California tries to close the gap in math, but sets off a backlash
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I am pretty sure I would have become a delinquent without it. I still flunked out of high school when I was 17 but I kept going as long as I did because the teachers were interesting and the coursework challenging (even if I never did much of it). Not all intelligent kids are studious by nature.
I would never put my children to any USA public school, private or entirely outside the USA.
How do you suggest I proceed to find which private school are actually better and not just religion oriented?
Religion for the schools I went too weren't that enforced, but I would say ask other parents, there should be a good tour of the school included, and then check out the clubs they offer.
"Better" though, is hard. I would just review how they teach STEM - interview the teachers with open ended questions and see how they respond.
One big PLUS though is the networking, private school, the peers/kids are usually from "better*" (for lack of a better word.) off families so that could mean better success, even if religious.
It's hard to quantify it, but the friends I made from my private school days helped me tremendously learn so many different things - how life is different for the truly well off, to community, and "success".
It sounds odd writing it like this, but in the USA many kids in school are there because it is compulsory and it is not a profit center, it is a cost center, bigger classrooms per teacher, smaller campuses, food not healthy, and draconian rules like no water bottles in class or other.
Of course it does depend per school, but those pain points about public school, can be taken to see if you can find a proper private school.
And if you do, I would get the most of your dollar and do the parent events too - meet the other parents and strike bonds that may really last your childs lifetime.
Education is another one. Private school teachers are usually very well qualified. I would ask what kind of professionals they have on site. I.e. there should be at least one person specifically versed in childhood development, preferably several. It's not uncommon for them to have dual degrees in childhood development, and teaching in some specific field.
I was a student in largely remedial classes at my initial kindergarten/elementary school, regularly suspended and sent to detention for misbehavior, usually being distracted in class, and for years the school pressured my parents to apply heavy medication.
just before middle school I was finally kicked out, but this ended up being the single best thing to happen to me, as I ended up at a school that had a gifted program.
Within the first few weeks my math teacher had contacted my parents about it (entertainingly, this was her response to my being distracted in her class rather than just suspending me, I'm forever grateful to her for this.) and I was rapidly moved into a different track.
It is not exaggeration to say this likely saved my life. I was bullied HEAVILY as the new and nerdy kid who was literally always reading a book, and had a ton of trouble fitting in, and this gave me something that I felt competent at, a place away from the normal class behavior that involved far more fights than learning, as well as friends and a path forward. I say this final part not to brag but to be clear about where this ended up: I graduated a national merit finalist and went to an ivy and then into research.
The efforts to gut gifted programs makes the pit of my stomach drop, and I have no skin in the game. It makes me think of where I'd have been without that outlet, and what students in the future will not have access to, and it makes me truly sad.
It does all this by pretending math needs to change, when there are a million other things we could fix in bad schools to make all students perform better at math.
If you expect less from people, they will meet that mark. If you expect more from people they will rise to the challenge
150 years ago most people in America were not literate. Now it's expected so they are
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> According to data from the Education Department, calculus is not even offered in most schools that serve a large number of Black and Latino students. Expecting but then not providing opportunity to learn isn’t a great model.
And, this problem is not universal for all people attending those schools. The fact that Black and Latino folks are statistically more impacted is important, yet not necessary for wishing to improve.
Those school also have student that are not black and latino.
There are 2 distinct problems:
1- School in poor neighborhood don’t offer calculus
2- Poor neighborhood have more Black and latino.
Changing math for everyone or reserving spot for black and latino in university is not the solution it will just make the USA less educated compared to other country.
there is only one real solution are:
1- Make sure school in poor neighborhood have enough funding to offer calculus
2- Stop telling minorities they are not smart enough and couldn’t succeed if they tried.
Asian parent know kids are smart enough to learn math and just need to work hard! that’s why they send kid to tutoring school. And that’s why asian are good at school even if they are a minority
It’s frankly ridiculous
Also, who is telling minorities that they aren’t smart enough? The argument made is that, despite their aptitude, they are not given the opportunities.
And again, this is indeed relevant regardless of race and should be a concern even if the schools disproportionately impacted weren’t minority majority.
All that said, I think your point about funding is the bigger issue. Even if this change happens, how will these schools suddenly be able to offer stats when they couldn’t offer calc?
if student have bad teacher in algebra class they can’t reach the level needed for calculus. And if not enough student are good enough to take calculus the school simply decide to cut it.
