A public school in Florida built America’s greatest math team
wsj.com
wsj.com
I did find the final bit sadly ironic. The entire point of Frazer's approach is that he looked at what the best teams were doing, came up with hypotheses about weaknesses in the approach, and experimented/iterated from there. Fittingly, now that the politicians are paying attention, their immediate instinct is to just blindly ape the structure that he's built -- rather than looking to instill the same mindset in other teachers.
I suppose it's the circle of life in large, bureaucratic organizations. A decade (or a century) from now, another Frazer will come along and apply the same mindset to this structure -- and all the bureaucrats will be suitably impressed again.
Over half (51%) of the student at this school have below satisfactory maths proficiency, and most of those (70%) are actually rated as Inadequate. If you are interested in raising the mathematical achievement of the roughly[1] 90% of students at Buchholz that don't get to take part in these ivory tower math classes, there is not much of use here.
[1] Only 140 students out of 2200 went to the Church thing. Alternatively, only 10% of the students attain a rating of maths Mastery in US News ranking: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/florida/d...
Because of that, you can pick a school where most students (70%) can't be bothered to learn the basics, and pick a few who are motivated to climb to the top.
This is completely unsurprising: in every sport, the proportion of those who do not care enough to those highly motivated is even more stark.
I would say it is even more general: there are an overwhelming amount of things to be passionate about, but being passionate about something means you put it before (almost) all else. So for any one specific topic you can expect most kids will actually be more passionate about something else, simply because there is just so much else to go around.
In any case, I think the harsh reality for teachers is that most kids are mainly passionate about being friends with other kids. I suspect this is especially true for kids with less beneficial backgrounds that can't count on as much support from their home.
Teachers also need collaboration from parents who all too often see school as a free babysitting service or just a road to a job.
Then the ones who are good but getting stressed out eventually start looking around and realize they could match their current comp assistant-managing a gas station, and that some of the extra things they've taken on give them experience that lets them gun for non-education jobs with way higher pay... and it's only a matter of time before they leave.
As a teacher at a school with pretty amazing admin and co-workers and parents.. they're pretty dang stressful even with those things. And I come from a background of founding startups, so I'm not some complete lightweight.
The thing is, you can endure stress and suck if it feels worthwhile. If you're missing those things, it stops feeling worthwhile.
We have spent the last 40 years reducing teacher autonomy, so it shouldn't be surprising that it's harder to get teachers who care.
I think schools are in a death-spiral where they can't get enough decent teachers with good judgement who can work autonomously, so they keep clamping down with more control over teachers' day-to-day activities, which just drives away more of the good teachers because working like that sucks.
Current high inflation (wage-inflation plus just the regular kind) is going to drive this to a crisis point before long, I think—when fast food joints have signs up begging people to apply at $17/hr with basically no education requirements, a starting salary in the low-$30k range requiring a bachelor's degree starts to look like something only a crazy person would opt to do.
[EDIT] Relatedly, school admin is also totally fucked up. The people doing those jobs are generally terrible for a bunch of reasons, including that they're also under-paid for the kind of person you'd really want doing those jobs, while also being very high-paid relative to teachers. Teachers who may or may not be good at teaching, but who are not good at admin, go into it because it's the only way to make real money in education until you're nearly at retirement age and holding a PhD, on a classroom teacher pay-scale, and people who can't hack it in private sector management go into it because it pays pretty well and you can coast while getting an ego-boost from being the Big (Wo)Man In Charge and bossing people around. The entire field is a cess-pit of incompetence, neglect, and outright idiocy, and it's a huge problem that doesn't get enough attention compared with teacher quality.
Indeed, it may even have adverse effects: you draw people who want the money, instead of people drawn to the profession intrinsically.
We do need to build environments (schools, administrations, patterns of educating teachers, social supports for teachers and students, etc) that cultivate enthusiasm and encourage high levels of effort, rather than crushing it.
