, identifies exactly why each student has difficulty understanding something, explains intuitions behind the most difficult concepts, designs highly tailored ho…

I understand what you are saying, but I would argue that lack of access to teacher is less of a bottleneck than drive, desire, and motivation. A motivated individual is going to have no trouble finding what they need to learn and places to ask questions for things they don't understand.

I see where you are coming from on access to labs, chemicals, and equipment. But someone who has fully availed themselves of everything they can learn from free/inexpensive online classes, books, forums, emailing people, etc. is headed on a path where they have a high probability of getting access to those types of things once that is the only thing blocking their continued education.

Re: An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

#438

Post by WalterBright »

namelessoracle wrote: post #362
zozbot234 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't get a college degree without passing the College Algebra weedout course (let alone Calculus, which is required for the bulk of STEM courses), and you can only realistically pass College Algebra by getting a lot of rigorous math in K-12. Lowering the bar is doing every student a disservice, and the most vulnerable students will be the hardest hit.

You'd think that but there are work arounds. Yes pretty much every college requires "college algebra". But some schools have "college algebra for stem majors" vs "college algebra for non stem majors". Guess which one is easier, has lots of bonus credit and extra curricular stuff to earn extra credit. (You attended the college showing of "vagely related math movie?! Here's 10 points on your final!") And also grades on…

> Statistics for Sociology

An acquaintance asked me if she should take "Calculus for Artists" after I suggested she take a calculus course. I laughed, and said that such a course should be named "Pretend to Learn Calculus". She should take a real calculus course, which she did, and did well in it.

If you're in college, stick to the real math classes, not the "math for losers who are forced to take a math class". You'll be with other students who want to learn math, and you'll have a prof that wants to teach math (the loser math course has a prof who doesn't want to be there, either). It'll be a much more pleasant experience.

Hey, if I was running a college, I'd have the two track math system, too. That way the students who want to learn won't be bothered by the ones who don't.

Re: An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

#439

Post by majormajor »

rayiner wrote: post #184
kurthr wrote: post #27

From the original letter: While well-intentioned, we believe that many of the changes proposed by the CMF are deeply misguided and will disproportionately harm under-resourced students. Adopting them would result in a student population that is less prepared to succeed in STEM and other 4-year quantitative degrees in college. The CMF states that 'many students, parents, and teachers encourage acceleration beginning i…

> If it is well-intentioned, what was the intention... to dumb down math in high school? Bingo. It's well intentioned, but the intentions aren't to ensure that America can keep up with a rising China. It's shocking to me that people in California aren't more worried about this. About 15 years ago, I was talking to an engineer at Juniper/Cisco. We were joking about how Huawei had copied one of their router designs dow…

If we look at countries beyond the US and China... what are they surviving on?

Should math be a higher priority in the US? Should working hours in the US be the same as in China? Should the academic pressure on kids be as high in the US as in China?

The US is much smaller population-wise, would we actually need to try five times harder than China?

Is it not enough to compare today's high school overachievers with those of 20 years ago, all still fighting for the same universities but with all similarly-inflated resumes? Do we actually need to push them even further?

Do we instead want to be more like the European countries that currently put themselves under less pressure than the US?

Re: An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

#440

Post by majormajor »

cwkoss wrote: post #128
kurthr wrote: post #27

From the original letter: While well-intentioned, we believe that many of the changes proposed by the CMF are deeply misguided and will disproportionately harm under-resourced students. Adopting them would result in a student population that is less prepared to succeed in STEM and other 4-year quantitative degrees in college. The CMF states that 'many students, parents, and teachers encourage acceleration beginning i…

Is calculus an important highschool goal? I feel like I may have benefited more if that time was spent on statistical literacy than calculus. I encounter stats very often in my adult life, calculus style problems are rare and I don't remember the formulas offhand, so end up just looking up what I need.

I would've done better in college - and probably have a better understanding of calculus today - if I hadn't tested out of University-level Calc I due to AP credit. I didn't really know what I was doing in the high-school course.

But I was a slacker and that experience doesn't necessarily transfer.

And yes, I'd generally favor stats over calculus as an additional HS class; however, I am hesitant about discouraging the opportunity to take either.

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