Comment by kodah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kodah | Hacker News Reader

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I think I can respond to your footnote. I went to a Catholic school that split us up into separate tracks for maths specifically in grades 4-8. I was in the upper level math class for a year before they moved me. I had a teacher who celebrated and encouraged bullies, slapped children with a ruler, and threw a chalkboard eraser at me from the front of the classroom because I appeared to be falling asleep. When my grades fell the knee jerk reaction was that I was wrongly assigned to this class and it was expected to have below some magical threshold of attrition. The ramifications for me were that my old friend group would no longer interact with me the way they used to, I was immediately bored in our lower maths class, and I was now a "dumb" kid.

It wasn't until I'd dropped out of college and taught myself math, because of the interviews in this industry, that I learned to enjoy math again. My point is that you're really fucking with the social firmware of kids when you do that. Also, reading between the lines of my life, not being in that upper level math class clearly had no impact on the latter parts of my life.

First, I'm sorry you had a bad experience with that teacher and that it caused you problems for many years down the line.

I'm trying to figure out how this relates. It sounds like you had a bad experience with tracking, and there is a fundamental issue with tracking where some amount of people will have bad experiences, but ultimately you were able to achieve your potential anyway, so why make the experience bad with tracking if people will eventually get to the right level over time - is that a fair interpretation of your comment?

My lack of success in that math program was due to a "bad experience" (I chuckled a little at that phrasing). The fallout of which had social implications, made me entirely disinterested (if not hostile?) to maths, and followed me for years. Point being, separating our classes had little to nil positive impact (for me) in the long run, and the decision of which class I was in failed to address the foundational problems with the class. The latter bit being the most important; in my case it was an abusive teacher with an anger problem, but there's also a good chance that nobody actually sucks at math but that we teach it from a perspective that only a subset of the population will ever relate to or meaningfully learn from. I guess what I'd like to see is some reproducible results showing that giving gifted kids their own course program and separating them from their cohorts actually has a long term benefit when compared to keeping them all together.

Edit:

To make what I'm saying a bit more clear: There's a ton of people in these threads assuming that not everybody is born with math skills (or variants of that attitude). That is exactly what these teachers thought and how different my life would've been had I agreed.

"not everybody is born with math skills" isn't the argument though. The argument is "not everybody has the same math skills". It's a multidimensional and continuous thing, but it's not exactly feasible to teach that way, so some approximation is involved.

It sounds like that was implemented very poorly in your case. You yourself said "I was immediately bored in our lower maths class". I don't see how the solution to this is to make everyone take the lower math class. Certainly there is some middle ground between the California plan and what you experienced.

Same, I had a really hard time parsing that comment. My read is that they had a terrible teacher who had the power to label them as “average” instead of “above average”.

It’s hard to see that as undermining tracking as a concept, since the problem is actually the absence of oversight and termination of bad teachers. No one teacher should have the power to doom a student, but a school needs to be able to recognize and cultivate talent.

Eh I don't think things working out in the long term necessarily invalidates the criticism, we have no idea how OP would have turned out if in a different situation. I'm sure most people that should have been in fast track math but didn't have an option for it still figured shit out long term, but that doesn't mean they couldn't have benefited from better math education.

It sounds like the implementation of levels was especially bad in the OP's case though, so I agree it isn't really a good anecdote to argue against leveling entirely like California is doing. It's throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

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