This sentiment is a big part of suppressing teacher wages, and needs to stop. No, raising teacher pay will not result in getting worse teachers. We shouldn't be relying on charity and self-sacrifice on the part of teachers.
[EDIT] The general problem here is that we default to "pay more to get better workers" unless the job produces clear social good, then it's suddenly like "well if you don't want to badly under-earn compared to what you could make doing almost anything else, then you must not have your heart in the right place so will be bad at this anyway". It's some weird kind of sour-grapes thinking that we use to avoid paying people doing actually clearly important and socially beneficial jobs what they're worth, while the real money goes to people doing jobs that... aren't so clearly beneficial.
I agree, but we have a whole lot of data that indicates that raising comp often has perverse effects.
A] There's a whole lot wrong with education resulting in bad outcomes. B] And the way we compensate teachers is terrible and unjust. I am not convinced that addressing B will have a huge effect on A.
Better tell waves hands at the entire private sector. They don't seem to have gotten that message. Seems like an opportunity to start a company paying 30% under your competition, so you can out-compete them by getting better workers.
I know there's related studies, like the famous "pick up your kids from daycare on time" study -- and of course plenty of examples about incentive structures gone wrong. However, I think those are different in subtle but important ways.
The point being made here, AFAICT, is that paying more would increase the available pool of candidates. All the people who are currently interested in teaching would surely stick around -- and a lot more people would be interested, too. Given the current issues with hiring and retention, it's difficult to see how that would be a bad thing.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10589297/
https://news.gallup.com/poll/150383/majority-american-worker...
http://www.timothy-judge.com/Judge,%20Piccolo,%20Podsakoff,%...
etc.
Extrinsic incentives are correlated only very slightly with performance, job satisfaction and self-reported measures of motivation. The correlations that exist are confounded because causation is likely reversed (people with higher satisfaction, performance, and motivation are paid more). When we study, in isolation, extrinsic incentives on tasks that are intrinsically rewarding, they appear demotivating.
Anecdotally, I see the effect in the classroom itself: rewarding students for things that they otherwise would do for the challenge and their own reward sucks the fun out of it really fast. The absolute last thing in the world you want to do is pivot someone from evaluating a task based on its intrinsic rewards to thinking about it in terms of extrinsic factors.
I'm actually taking over a competitive math program next year that has had a pretty big "candy bribe" component of it that I need to figure out how to unwind. It's one thing to unexpectedly give out stickers, candy, etc, and let students know you're celebrating awesome performance... it's another still to condition students to think that doing math is only worthwhile because Jolly Ranchers will be dispensed.
> The point being made here, AFAICT, is that paying more would increase the available pool of candidates.
I think in the very long run that's true: there are people who would like to teach that are steered away from it during college because they figure out they just can't make the numbers work.
But given that a teaching credential is a pretty substantial structural bar, I don't think it changes things much in the medium run.
The data on whether this works in general is very, very muddy.
> unless the job produces clear social good,
Really, any job that lots of people are drawn to by the love of it gets crap compensation by default. It affects the supply curve too much.
I love teaching and do it for 1/10th or less of what I could make for equivalent effort elsewhere.
And yah, this has terrible outcomes and is unfair.
My spouse, with about a decade of teaching experience at the time, once had a former student drop out of high school and start working at as a gas station clerk at a major chain.
The student was making almost as much as my spouse, and if she stuck with it she'd be out-earning my spouse in a year or two. Total comp, benefits included, not talking just wages (school worker benefits are not and have not for some time been that good, really, and at least in my area are now pretty poor compared to offerings in the private sector). Clerking at a gas station. As a high-school dropout.
I'm pretty confident teacher pay is so bad that this "raising pay will draw worse candidates" (where the fuck is that hand-wringing when CEO pay comes up at board meetings? Any pro sports teams worrying they might pay too much to attract good players?) thing is not a real effect worth worrying about, if we're talking pay increases for teachers that are anywhere in a remotely plausible range.
