California moves to recommend delaying algebra to 9th grade statewide • Hacker News Board

Re: California moves to recommend delaying algebra to 9th grade statewide

#651

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 3:23 PM UTC

Const-me wrote: post #512

todd8 wrote: post #496

Like many readers of HN, I've taken a lot of math over the years--at least 25 semester long courses at the university level. So I have well informed opinions about what works and what doesn't work for me ; schools, on the other hand, have to educate everyone. This, perhaps, accounts for the wide range of opinions being expressed here. I think that we can agree that the whatever they are doing in the United States isn…

> Why not pick, say, the top four countries, (recently South Korea, Japan, Switzerland, and the Netherlands) and adopt their methods that are working? The critically important part of their method is funding of schools being independent from wealth of the kids’ parents. I’m not sure US can adopt that; American voters view that method as communism.

[deleted]

Re: California moves to recommend delaying algebra to 9th grade statewide

#652

Post by csa » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 3:25 PM UTC

dkhenry wrote: post #472

csa wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many decades of the lived experiences of children in other countries disagrees with that research. Based on your reply, I’m fairly certain that you are not familiar with the research and your not familiar with what is actually happening in Eastern Europe, Kumon, etc. in relation to that research. As a professional in this area of research, I feel fairly qualified to say that I am. I am happy to agree to disagree ab…

I am glad that we can disagree, and I hope you would spend some time considering that while the research has progressed we have experienced a rapid decline in the subjective and objective quality of education. Just because I completely reject the ideas you may be involved with researching doesn't mean I am ignorant of them, I just haven't been convinced that they are based in reality.

> we have experienced a rapid decline in the subjective and objective quality of education.

Interestingly, on this we agree. That’s why throwing more bodies at the problem (your initial suggestion) is not a solution that I think would work. When a typical educator is asked why a certain teaching or learning method works, their answers tend to be both incorrect/incomplete and remarkably shallow (e.g., it worked for them when they were in school).

The research available points at multiple tried and true ways of learning, but getting these ways of learning implemented in households and in the public school system in the US is a Sisyphean task.

Re: California moves to recommend delaying algebra to 9th grade statewide

#653

Post by todd8 » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 3:26 PM UTC

Const-me wrote: post #512

todd8 wrote: post #496

Like many readers of HN, I've taken a lot of math over the years--at least 25 semester long courses at the university level. So I have well informed opinions about what works and what doesn't work for me ; schools, on the other hand, have to educate everyone. This, perhaps, accounts for the wide range of opinions being expressed here. I think that we can agree that the whatever they are doing in the United States isn…

> Why not pick, say, the top four countries, (recently South Korea, Japan, Switzerland, and the Netherlands) and adopt their methods that are working? The critically important part of their method is funding of schools being independent from wealth of the kids’ parents. I’m not sure US can adopt that; American voters view that method as communism.

For as long as it has existed, the USA has maintained separate categories of governance with limitations that ensure local and state control over certain areas.

The constitution makes clear (to me, but I'm not a constitutional scholar) that the federal government has specific enumerated responsibilities, everything else is up to the states and local governments. The benefit of this is it allows competition of ideas for governance between the states, which occasionally reveals alternatives that aren't always apparent. (For example, the disparate state wide regulations put in place to mitigate the impact of Covid. Why are the states doing things so differently?)

Unfortunately, there are big differences between schools across the country and the federal government has tried to get involved, despite the constitution. To work around the constitution the feds use now commonly employed methods like spreading federal tax money around to fund federally regulated programs in state and local school programs. It might be better if the country didn't have to be so indirect about it and could simply impose a uniform educational system, but this would require a titanic effort to overcome state's rights types of constitutional challenges.

Is it really just a money problem for schools? I don't think so. Baltimore public schools are notoriously bad, but spend well over the national average per pupil.

The Leander Independent School District is nearby to me. It is ranked 12th among 1,018 Texas school districts. It's an excellent school district. It has a 97% graduation rate and an average SAT score of 1230 while the Texas wide average is 1022. This school district spends $11,496 per pupil, which is below the national average of $12,239, see [1].

It seems that without spending more we could do much better by emulating the Leander Independent School District and ensuring that instead of $12,239 being the national average spending make it the national minimum spending per pupil. Parents willing to spend even more could still move those districts that spend twice as much per pupil, but we should strive to give all students the benefits of a school district like the Leander Independent School District.

[1] https://www.niche.com/k12/d/leander-independent-school-distr...

Re: California moves to recommend delaying algebra to 9th grade statewide

#654

Post by politician » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 3:29 PM UTC

ahartmetz wrote: post #635

zozbot234 wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are the pipeline of people that end up in practical and technical jobs e.g. doing machine maintenance in factories and so on. These jobs are going away in the near future. Nowadays the only people who work in factories are highly skilled engineers with complex e.g. CNC skills and a heavy math background.

How are you so sure about all that? I don't see which upcoming development would make machine setup, maintenance and repairs go away. It's exactly the stuff that computers are not good at. It's things that require high dexterity, improvisation, interaction with business functions etc - things that computers and robots are not good at. I have a personal corollary to the Dunning-Kruger effect: If you don't understand w…

Chesterton’s fence as applied to Dunning-Kruger? I love it!

Re: California moves to recommend delaying algebra to 9th grade statewide

#655

Post by CountDrewku » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 3:29 PM UTC

vanusa wrote: post #629

foxhop wrote: post #582

We have observed that physical distancing children hurt a lot of children. It was a sacrifical experiment to try to save the elderly and weak. When the virus leaked from the Wuhan laboratory and spread across the globe in a matter of months, we knew even then that children are not really at risk of dying from sars-cov-2. Seems like the correct course of action for the times is to take education out of the hands of go…

When the virus leaked from the Wuhan laboratory and spread across the globe in a matter of months, If this is what gets "taught" around the dinner table at home ... then in such a house, all STEM education will be moot.

