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

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#491

Post by feoren » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 7:50 PM UTC

DSMan195276 wrote: post #411

currymj wrote: post #274

You can imagine the following perspective: - Most people don't need to learn calculus at all, and it's fine if the few weird students who do start when they get to college (maybe the advanced students can learn single-variable calculus in high school). - For pure signaling reasons, taking calculus in high school has become very important for college admissions. - In order to take calculus in high school, you need to…

You've gotten a whole lot of replies that seem to miss your point, but I'd say that I've experienced that exact thing - to get to Calc in your senior year you needed to have gotten on a very specific track of math courses back in middle school, and likely your parents needed to know about it to make sure you got in. Otherwise, what appeared to be a very inconsequential choice at middle school actually decided your en…

> it's a pretty common joke how virtually inapplicable calc is to us

If you think calculus is not important to software development than you are not bothering to look. Just a few examples:

- Calculus was the first math class I took that gave a clear definition of what a "function" really is. Do you use functions?

- Analyzing the properties of functions to see what operations made sense to do or not (e.g. continuous vs discontinuous).

- The concept of taking a function at various points and adding a small value to it to see how it changes is extremely important in sensitivity analysis and optimization.

- Anything involving non-uniform probability distributions, like sampling a random number from various distributions, requires understanding the relationship of PDFs and CDFs, which is one of derivative/definite integral. This means any form of realistic simulation, any estimations of time to failure, performance of anything, etc.

- Gradient descent and backpropagation in neural networks are completely opaque if you don't understand derivatives.

- Most games or simulations deal with rates of change.

- The concept of infinitesimals applies to finding tangents to curves, showing up in vector graphics all the time.

- Anything involving elevation in GIS, analysis of water flow, even topographic maps

I'm honestly sick and tired of seeing these crazy anti-learning comments like "I'm in software development and I literally never use calculus / linear algebra / type theory / lambda calculus / algorithms and data structures / boolean logic / binary trees / linked lists / stacks / queues / geometry / algebra / arithmetic" do use those things. What do you do all day, copy code from StackOverflow and hope it works? Don't discourage other people from learning just because you were too lazy: in fact that's literally what this entire post is about. You're part of the problem.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#492

Post by kneebonian » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 7:51 PM UTC

msravi wrote: post #389

wnc3141 wrote: post #46

A common phrase of the "soft bigotry of low expectations" is at work here. Those held to lower standards will fall to lower standards, deprived of the resources and support to achieve. The article attached provides a fantastic explanation. https://www.educationnext.org/teachers-should-replace-the-so...

From the article: > It does not matter if they grow up in foster care or a two-parent family. But it does! Very much. I just don't understand why the US tries everything other than fixing the most glaring cause. Lots of problems can be fixed by encouraging and aggrandizing stable two-parent families instead of getting schools and teachers to fill proxy parenting roles.

My mothers been an educator for many many years now. She says the single biggest factor is parental involvement.

But hey convincing both parents to be gone all day and slave away for the corporate masters was smashing the patriarchy and breaking the glass ceiling or something, and the fact that it doubled the labor pool causing supply to go up is entirely unrelated to the fact that wages started stagnating at the same point.

But really what use is a family anyway, I mean who needs that when you can have a "community" on a platform that is dedicated to "content" for you to "consume".

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#493

Post by alephnerd » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 7:52 PM UTC

cmh89 wrote: post #481

alephnerd wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think we present things like calculus as dryly as possible A lot of this is because the hiring pipeline has dried up. I went to a top hs here in the Bay Area and had teachers who were very knowledgeable and invested in STEM education. Because of extremely low salaries when factoring in CoL, a replacement pipeline hasn't formed. I had 4-5 of my classmates in HS end up majoring in STEM and minoring in Education at…

I have friends who are/were teachers. I can't imagine why anyone would subject themselves to that. Low pay, spoiled out of control children, their evn worse parents, active shooter drills/real active shooters, fucking TikTok. I wouldn't do that job if it paid double what I make now.

Hot take, but parents don't parent anymore.

I've seen antisocial behavior rise in both kids from well off backgrounds as well as from kids from less well off backgrounds. In both cases, the parents aren't an active participant in their kid's lives.

The kids (both rich and poor) with present parents always ended up well established and this was irrespective of race.

The only benefit that money had was it could open some doors if the kid f**ed up.

One of my acquaintance's HS going kid has an active drug problem and has ended up in in the drunk tank a couple times, but because my acquaintance is a white collar professional who can afford to live in a well off neighborhood, they can afford the legal fees. If this was some black kid in West Oakland or a Latino kid in East San Jose or a Vietnamese kid in Newark, they would have ended up in Jail/Juvie, lost critical learning time, and have no real options or safety net to fall on.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#494

Post by dsign » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 7:52 PM UTC

feoren wrote: post #462

AlanYx wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is my best guess about the line of thinking that motivates these "no advanced math" policies. You've explained the thought process of the "reformers" fairly well, but there is another additional element that's important as well: a sizeable contingent of people believe that advanced math itself is intrinsically bad or negative. Usually this is either because math is fundamentally exclusionary in some core way, o…

> the reason they're not all getting competitive scores with good shots at college is because advanced math (being intrinsically negative/evil) is ruining it I ... I don't understand. This is literally the craziest conspiracy theory I've ever heard. Here's the thing: if a shadow cabal of lizard-people were actually using space lasers to mind control everyone into thinking the Earth is round so we never discover their…

I don’t know. I have met plenty of people during my life who didn’t like math. Would they vote to remove Calculus from high school curriculums, if they believed it would level the playing field? Yes, and without blinking.