For all the flaws and wishful thinking that I can see in her politics, infantilising and disempowering those she goes on protest marches to help is not among them. She absolutely keeps quiet and listens to anyone having a bad time — proper active listening — even though when she does speak up for them her voice is exactly the stereotype of extreme volume and energy the rest of the world has for Americans in general.
Most recently this was seen with the organizer of the Netflix walkout, who has a history of racist tweets, primarily anti Asian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7wMZ_R_anw
It is a tragedy to see such fundamentally inhuman philosophy take root. This approach cannot remedy anything at all.
https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
I found it notable that in a lengthy multi-part document about white supremacy in math, there is zero mention of the word "Asian" despite that Asians are about 15% of California's population.
And the society will be morally panicking about something else, because this seems to be a generic weakness in human nature, not amenable to learning.
Overall, if true, the weak showing of the US seems to be in large part a matter of motivation and persistence than what we’d traditionally call math ability (so maybe we need to change our thinking to include grit to stick it out as part of the math curriculum).
Paper on the topic: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w24004/w240...
> Offering incentives to U.S. students, who generally perform poorly on assessments, improved performance substantially. In contrast, Shanghai students, who are top performers on assessments, were not affected by incentives.
That's pretty interesting. What's with US students and motivation?
Worth considering before social factors come into play, as large countries have a lot of variance. Not saying motivation isn't also an issue, but there are lots of motivated kids and great schools in the US if you know where to look.
https://www.the74million.org/article/schneider-the-strange-c...
Perhaps what rubs me the wrong way about that phrase in particular is it seems to imply that education is not only necessary but sufficient for success. A common anti-pattern I’ve seen in young adults is finishing 20 years of schooling, entering the real world, and saying “Wait, now what?”
Emphasis on persistence in drudgery is already deeply ingrained in our educational system, because it fits well with our cultural predisposition and moral framework, and is a big part of why our educational system ranks where it does, because it doesn't actually work.
You don't motivate students by training them to endure nonmotivating instructional methods.
Its funny how people think evidence that motivation matters means we should try to change students to be motivated rather than change instructional approach to be motivating.
What makes you think students don't have a good idea of their own situation? They know best what they want, they know best how miserable it actually makes them to keep grinding though failure vs. the potential payoffs.
Which isn't to say that they're right about it, individually. But on average they probably make better decisions in their circumstances, than someone else would make for them.
You can't teach grit. You can at best preach it.
It's about values, not skill. Maybe it's possible to value persistence as a good in itself, even if you're less than idealistic about the goal. But then that is not something to be taught as a skill, but something to be preached as a value, by someone who believes it and lives it.
I just think, we can't be agnostic about what success is, what the goal is.
I don't think "grit" really is a thing - if we both believed in the same things, shared the same ideas about what's important and valuable, I think we would be equally capable of the "sticking to it" part of it.
But changing the way we teach won't help, because bringing people around to your set of values - whether it's convincing them that math has inherent beauty, or merely that mastering it is a great way to a lot of awesome material comforts - that isn't really teaching. It's preaching. It has to come from someone who believes it, and lives it - and is sufficiently similar to his students (or congregation!) that they can imagine themselves living it too.
Yes, but that motivation (or lack thereof) is symptom of more fundamental differences.
Americans do well on PISA compared to their ethnic relatives (<https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-sco...>) Asian Americans do better than Asians; whites do better than Europeans; Latinos do better than Latin Americans; and blacks do better than Africans.
Hispanics and especially blacks' scores drag the US average down. Both white and Asian Americans score higher than Canada (and white+Asian is essentially Canada's racial makeup), and higher than New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Norway, and the UK; Estonia is below US Asians but above white Americans. Norway is by far the wealthiest Nordic state but its average is only two points higher than the US national average, despite not having a demographic that is 13% of the population and scores 85 points below the white American average.
I could see an argument that there aren't significantly high numbers of genetically gifted children. However, I don't think you can make that argument without recognizing the fact that children's home lives and home cultures have enormous impact on their potential, effects you can't undue with special teacher guidelines. The child who goes home and spends four hours studying quietly is going to demolish in every academic way the child who goes home and listens to his parents cursing at each other and the child who goes home and watches TV for four hours.
