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Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

noahpinion.blog

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Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#741
post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the hell does pushing back on single-family homes look like? Christian fundamentalism? Think about this from a perspective of getting positive outcomes from the actual world that exists. Divorce happens. Unplanned pregnancy happens. Family planning is being actively dismantled by the same people who are pushing for increased privatization of schooling and decreases in social safety nets. I don't think that's a c…

> What the hell does pushing back on single-family homes look like? A previous poster spelled it out: > by encouraging and aggrandizing stable two-parent families instead of getting schools and teachers to fill proxy parenting roles You seem to be thinking of "pushing back" as some sort of attack upon single parents, when I believe that the original spirit of the comment was more along the lines of: Let's strive to s…

Your post is content-free, and it says much about the value of your thoughts. This is not a problem of emotions, except in that it's a useful tool for others to manipulate your emotions. The only effective solution would be to subsidize these relationships via taxes, ideally to the point where one partner can devote themselves to childcare. In this society, you want something, you pay for it. You should probably contemplate why this isn't being proposed by the people who are supposedly concerned about this problem, but I suspect you'll find an answer that lets you keep thinking that you're thinking, rather than being played like a fiddle.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly, good point: 2003 UCLA LAW Review: https://www.uclalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/15_... See first paragraph section C, page 11 (293) -- also citation, but didn't have time to link it here.

Fascinating. Thanks for sharing. While Calhoun comments seem crass, they have significant parallel in contemporary politics.

Yes which makes other contemporary politics topics (cf. Puerto Rico statehood as a lighter one) more enlightening.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#743

> Guess what? Children are educable. If you invest the resources of the state in poor kids and underrepresented minorities, they will learn. It is shocking to me that this has to be said. What in the world...

It does not need to be said. The article is just extremely biased.

More silent downvotes, congratulations HN.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL gnomic . Thanks! And if I knew whether or not it was nonsense, I wouldn't have prefaced the post with "I don't know." I was just suggesting that proxiful-wash's downvoted post wasn't completely out of the question. The priors are suspicious enough: might a country that attempted to get the world to believe that the US created the HIV virus [1], successfully influenced a razor's-edge Presidential election [2], and…

You're putting "plotted to" and "successfully" to a lot of work here, on behalf of claims your sources appear at great pains not to make or even imply. You seem to take this whole concept very seriously, so maybe you can help me understand why. Out of the idea that Russians are responsible for all of America's worst problems, what endgame do you see that actually improves our situation? What specific and relevant cha…

Out of the idea that Russians are responsible for all of America's worst problems

Translation: "A good-faith discussion is not going to happen, so let's hit the mud and see how dirty we can get."

I don't think so. Only one of us would enjoy it.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With that kind of thinking though we can reach logical results like: - writing prose and composition is unnecessary, as at best one will write on slack and social media; - doing pushups, calisthenics, or running is unnecessary: few jobs require that; - learning about how the government works, civics or sociology or psychology should be skipped: all these are taken care by the employer that is not going to let you go…

I don’t see how that is a logical conclusion. There’s such a thing as opportunity cost and interests. If someone wants to learn something, they should, but the problem is forcing those to learn something when they would rather learn something else. There are basic things that everyone should know, like reading. Instead of calculus, logic would be better, and especially probability and statistics.

Essentially what I am saying is suppose the politicians' reasoning, that @currymj suspects and offered above, and I agree with them is the likely one, was to be true.

Then the word calculus (and university admission perhaps with other goals in life) can be treated as variable(s). There is no inherent reason the set of deduction rules are dependent on the choice of topic. Let us denote the reasoning for brevity as a proposition p(s, g) with s\in Subjects g \in Goals:

Start substituting other subjects in there. Their reasoning goes that for an s \in Subjects to be in AcceptedSubjects \subset Subjects it must hold that:

p(s,g):=\(For the majority of students), \exists g \in Goals: p'(s,g). Where p(s,g) relaxes also the goal here -- doesn't have to be college admissions. Then start adding art, debates, writing and other topics I mentioned.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probability and stats requires calculus

It doesn’t, especially at the introductory level. Sure, at a certain point, it would be needed, but that would be for someone wanting to become a statistician, not the general population.

To be fair to the above poster: probability and statistics definitely does need calculus and other math beyond an introductory level. And you see that gap when you read social sciences work applying statistics and making rudimentary, and requiring insight otherwise, mistakes.

Beyond introductory level both probability and statistics have a lot of "counterintuitive" pre-probability and statistics results, that also explain a lot of the misconceptions the public faces in not understanding the notions.

Probability and statistics are topics that our democracies would be better of if people understood them: then they would understand perhaps topics like polling, and we wouldn't perhaps have misuse of the topics in Court like Sally Clark's case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Clark

[But I guess we would have to drop lotteries as a taxation system also. [/s]]

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#747
post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one has ever incentivized single parenthood. We offered protection for children born into difficult circumstances not of their making.

