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Comment by bllguo | Hacker News Reader

okay that is true, and I will absolutely die on the "calculus is a crucial part of math education" hill

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

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I think it is understandable for people to have a visceral reaction to even the idea of limiting their kids' potential. I do not see how reducing gifted/accelerated classes can be framed as raising standards though. The standards are the standards, they do not have anything to do with a child's age.

i mean it in the sense of not being okay with underperforming students year after year such that they drag their peers down. have higher standards for the whole class from the start, otherwise problems compound. This is what we have now, where every year basic concepts that should already be understood need to be rehashed for half the year before moving on to actual new material

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

I agree with your first paragraph, but I think there are significant political and logistic headwinds to being able to solve that problem in the classroom. Namely, I think it is a sociopolitical problem starting at home that is far greater in scope than a school can provide a solution for.

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.

For schools already offering Calculus, offering support to outliers simply means moving them to the Calculus class when they are ready. For other schools it means allowing students to get high school credit from college courses.

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.

> but in those cases i dont think its entirely fair to expect schools to fully accommodate such outliers

This sentiment would equally support removing special education programs for students with learning disabilities, yet those are not being called into question.

100% this. Why aren’t we doing full inclusion then? (Another thing they want but can’t have because of all of the spedbux they get from the Feds.)

Why would you say reducing accelerated classes could be a good thing?

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.

"Gifted" is potentially misleading, as California largely does not have the same system as the one being removed in NYC. In many Californian schools under the common core, you are allowed to jump forward in math depending on your performance on standardized tests.

But jumping ahead in math does not mean you are now part of a gifted & talented program.

But how far does that definition of calculus go, on your hill? Is it being able to perform single-digit additions in your head? Rote memorization of the 1-10 multiplication tables? Remembering the squares of 1 through 25? Performing division of 7-digit numbers in your head?

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.

You described arithmetic, not calculus [1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus

Ah, thanks!

Honestly, at a high school level, I wish a lot of calculus concepts (and non-calculus concepts) got cut in favor of delving deeper into algebraic concepts. So many things only get taught at a surface level that I ended up just needing them retaught in college anyway.

> I will absolutely die on "calculus is a crucial part of math education"

Pro tip: your life is more important than that.

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