If that isn't "naturally gifted" I don't know what is. I definitely watched other students struggle to maintain a B average with lots of studying and effort.
I suffered in other subjects, and others excelled at them with little effort. They were the naturally gifted ones there.
It was a constant source of stress to me that they would treat everyone the same when it came to those subjects, to the point that in 6th grade, when reviewing multiplication tables that I'd learned years before, I refused to do my homework. I ended up with an F that semester in math because I was so good at it. Luckily they moved on to harder subjects in the next semester and my grades returned.
If you are morally outraged by accelerated classes because they don't have your preferred racial mix, then that's fine, but understand it means that the faster students have their potential held back. If that's an acceptable price for equality of outcomes, then at least say that and don't pretend that somehow you can have your cake and eat it -- that faster students benefit from being taught slower paced material, and that well-behaved students benefit from being in a class with disruptive students, or that math education is improved when calculus and other challenging topics are removed. That's just doublespeak. Have whatever values you want to have, but don't fool yourself into thinking there isn't a price, and that faster or well-behaved students aren't the ones paying the price.
What will happen is that wealthy students will pay for extra tutors or private school, and we will be back to a less meritocratic system in which you need to be both rich and smart in order to get the good education, as the state is now focused on making sure the best students don't learn too much to upset the ideals of "equality".
This the logical endgame for a state that believes Harrison Bergeron is a utopian work.
I think dismissing the whole concept out of hand is just as dogmatic as the caricatured liberal views you seem to have assumed I hold. There are education systems in the world, like in East Asia, that follow these principles, so I think they are worth exploring. This is a weakly held position for me.
This is not the result of accelerated classes, it's the lack of accelerated classes. Really it's the result of insufficient sorting. If we had good sorting, we'd be routing half our kids into trade schools where they learn useful skills, and route the other half of our kids into real college prep high schools where the slow track would do calculus and the fast track would do differential equations.
But instead, we send everyone to the same school, pretend that everyone should go to college, and then slow things down so that the slowest student in the room sets the pace. Then we don't remove disruptive students, hire social crusading teachers who themselves don't have a passion for the subjects they teach, and end up with our current outcomes. Most US high school teachers wouldn't even be qualified to teach at a gymnasium in Europe because even our standards for teachers are so low.
Yes, you have to do heroics to learn anything in a U.S. school. The solution to that is not to do more of the same that got us here. The U.S. used to have high schools with college-preparatory ("prep") emphasis that existed side by side with vocational high schools where you could learn a useful trade. High schools even used to have entrance exams. We've fallen a long way in the name of pretending everyone is equal - just in the last 60 years - and the end result is that we have a shortage of both skilled tradesmen and skilled engineers - now we need to import both, and immigrants come from all over the world and earn much higher salaries than the native born because they got a better education.
For example many systems in Europe still do good sorting, managing to give a good education to both fast and slow students by sending one to a gymnasium and the other to a vocational school, and the result is high paying careers for both.
So what's happening in California is merely the continuation of dumbing things down in the name of equality, an ideological process that has been happening for many decades, but taking it to such a level of absurdity and doublespeak that more people are starting to recognize how foolish it all is.
I mean that's also a world in which the humanities don't seem to exist at all.
I would pin this on widening income/wealth gaps, family problems at home, cultural differences, and other non advanced class related reasons. I dismiss the concept because I think trying to attack a problem not at the root is a waste of time, and in this case, actually harmful.
The big elephant in the room with all these problems is wealth and power redistribution, but that is untouchable so efforts are redirected to things like this.
In this case, holding everyone to a higher standard specifically means disallowing children from taking Calculus even if they are ready, and de-emphasizing Algebra in middle school.
In school (elementary school especially), I'd finish tests and other work well before other students, would be bored as they asked questions with "easy" answers, etc.
When I got to college, I had zero healthy study habits, and got a good six months of getting my ass kicked until I sorted things out. It wasn't until then that I actually felt challenged and engaged. Until then, I expected to get As and didn't have to work for it. Once in college, where I was challenged, EARNING As was so satisfying. I still remember the feeling of accomplishment of getting As in two chemistry classes, which was a subject I didn't like and I had to work HARD for those grades.
It seems so obviously self-refuting that I can't believe people use it without irony.
Can anyone name anyone who is naturally gifted at anything that didn't get taught and learn a million different things (not all of which they were good at) in order to get to the point where they could display their "natural gift"?