There’s 0 evidence of that. What has happened is the lower class family structure has been decimated as generation after generation of mother becomes a client of the state and dads aren’t around because they aren’t actually needed. The kids have not benefited from this (there’s no metric that shows this and in fact the achievement gap has widened and prison outcomes are increased for lower class kids) and in fact are…

You're telling me there's zero evidence of my claim and yet you are going deeper down the hole of thoroughly disproven theories. Child poverty numbers in the US were the best ever recorded just prior to the pandemic and you can draw very direct lines from government anti-poverty programs as being a major contributing factor.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/09/record-drop-i...

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The birth rate (especially the teenage birth rate) has been dropping for the last 20 years. But sure, it's hookup culture that's causing single parent households, and not an evolution of how people of child-rearing age think about marriage, or that the changing shape of the economy means that marriage-as-a-mainly-financial-arrangement is dying a long-overdue death. It's definitely not that legalizing so-called no-fau…

Dropping birth rate is not a problem at all, Europe Scandinavia Australia has dropping birth rate but much better social situation. The rest of your argument is incoherent and does not have a point, so I dont event understand what is it about. Overpolicing is a myth, because cops are policing where crime actually happens. Doesnt make sense for police to patrol law abiding medium/high class neighborhoods if crime does…

Ok, I'll clarify:

Your claim is that "hook up culture" is causing all these kids to grow up single-parent households. This flies in the face of all kinds of studies that show that, starting with millenials, kids are waiting longer to have sex, and are having fewer partners than e.g. baby boomers. At the same time, young adults are waiting longer to get married than baby boomers, are getting married less often, and once married are getting divorced at a lower rate than their parents generation. They're also having fewer children.

And yet, the number of unwed mothers has steadily risen in the past 50 years, only plateauing in the last 10 or 15 (at or about the time "hookup culture" became a thing that people clutched their pearls over). Why is that? I hypothesized, in my post, that there's an "(1) evolution of how people of child-rearing age think about marriage, or that (2) the changing shape of the economy means that marriage-as-a-mainly-financial-arrangement is dying a long-overdue death. (3) It's definitely not that legalizing so-called no-fault divorces allows women (especially mothers) to escape abusive situations that are, for one reason or another, impossible to prosecute as such"

So let's break those down. Point 1 is sort of indisputable. Young people are waiting longer to get married (but also getting divorced less). Clearly, people are being more careful in who they choose to settle down with, including who they have children with.

Point 2 I claim is driven by the fact that single women are no longer obliged to treat their job as a match-making opportunity. Women make enough in the job market, and have enough jobs available to them, to not enter into marriages strictly as financial partnerships, that carry the obligation of sex and child rearing.

Point 3 is subtler, but also the main reason why just discouraging divorce will, I believe, actually lead to worse outcomes for children. Thanks to the various advances in women's rights over the last 100 years, a woman can actually get a divorce from an abusive spouse, without requiring police cooperation. This is huge. We are on a downward trend for domestic abuse, and a lot of that is because an abused partner can actually leave (and why you saw a spike in domestic violence during the COVID lockdowns) without the police getting involved. So the options are "have a single parent", or "grow up in an abusive household". Given how frequently abusers are themselves victims of prior abuse, I'd argue that growing up in a single-parent household is, ultimately, the lesser of two evils.

Speaking of police and their ability to choose not to make an arrest for a given event, there's my point about over-policing low-income communities. A person from a high-income community can get busted over 1.01 ounces of weed, post bail, and be back to work the next morning, then plea it down or have the charges dismissed, provided the police even stop them to begin with or think that an arrest is worthwhile. Meanwhile, a person from a low-income community has no choice but to take the months or years of jail time, for the same charge. And since we say "put police where the crime is", the police are themselves more likely to stop a "suspicious" person, and arrest them, because the police think there's more crime there too, and "going easy on them will just encourage them". All of this adds up to parents ending up in jail when they should be raising their kids, on charges that other people aren't even held for.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#749
post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry. DEI programs have this covered as well. Stop using standardized tests to get in. And then just aim for the perfect "socially desirable" mix. Regardless of ability.

The amount of equity a society enforces should be inversely proportional to age. If a kindergartener is unable to succeed, we need to give them extra help. If a 45 year old is unable to succeed, they had their chances and it's their fault.

Plenty of kids are just stupid.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

who is going to fund that? it's not just education its subsidized day care, and "it gets done when it gets done" is going to either result in a lot of 20 year old Seniors -- who are still on taxpayer funded schooling -- or else the bar gets lowered to push these kids through fast albeit at their own fast pace.

And how is your worst case scenario worse? Because the bar is already as low as it will go and instead of just leaving some behind we are actively holding a whole bunch back. I could have graduated by 12 if they just let me go at the material, instead they had me drop out, in frustration at being forced to work at the pace of the stupidest and laziest, before returning to do exactly what I describe through an alterna…

I'm not sure I agree with your solution but I agree with he problem. No child left behind is idiotic. Some kids are just stupid, put them to work digging ditches or something. No point wasting a ton of manpower and stuff trying to teach them basic algebra, they'll never use it for anything anyway.
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