> Really, any job that lots of people are drawn to by the love of it gets crap compensation by default. It affects the supply curve too much.
Sure, and as is typical you get some good people who are semi-retired from a better-earning career or have a much higher-earning spouse, who don't really need the salary at all. You don't get the trust-fund kids as much, as in other careers that are similarly pro-social or artistic, since teacher social status is somewhere under the floor, but otherwise it's similar.
But that's not enough, and I don't think paying teachers 50-75% of what any decent teacher could make doing something else with a teaching degree—not even assuming some entirely different life-path—is a great way to get a good candidate pool. Enough bodies, based solely on some idealistic drive (check in again in 5 years, let alone 10, on how well that's doing sustaining them, and for the ones who do need the money, which is most of them, on how their financial situation is adding to the stress that's driving them out of teaching) sure, but not enough good candidates. And it's not enough to keep the good ones around.
OK, I've already said I think this is unjust. Please read my comments and understand context. I just do not think this is a path to increase educational performance, particularly in the short to intermediate run.
> where the fuck is that hand-wringing when CEO pay comes up at board meetings? Any pro sports teams worrying they might pay too much to attract good players?
I feel like you're not understanding the distinction between:
A) paying a premium within a profession to get the top candidate
and
B) increasing pay broadly to get a higher level of performance from existing practitioners
and
C) to get more able candidates into a profession or retain them.
> you get some good people who are semi-retired from a better-earning career
[raises hand]
> since teacher social status is somewhere under the floor
IMO this is the biggest problem. And, indeed, teachers will take even lower pay to be in a private school situation with a parent community and student community that values education.
Lots of private schools pay worse than public schools, true, and do indeed draw teachers who are decent-to-good but sick of putting up with public school admin and parent bullshit—for reasons that are obvious if you think about it, but perhaps not intuitively obvious, private schools are less beholden to any one parent than public schools are, and are much better positioned to firmly tell them "no"—but once you start to get into actually-good private school territory[0] pay and appreciation (and to a some extent social status, at least within a certain circle) match or beat area public schools, typically.
[0] A very high percentage of private schools are not good, though—"how can that be? How do they keep getting enough students to stay open, in a competitive market that includes 'free' as an option?"—politics and religion, is the answer, and they can under-perform on academics year after year as long as they're delivering the message the parents want on those fronts. Incidentally, the teachers these schools draw with their lower pay aren't always leaving public education over legitimate bullshit, but often over perceived bullshit like "they wouldn't let me talk about Jesus as much as I'd like", and these are usually not good ones that the public schools are losing to private schools, but ones who we'd want to leave public education.
This just isn't true of the SF Bay Area. When you look at the very top, like Harker, Nueva, etc-- salary may slightly edge above public school pay for some portions of the scale, but is still behind when you consider total comp.
> appreciation (and to a some extent social status, at least within a certain circle)
I feel appreciated and valued by our parent community, and I do not feel like there are many that look down their nose at me. (And, given my background, I'm just kinda amused by the group that do).
I also have total "easy mode" when it comes to behavior management. Students that don't even know me come into the room predisposed to think I have important things to say and to work hard.
> A very high percentage of private schools are not good, though
Oh, believe me, I know about the crummy sectarian schools, and the crummy for-profit "highly academic" academies. I am not talking about that. (I don't think many of these are very good teaching environments, either...)
> private schools are less beholden to any one parent than public schools are
This is very complicated and probably out of scope for this discussion.
> and are much better positioned to firmly tell them "no"
Once you have a wait list, this is true.
> Some places, there are five private schools in a 30-minute drive that charge $40+k/yr and are all pretty good or even excellent
Far, far in excess of that here.
> there are five private schools in a 30-minute drive and they all charge $12k/yr or less and are all terrible (but do cater to religious and/or political preferences)
And we have a bunch of those, too.