I say we take anyone's kid who they claim is naturally gifted and dump them on a deserted island shortly after birth and we'll see exactly how well they get on with their natural gifts. Maybe we'll come back in 16 years and they'll be doing calculus, speaking three languages fluently and playing the saxophone, but I doubt it.
After all, we wouldn't want them held back by the decades of parental care and schooling that we give to the normies who need to like, learn stuff from books and be fed for years and other such crutches for the feeble-minded lesser beings.
Yes, obviously in order to make an apple pie you must first create the universe. In order to be gifted you must first be born, have a basic level of food and shelter, be mostly free of disease and so on. That's not a relevant point of discussion here. We're discussing a case where all things are equal.
"But all things aren't equal!" You scream. "Those evil white people grew up in the lap of luxury while the poor, repressed minorities had a life of scraping, miserable poverty!"
First, this isn't always true. There are poor white people and middle-class (or even rich) minorities, and to suggest that every minority is hopelessly disadvantaged because they all grew up in the ghetto is its own kind of racism. But second, this is a separate discussion. To answer the question "Are some people naturally gifted?" you have to adjust the other variables to equal first in order to tease out the answer to that specific question. Having discovered that yes, indeed they are, you can then conclude that this CONTINUES TO BE THE CASE in situations where "privilege" is not equal. The fact that some people are handicapped or helped by their economic or racial background does not magically erase the fact that they are ALSO helped or held back by their innate intelligence, and tendency to understand or not understand specific concepts.
Some people are smarter than other people, in a way that has nothing to do with economics or racism, but is purely biological luck. In direct contradiction to your assertion, THIS is self-evident, in the same way that "Things fall to the earth when dropped". and "Eventually, everyone dies" are. To deny this is to deny basic, readily-observable and reproducible reality, in a way that suggests either disingenuousness or mental illness.
Everyone is not equal, never has been, and never will be. It is an inherent property of the randomness of nature that some members of a species end up with abilities superior to others, completely independent of economics, race, social class, or any other human construction. Stop pushing this inane Harrison Bergeron gibberish.
No, we're not.
Dude it's high school math not spring boot.
Some kids have some types of intelligence better than others.
If some part of intelligence was not intrinsic, we could be teaching calculus to rabbits.
If you throw a naturally gifted child into a volcano, or abandon it on a deserted island, sure, it will die. Therefore, no gifted kids, QED. But the standard assumption is that the gifted kids grow up in normal environment (and the fish swim in non-boiling water), and then do better in math that average kids growing up in the same kind of normal environment.
The argument is "different outputs for the same input", not "excellent output for any kind of input".
School definitely can (and should) be improved, including math education. But instead of making everyone equally good at math, the optimal kind of math education would make everyone better at math, and the gifted kids even more better.
And then a fish says, maybe they're not naturally gifted, but just not poached, and everyone suddenly starts talking very specifically about fish in some alternate world that all share the same water. "What, are you saying there's no biological differences between fish, what kind of nonsense is this? If we explicitly assume there's no other factor involved then what is left but raw natural intelligence?" as if they're trying to miss the point intentionally.
I learned from a pretty early age that solving long equations with a pencil and paper is simply something my mind is never going to be good at. I hated every minute of it, and it was a huge source of anxiety for me and my parents. My mom, a house cleaner at the time, managed to muster the money to get me a tutor, which got me through high school and into college.
Fast forward 15 years and my relationship with math couldn’t be any different. In the context of my career where math has a practical purpose and I no longer have an artificially imposed requirement to memorize, I actually have quite a bit of use for and natural curiosity around math.
I’m not saying that my experience means that math education should change dramatically for everyone, but it certainly fails a wide swath of people like me. Their math education is traumatic, that they are “bad at math” is reinforced into their brains by the educational system, and they live the rest of their lives avoiding it. (I’m married to someone like this!)
I’m just glad that I was able to see how math as it is experienced in the classroom is pretty dramatically different from the way it is used in the professional world, and that I’m only bad at the former, not the latter.
But really what I'd like to see is math taught in a far more granular way. Weekly chunks that were pass/no-pass. If you didn't get it, repeat the week. If you got it, progress to the next week.
If you have _n_ weeks of math done, great, you get a HS diploma. If you have _m_, you have a minor, etc.
