My sympathies to those poor students for having to study all that bullshit before graduation. I hated history in high school as well.
For what it's worth a lot of curricula include a "world history" already, so I'm unsure what exactly they added.
[1]: https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
It is notable that in a long multi-part document concerning racial justice, there is exactly zero mention of "Asian" but bountiful discussion on white nationalist ideology in math.
The document has only vauge allusions to specific problems that connect to racial bias. One they list is that the linearity of math education means that failing one course may prevent you from taking the next, even if the topics are not connected. Sure, this is probably true... but it's a problem for students of all races.
The document includes a note to highlight the stories of queer and non-white mathematicians. But, in my entire public school education, I don't recall a /single/ mention of any mathematician at all. Math was not "personified" in any way that I can remember.
Really, it's hard to even understand what the document is proposing, beyond that teachers should be aware that they might somehow be promoting white supremacy in their math class. ??
If that's white supremacy then I hope all the white supremacist bridges are clearly labeled so I can be sure to use them and not the ones that were designed with "ethnomathematics"
Seems fine to me. I always had trouble with word problems because the scenarios were, with rare exceptions, completely unrelatable.
>> "Though math teachers often tout the phrase “mistakes are expected, respected, inspected, and corrected,” their practices don’t always align. Teachers often treat mistakes as problems by equating them with wrongness, rather than treating them as opportunities for learning—which reinforces the ideas of perfectionism (that students shouldn’t make mistakes) and paternalism (teachers or other experts can and should correct mistakes)"
This seems like a reasonable recommendation! I was mocked and insulted by teachers for getting things wrong. It did not in any way encourage learning.
Can you give some examples? What wasn't relatable, and what would make them more relatable to you? The only "word problems" I really remember are the "bob has 10 apples and gives alice 4" type, because most math problems became "word problems" as the math got more complex.
Define "modern needs." My understanding is that American math education has long been affected by a tug-of-war between...
1) people (usually focused on K-12 education) who want to dumb it down to meet the needs of "modern day to day life" (e.g. algebra isn't important because common people don't use it every day), and...
2) people (usually focused on post K-12 activities at elite levels), who want to make it rigorous, because strong math skills are fundamental for high-level achievement in engineering and science.
In America, #1 seems to be the dominant outlook unless there's some national competitive threat (e.g. the Soviets beating the US in the space race).
Would those be the needs of the Eloi? Math remains the underpinning of everything that enhances life in the modern world. Blissfully regarding it with disdain doesn't change that.
This is false on many levels. Th concept of industrial-style tracked education is generally falling out of favor and being displaced by individualized curriculum adaptation with ad hoc, temporary, subject-specific shared learning groups of similar ability, and in math particularly there has been a recent and controversial change both implementing that change in methods and a change in focus for advanced learning toward deeper concept mastery rather than rushing through more concepts. Which certainly can be (and on HN has been, though people want to seem to rehash it in this thread with no new arguments) its own debate, but is not deleting material and then adding this.
It throws all the onus on teachers who have 20+ kids to teach to the basic state standards. They can't possibly develop and oversee individual sub-curricula for different levels in each subject. They do their best, but it's just not possible for them to dedicate more than a tiny fraction of their time to special instruction for advanced students.
My experience as a student under the former regine and parent of a very-high-proficiency student under the latter (because he is in a charter school that does this even though it isn't yet a state standard) is that the new model works quite a bit better.
This is also confirmed by the results of comparative before and after study of places that have switched from the old model to the new model, which is the motivation for making the new model a standard.
I'm not sure what you can learn from looking at charter schools, as long as they remain exceptional and outside the main system. There is a charter school in our district that effectively is a gifted school - it is explicitly a college prep school.
The Equitable Math proposal is not this at all. All children are required to be on the same level.
It is exactly this minus ad hoc grouping, which is the least important and most subject-variable part. It explicitly and repeadtedly calls out the need for individualized opportunity, support, and expectations throughout, and explicitly cites as motivation concrete experience combining de-tracking with differentiated work and open-ended exploration improving performance outcomes for both more and less proficient students.
I don't know if people criticizing it aren't reading it, or if the parts that depart from the industrial-style one-size-fits-all in predefined groups model are so foreign to some people that they are literally incapable of incorporating them into their mental model of the framework despite them being explicit in the text.
The ability to jump forward into Calculus is about an individual child's capability to do Calculus. The ability to jump forward in math is the opposite of one size fits all.