>> Such a plot may even make a decent movie.

A “plausible” one, yes. Incidentally, have you noted how movies don’t ever have any actual hard science, and they never require mathematical thinking on their viewership? The same can be said about fiction in general. I bet our culture-makers would vote in-masse to suppress math from whatever curriculum they could.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#495

Post by pwthornton » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 7:54 PM UTC

gwoplock wrote: post #427

kwhitefoot wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eight different classes in one day? How can that work?

When I was in high school, IIRC we did 55 minute classes with 5 minutes between classes, 4 core classes 2 or 3 electives + lunch. It doesn't work, by time you start, the class settles, late arrivals show up, homework is collected, questions asked and whatnot, there's probably only 30 mins of real instruction. Class would boil down to either teaching or worksheets but not both.

Yes, this is the rub, it's not very efficient. For deeper activities, block scheduling is radically superior. Hell gym is way better too!

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#496

Post by pwthornton » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 7:54 PM UTC

jdale27 wrote: post #451

cobbaut wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European here, I went to school from 8:20 till 16:05. You guys really have school starting at 10:00? Who takes care of the kids after parents go to work and before school starts?

No; the comment you replied to sounded like a suggestion, not a description of reality. In the US, it's common for schools to start at 8:00 or even 7:30. Recently there has been a push to start later to give kids more time to sleep. So pushing it back to say 8:30 or 9:00 (but not shortening the day, so basically everything just gets pushed back, and the kids stay up later, and need more time to sleep...).

My high school started somewhere around 7:22. I got up at 5:45 in high school. Just nuts. I get up for my joby job as an executive at 7:15.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#497

Post by kneebonian » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 7:55 PM UTC

gwoplock wrote: post #427

kwhitefoot wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eight different classes in one day? How can that work?

When I was in high school, IIRC we did 55 minute classes with 5 minutes between classes, 4 core classes 2 or 3 electives + lunch. It doesn't work, by time you start, the class settles, late arrivals show up, homework is collected, questions asked and whatnot, there's probably only 30 mins of real instruction. Class would boil down to either teaching or worksheets but not both.

So my school did block schedule of 90 minutes classes on alternating days. But I am wondering if 30 minutes of instruction is about right?

I mean a lot of evidence point to people having difficulty focusing on a single thing or learning for more than 20 minutes at a time? 30 minute bite-sized lessons might be perfect.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#498

Post by pjscott » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 8:00 PM UTC

downWidOutaFite wrote: post #191

This stuff seems so cartoonishly bad that I feel like I'm missing something. But I've been unable to find the progressive arguments. We need popular progressive bloggers to explain the other side.

The idea behind delaying algebra is that if you teach math more slowly, the people who do worst in math will be able to progress somewhat further because they have more time to drill and repeat things. Someone who would have received an F in algebra in 8th grade might be able to scrape a D+ if they spend a year preparing and then take it in 9th grade. Empirically, they did indeed see a greater percentage of people passing algebra when they delayed it by a year. Of course, they also saw fewer people taking AP Calculus, since the slower pace of education meant that fewer people had the prerequisites in time.

So the big question is, why make everybody take the slow track? Why not offer the option of 8th grade algebra to students who are ready for it? As far as I can tell from listening to advocates, it actually is the Harrison Bergeron thing, but with a twist: the achievement gaps that they're trying to narrow have strong correlations with race and class, which makes closing those gaps almost a sacred cause. And that typically is where the arguments stop, in much the way that a mathematical proof stops when you say "QED".

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#499

Post by glonq » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 8:03 PM UTC

proxiful-wash wrote: post #335

pwthornton wrote: post #299

This is the way. Teach kids more, not less. Ask more of them, not less. If you need to lengthen the school day and school year to do so, do it. Do it now. "So what should we do instead? Dallas came up with an answer: Teach kids more math instead of teaching them less. In 2019, Dallas Independent School District implemented a new equity policy that encouraged many more people to take honors math classes: Many capable…

It was you wonder if a foreign state adversary is influencing us to stupify our next generation. I'll keep my comments civil here but its pretty obvious who is behind this.

Well either the US is especially vulnerable to foreign sabotage or the US is especially vulnerable to self-sabotage.

I'll let others debate over which is worse.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#500

Post by Mountain_Skies » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 8:03 PM UTC

djbusby wrote: post #379

MostlyStable wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lengthen the school _year_ sure, but I'm skeptical that lengthening the school _day_ won't have, at best, mixed effects, especially given all the studies on sleep etc.

Start at 10am, go till 4pm?

Most school districts want to have students home before the evening rush "hour" starts. Mixing school buses and parent pickups with peak afternoon traffic is something they absolutely want to avoid.