And I'm saying "math", but that could be broken down into subspecialities. You don't qualify for precalc week 1 until you've reached Trig Week 12 and Geometry Week 8, or whatever.
Weeks could be "challenged", as well, if you were able to skip ahead.
And there'd be no need for a gifted program. (Such programs--I was in one--always sat the wrong way with me. Like it was an artifact of bad structural design of the education system.)
Anyway, that's what I'd do if I were king. In fact, I'd change every subject to use this model. (HT Kahn Academy and their flipped-classroom work.)
Flipped classroom = instructional approach in which "lectures" are pre-recorded and watched by students and home, while class time is used for discussions and solving problems (individually or in groups).
The term flipped is used because what you do "homework" in class, and watch "class lectures" at home.
I really like your proposal! (And not just for math; any subject could be taught this way.) Problem is, if everyone advances in a different way, it is no longer possible to have 20-30 kids in the classroom listening to the same lecture. Because one of them is today at week 1, another at week 2, etc. So now you need to learn from books or computer.
> And there'd be no need for a gifted program.
We would need some bonus "weeks" that are not meant for the average student, but the matematically gifted students could take them.
First, students should be able to take "weeks" typically meant for older students, even if that meant that gifted kids at elementary school would take lessons meant for high school students. Second, there could be alternative lessons exploring the topic in greater depth, or exploring connections between various topics. Third, there could be optional lessons with topics that are normally not taught at all.
All three of these should be available, not just the first one (although even that would be way better than nothing, which is what we have now). To give an example of a deeper lesson, while average students learn e.g. that binary numbers exist, and maybe learn to convert from decimal to binary and vice versa, gifted students could also learn to do addition and multiplication directly in binary. An example of a topic typically not taught could be set theory, or game theory.
Or, since I'm King, I propose we hire enough well-paid teachers to cover our needs.
But actually in the inverted classroom model, you have video lesson "homework" (what we think of as the lecture) and then the students come to class to do exercises. The teacher becomes more of a tutor. So one teacher could still cover students within a few weeks of each other.
And I definitely like the idea of a week having the minimum work and a pile of bonus work for the over achievers.
For me it's clearly at home. My dad loved math and statistics, taught me concepts from a young age and a generation on I try to pass that on to my children. Given their aptitude and results it seems to work. I don't much believe that "some people just can't grok math" other than a basic correlation with IQ. I think we don't lay the foundation right for kids struggling with math since they have to follow or be dragged along a median path.
If mathematical enthousiasm is mostly developed at home, do American parents have or take less time to give kids that enthousiasm?
My kids get extra schooling in math in school (K-12 is the US equivalent), a few hours a week with a dedicated teacher for those hours. Okay, that teacher doesn't really grok math (gives the answers to the really hard questions, with 9 years olds ;), but the extra sessions with the peers combined with attention at home give good results on standardized tests plus exactly that enthousiasm that I'm hoping for.
I am going to say something controversial when we see the the success of former soviet countries in Maths and the lack of success in central Europe and North America, despite the resources, to me, there appears to be a difference in how schooling handles suffering/frustration in those cultures.
What I mean is that often the process of learning maths needs frustration and sometimes feeling overwhelmed and you have to stay with it, until your brain re-organizes and things click.
In most western cultures there is a general sense that all learning should be fun and interesting and that children should be sheltered from frustration. I agree with it for the most part as a general principle, but I don't believe that works with the re-wiring needed to _understand_ topics in mathematics.
I agree with what you wrote, but there is yet another part of the puzzle, various extracurricular educational activities. Things like the International Mathematical Olympiad, which during its first two decades was mostly an Eastern Bloc thing; or the Russian popular-science magazine for kids, Kvant.
I suspect that these extracurricular activities were more responsible for the peak math performance in former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe that whatever was happening at schools. Mere school knowledge was never enough to win the math olympiad.
Going further, the reason why so much energy was spent in this direction, was that mathematics and physics were the only sciences that you could do in former soviet countries without risk of accidentally saying something politically incorrect and bringing doom on yourself and your family. (As far as I know, there was nothing in math comparable to e.g. Lysenkoism in biology. And humanities were pure ideology.) The smart people couldn't become entrepreneurs anyway, so many of them enjoyed teaching math and physics; it provided them a parallel universe they could escape to.
I liked math because it was easy. And then I continued to like math because it continued to be easy. Then at a phd level and you had to write papers and do other tedious things etc, I realized I didn't care that much and learned programming instead.