All indications point to it coming from a laboratory even if they cannot pinpoint the exact one or 100% prove it. Statistically it's likely it came from the WUHAN lab, you know in the town it started. The correlation is too high to be ignored.

The NIH has been caught funding gain of function there.

So, sure go ahead and dismiss it as conspiracy but at this point you're the one sounding more like a conspiracy theorist by denying the ever growing evidence.

Re: California moves to recommend delaying algebra to 9th grade statewide

#656

Post by linuxftw » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 3:34 PM UTC

batter wrote: post #612

linuxftw wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. The purpose of public school is to provide a basic education. If you want to do more work, or your parents want you to study more, you're free to do so. In your very own example, you went to a private school and did well. That's great, that's what's supposed to happen. What's currently happening in public schools is that too many resources are being allocated to the over achievers and not en…

Except one thing - even if you're in private school you have to pay for both. For public via taxes and private from your own pocket. It sound more like double tax for smart kids - knowledge for rich only. And just to remind that school price can be on par with University.

The problem here is economic disparity. If people can't afford to send their children to the school of their choosing, then it's a signal wages are too low. This also applies to public schools, you can be the smartest kid in certain inner cities, and you're unlikely to do well compared to an average kid in a higher income area.

But even if we have unlimited funding for lower education, what's the purpose? The vast majority of society isn't fit for a traditional university education. And even if they are, the vast majority of university students go on to achieve what, exactly?

Sure, some kids might not be able to achieve their dreams, welcome to the club. Is the dream of a life being a scientist or some such any better than the dream of being a professional skier or race car driver? We're not robots, we're people. The obsession with academic excellence has to end.

Re: California moves to recommend delaying algebra to 9th grade statewide

#657

Post by mrep » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 3:40 PM UTC

ejstronge wrote: post #620

mrep wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are referencing property taxes funding schools, you should know that it actually only funds about half of total school funding. The other half comes from federal and state governments and the way they give out funding is to selectively counteract that misallocation such that 47 states actually allocate more per-student funding to poor areas than to wealthier ones and according to this article [0], it has been…

Just to be clear, the state-level effects don’t seem to counteract the local effects based on your link

I said state and federal: "Considering federal, state, and local funding, almost all states allocate more per-student funding to poor kids than to nonpoor kids, though only a few—Alaska, New Jersey, and Ohio—are highly progressive. A handful—Nevada, Wyoming, and Illinois—are weakly regressive, and the majority have a weakly progressive distribution of funding to poor versus nonpoor students."

Re: California moves to recommend delaying algebra to 9th grade statewide

#658

Post by dmitrygr » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 4:09 PM UTC

ryan93 wrote: post #268

holonomically wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This thread is full of some of the least empathetic people on the planet. Some people just struggle with stuff that others don’t.

I struggled with basketball in PE. The teacher said that maybe it just wasn't for me, and had me sit on the bench for the rest of the basketball unit. For some reason they didn’t force EVERYONE to sit for six weeks cause I couldn’t basketball. Now explain to me how math differs.

Re: California moves to recommend delaying algebra to 9th grade statewide

#659

Post by politician » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 4:13 PM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #479

smolder wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowledge/skill assessment is more complex than dictation. It's like a O(n) operation that necessarily looks at each student versus the O(log n) of dictating stuff to a class that asks some questions. The more evaluation and feedback are in the process, the more individualized it gets, the more burdensome and expensive it gets, generally. That's not to say we can't improve our teaching methods to automate some mechan…

Educational technology has existed for many decades now, built by academia and industry alike. It seems to largely have played a very minor role if even that in the successful advancement of the rate of educating children. If you think you have methods that could significantly improve that, you’d have a great impact on the world. I’d love to hear these bunch of ways.

I’ll bite.

Take a multimedia corpus, arrange the material for delivery via Spaced Repetition Learning (SRS) coupled with an active reinforcement learning system to gradually introduce and deepen understanding of topics that expand the learner’s challenge boundary.

Instead of teachers and fixed class sizes, allow students to self select into rooms based on noise level. Include a range of furniture from desks to couches. Any adults are only present to monitor for fighting or harassment and need no special training — they are certainly not to be responsible for lecturing or grading. Leave that to the machines. Perhaps direct students that have mastered material help students that have not.

Naturally and smoothly steer learners into vocational or academic studies based on their performance without social discontinuities like the German method.

One challenge with this approach would be how to organize appraisals of essays or long-form written content. Peer review might be one answer. There are, no doubt, many other challenges and criticisms. This scheme would dramatically upend the economics of education and make a large number of positions redundant.

Re: California moves to recommend delaying algebra to 9th grade statewide

#660

Post by TheGigaChad » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 4:30 PM UTC

jart wrote: post #370

uejfiweun wrote: post #191

Not from California, but I took algebra in 7th grade - it was the advanced math course in my public middle school. It was a much-welcomed safe haven from the other classes - the middle schoolers here were actually SMART. In that class I sat next to a guy who taught me how to program the TI-84. We would spend all class programming, making games, and just learning. Now, over a decade later, I am a professional software…

The fact that you were successful because the guy who sat next to you in class knew how to unlock the programming mode of your calculator is incidental. Why didn't your teacher do it? Congratulations on escaping the system that disadvantaged you. The best thing about programming is that it defines a notation for doing mathematics that doesn't trigger people who went to public schools. Be careful about calling yoursel…

Suck dick.