I did pretty bad in primary school, mostly because I never did/turned in any of the homework. Whenever we took tests, I did well, but enough of my grade depended on homework assignments that my test scores didn't make up the difference. I always did well on the standardized aptitude tests (back then it was the CTBS tests) - well enough that they had to place me in the "gifted" program. That didn't actually mean anything at my school - you didn't go to different classes and weren't separated from everybody else; it was just a label applied to everybody who scored above a certain percentage on the standardized tests.
And man, did I hate math. I hated doing the never-ending worksheets of long division and thought math meant miserable drudgery. About halfway through 8th grade, I had the opportunity to start taking joint-enrollment classes at a community college. They taught me algebra there and that was when I started to enjoy math. I think a lot of that had to do with being able to move at a reasonable pace through the material rather than spending an entire year on long division.
In home I had no one to teach me maths (parents had elementary school education and doing farming work).
But here in India government schooling is pretty good if you have interest to learn. Everything from textbooks was free.
What we were told was, until 10th grade, to learn English and Mathematics properly. Then I got into CS and that's a different story.
Government school teachers were pretty good, I learned a lot of English, science and mathematics from books in libraries and borrowed by other people as well.
Still not comparable to those who could crack olympiads and high level exams, but it doesn't take spoon feeding from 5 years of age, to grow an interest in math.
First at home. I remember doing division by 7 and being fascinated by how the decimals repeat, before I started elementary school. Later: math books, math competitions, and math camps where university students explained advanced math concept to small kids using simple words.
I also learned a few interesting math things at high school, but it was a small part of the whole, maybe 10% or 20%.
In my opinion, to be good at math requires a combination of IQ + motivation + good learning resources. With low IQ, some things are simply too difficult or too abstract. Without motivation, you will not spend the necessary time and effort. Good learning resources (books, tutors, videos, whatever) will remind you of things you haven't considered yet, and will help you solve difficult problems by giving you easier problems first.
In perfect case, educational system should provide as good learning resources as possible, and perhaps also some motivation. It can do nothing about IQ. There is a possibility that kids with average IQ would do much better than now; but kids with high IQ would do even better.
>The draft rejected the idea of naturally gifted children, recommended against shifting certain students into accelerated courses in middle school and tried to promote high-level math courses that could serve as alternatives to calculus, like data science or statistics.
I do think there could be a benefit to reducing "gifted"/"accelerated" classes before high school, though, which is something that 1. could be framed as either raising or lowering standards and 2. the general public seems to have a visceral reaction to. that's more what I was addressing
there are bound to be truly exceptional students that far outpace everyone else, but in those cases i dont think its entirely fair to expect schools to fully accommodate such outliers. historically such prodigies resort to self-study
So while schools have to keep passing kids that should be failing for reasons outside of their control, I think the next best option is to keep giving those who can advance quicker an option to keep advancing quicker.
In the case of some Californian schools, over half their math faculty may already be Calculus teachers, and in the incoming junior high, over half the students may be on track to take Calculus. We should not think of students with the potential to reach Calculus as outliers.
This sentiment would equally support removing special education programs for students with learning disabilities, yet those are not being called into question.
I had no such thing in school, but being bored had a huge part in school being hell for me. I read about schools for gifted children and dreamed about how cool it would be to be on such a school (not that I would necessarily have qualified, mind you).
I am personally in favor of teachers having high expectations from pupils, that they can rise to meet.
I don't think that any of that is crucial to math education by itself, but having an affinity with numbers (rather, an intuitive sense of magnitude) is very beneficial to understanding the more advanced concepts. The open question (at least to me) is whether that understanding is nurtured best by calculus, geometry or Cartesian graphs.
Pro tip: your life is more important than that.
But jumping ahead in math does not mean you are now part of a gifted & talented program.
No, its not.
No, it is not.
> as you will now be unable to jump ahead in math. Also, algebra is going to be de-emphasized as the soft goal of junior high.
Changing how performance above the standards is responded to is not lowering the standards.
> No, its not.
There's no point in having a conversation if you think explaining yourself is a step too far.
Er, I did explain myself in the part you didn't quote.
But, there is no conversation if reading beyond the first three words of a post is a step too far...
All this abstraction is just excuses and bandages for why the USA is falling behind compared to China, Japan, Russia, Philippines and more.
It's just sad. 1+1=2. It shouldn't equal 11 or whatever political current events of the day are.
We'll just have to agree to disagree. I believe with a strong background in algebra and simply knowing how to take an integral and derivative you can go far in stats. Will you be an expert? Obviously not, but high school level stats knowledge can easily be attained.
The people who need it already takes statistics, and nobody else needs to learn those formulas, and just learning those formulas doesn't teach you to understand statistics (as we can see how they get heavily abused in every non-quantitative field).
Edit: Now from this discussion, I just realized that the fields that abuse statistics a lot are also the fields that doesn't require you to learn calculus. So maybe calculus is needed to understand statistics after all?
Because "understand" has different levels. Your question can be reworded for Calculus itself: "How can one one understand calculus without understanding Real Analysis?"
And yet some college degree requirements (e.g. Business Admin) do let students take Calc I without Real Analysis.
Your question has the following bias because you happen to know both <X> and <Y>, so you then believe <Y> can't be taught without <X>. But we do that all the time at all ages. E.g. we teach kids how to find area of circles and spheres -- without teaching them calculus methods to derive those formulas.
We can expose people to many statistics topics such as Bayesian reasoning without calculus.
There are several college professors of Calculus that also agree that substituting Statistics or Linear Algebra for Calculus at the high school level is not a bad idea.
I agree, but I think with the tools and technology we have today, I think more can be expected of kids. There are countries where every high school graduate is expected to have some experience with calculus.
Maybe in 50 years, real analysis will be in the purview of high schoolers, just like 50 years ago, and programming was not.
> Your question has the following bias because you happen to know both <X> and <Y>, so you then believe <Y> can't be taught without <X>. But we do that all the time at all ages. E.g. we teach kids how to find area of circles and spheres -- without teaching them calculus methods to derive those formulas.
I probably do have that bias, but I think a lot of things taught in school are automated away, yet they are still taught to teach “how to think”. There is software that spits out areas of circles and spheres and regression models and p values, but I would think the goal is still to provide as much background as possible to build as accurate of a model of the world as possible.
> There are several college professors of Calculus that also agree that substituting Statistics or Linear Algebra for Calculus at the high school level is not a bad idea.
I can see Linear Algebra being useful too, but I would actually hope high schoolers are graduating with introductions to both Calculus and Linear Algebra.
Sure, we can say that as an ideal but we still have to convert the "as much background as possible" into an actionable concrete curriculum.
The issue is a finite amount of time to teach a list of topics and the bias in 99% of recommendations is to always say "kids should be taught X" but we never frame it in the opposite way to reveal the inherent tradeoffs : "kids should be denied being taught Y so that time is used to teach X":
In other words, any recommendation that kids "must learn topic X" means we're silently omitting Y. It's an inherent optimization problem of what to do with limited time window in classrooms. That's why some college Calculus professors recommend switching out Calc I for a Statistics/LinearAlgebra. They're not saying calculus is unimportant. Instead, they're treating it as optimizing the best bang-for-the-buck math topics for 17-year olds.
We can do a lot of radical thinking regarding optimization of high school curriculums. E.g. I've always thought that a semester of dissecting advertisements in newspapers and tv commercials and how they manipulate you would be an excellent class for teenagers. But devoting time to that comes at the expense of something else. Therefore, I'd recommend substituting Shakespeare's plays Romeo & Juliet and Julius Caesar with "Media Manipulation Studies" but of course, some people would complain "how can you possibly understand Western Civilization and humanities without studying Shakespeare?!?". Maybe true but making kids study Shakespeare also means we're denying them <Other_Really_Important_Topics> because there's always a constraint of finite time.
But if it is being done because a subject is too hard and making the population look bad (since other countries seem to manage just find with the same topic), then I would have a problem with that. Which is what it seems like in the California proposal.
One could similarly say "How far can you get in statistics without measure theory? Or do you just take the definition of random variable as given?". It's still hand-waving, just at a different level.
while I do agree that statistics education should be much more heavily emphasized, I still believe it and calculus should both be taught. Understanding the basic ideas of calculus opens a lot of doors in other fields of study. Hell, "data science" math would necessarily involve understanding calculus and optimization
All three have value but clearly the math problem aspect of it has depreciated in value due to calculators, wolfram alpha, etc yet it tends to remain the focus of many math curriculums. Calculus by its nature is more computationally intensive, meaning that it has experienced the greatest decline. If you really think about it, that curriculum was designed for an era when we called human "computers". There is probably opportunity to make calculus a more broadly valuable class by deemphasizing the mechanics and focusing on the principles and proofs.
This sounds really extreme, what makes you think a statistics class would have changed your life?
as a father of a gifted kid this make me angry!
Why is it ok to say some kid are one standard deviation below the curve and need special class and teacher.
But it’s not ok to say some student are also one standard deviation above the curve and also bold special class and teachers?
Because it doesn't offend the families of the average children, who make most of the population.
"reject the idea that some children are naturally gifted"
That's simply not true, empirically not true. Clearly some children are naturally gifted in math, ability to play music, drawing, computer programming, sport, learning foreign languages and so on.
Obviously we can ignore reality, in the same way as not-so-long dead communistic block ignored reality of economy, but this always end up in the same way - reality wins, soon or later, but the price of learning this is typically rather high.
The tragic part here is that obviously rich kids will go to private schools that will let them develop their skills and talents. Those who will be hurt are gifted kids from poor families.
The data mentioned does not show if the problem is in the schools or the Black/Latino students picking such schools.
Generally though, you want to live in the more expensive parts of town because those schools will be better managed (and obviously have a more capable cohort of students due to them being kids of richer parents). When buying a house, the basic question all couples with kids face is "what is the least expensive house in the most expensive neighborhood" in order for their kids to attend the better schools (assuming the parents are not rich enough to send them to $20k+ per year private schools).
It is one of the reasons the SAT and Advanced Placement test scores is (or was back in my day) so prominent in determining admittance to college. They are optional tests that kids take to show their proficiency.
It is relatively common to use the address of a relative or friend in a richer part of town to get your kid in the nicer high school that you cannot afford to buy a house or rent an apartment in. My immigrant parents did that for me on multiple occasions.
A lot of this is due to how US schools are funded, which is primarily by property taxes. That plays into the strict location requirements, since you could imagine a small school funded by a small property tax base being overwhelmed by students from outside the school's tax base choosing to go there and not having funding to support them. It also plays into the quality discrepancies: wealthy areas have nicer houses and therefore pay higher property-tax-per-capita (sort of, there's also racial discrimination dynamics here), so schools in wealthy areas have more money per student and can hire better teachers, have better teacher:student ratios, nicer equipment, etc. There's some state/federal funding of schools I think, but most funding is from property taxes, at least in the places I've lived.
In general, I think most confusion non-Americans have about the US stems from confusion about how our government works: in a very real way schools are run by counties and towns, not federal or state governments. School boards are elected, and schools are mainly run on a local level. Asking why a student can't choose to go to a different school is a bit like asking why a German student can't choose to go to a French high school -- there's an administrative barrier between them.
This wording is so wrong. You can't say that the Black/Latino Students are the problem in any context. You can't say Race-People-problem. Can't.
As long as I've been alive and even further back, teaching has been peoples' "backup". It's not attracting the best and brightest, and now it attracts all these angry woke virgins who deliberately want to force communism into their classes.
I think it might be time to figure out some hard questions for the union to answer
These people are monsters. They're literally tearing apart civilization (education of children is foundational) for the sake of their doomed ideology. If you can't see the parallels to the Soviet Union, you're either already drinking the kool-aide or incomprehensibly dense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeois_pseudoscience
Late Stalinism is worth studying, if only to learn how twisted can an entire country become out of fear.
Russian School of Mathematics is very popular in Bay Area.I think there are branches all over the states(not sure). They exist solely for 'math enrichment of K-12 students'. The after school programs are tough and come highly recommended.
There is also 'Singapore Math' that I am not very familiar with but its supposed to be based on the very challenging Singapore Math curriculum.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a system where gifted math kids could take classes at the local university, and from what I've heard this is common in various CA school districts as well. Hopefully, that won't be discouraged as I found it to be a huge positive being both much more interesting and good prep for university. It seems like the resources are widely available (in semi-rural/urban areas, and now online) to support kids with different learning speeds, styles, and interests. Holding back individuals, purely for the sake of raising the average, if that is their intention, is sick- learning isn't a zero-sum game, but should be the opposite.
The modern progressives, on the other hand, are evil AND dumb.