There's a huge selection effect: when you choose the students A) who can earn a scholarship, or B) whose parents will sacrifice to pay tuition at a non-sectarian school, you're basically selecting for the families who value education.
I'm reminded of research that shows that students at lottery charter schools outperform students at neighboring public schools... but then the students who enter but lose the lottery also outperform the general student population at those schools.
I believe we have very good educators and we have a whole lot of things we're doing right. But we also have a whole lot of things that are just fundamentally easier or better in our environment. Almost entirely, the behavior problems I confront are students getting a little excessively exuberant or otherwise out of hand, not wanting to misbehave.
It's not just that we're personally harmed by the current system—we're in the "has a high-earning spouse" group so we don't need to both be adequately paid, though of course it'd be nice—but I've watched one good, experienced teacher after another bail on the profession over the years, because they do not get paid enough to put up with the shit they're subjected to, and at some point they see an opportunity outside education, realize just how badly they're under paid, and decide they're done with it. It seems to be getting worse, too, even before recent inflation started screwing with everything (I suspect the rest of this decade is going to be a slow-motion disaster for education hiring and retention, in excess of how bad it already was). I have kids, too, and they're in school, and I hate knowing that a bunch of the best teachers they might have will leave before they get them, because the work-conditions/comp ratio is so badly messed up that it's not only asking some sacrifice of teachers, but is practically abusive.
> There's a huge selection effect: when you choose the students A) who can earn a scholarship, or B) whose parents will sacrifice to pay tuition at a non-sectarian school, you're basically selecting for the families who value education.
Yeah, agree that the factors that make a "good school" versus a "bad school" are complex and that you can't just look at student outcomes to decide whether the quality of a school's instruction is actually above-average—especially with private schools, but also with public schools. Solutions to those problems that aren't actually related to school quality per se are hard to come by, without deliberately leaving some kids behind and/or increasing staffing levels dramatically (so, also significantly increasing district spending/budget). Lots of the problems, effective solutions start to look like "solve poverty", so... good luck. :-(
Didn't mean to be flippant with the good vs. bad school distinction—looking at various measures of student outcomes definitely doesn't give a full picture of how good a job a school, or a teacher, is doing, and selection bias is a major confounder in attempts to do that.
Yah. And the crap is a primary concern, too. We need to figure out how to make things better. Especially on the things that teachers complain about that are demoralizing because they can be expected to negatively affect student outcomes.
I think improving comp has a distant and uncertain effect, but fixing a lot of the crap could be more impactful. Right now we incent administrators not to hold students accountable; how can we do the opposite?
Also, how can we systemically study interventions in a way that we can draw meaningful conclusions-- instead of leaping from educational trend to educational trend because they seem like they sound like they'll do something.
> and selection bias is a major confounder in attempts to do that.
It's got a huge indirect impact that is difficult to control for, too. If I have a student who wants to be disruptive, other students will call him or her out, and they won't find much social validation from it. So, it's not just the attitudes of individual students affecting their own outcomes, but everyone else around them.
And even second order things. I would probably be a below average educator in a difficult public school classroom. And instead, I'm an extraordinary one in the environment I'm in. Horses for courses.
I would say A and C are both reasonable. To get higher performance out of existing candidates, you would need a metric for performance... I am unfortunately not aware of one that is robust enough to be used.
You might be able to do B with pay for performance if you had a good metric.
C might make things significantly better 10 years from now-- increasing the size of the candidate pool. Of course, this requires you be able to adequately measure candidates, too.
I think we should increase teacher pay. I don't think it changes much soon in the quality of education. I do think improving teacher working conditions--- especially the ones that infuriate teachers because they have well articulated justifications of worsening student outcomes--- can improve all of the above.
""" Mr. Frazer’s insight was to connect four levels of education: The kids he scouts in elementary school develop in middle school, compete in high school and take specialized classes from college professors that he brings to Buchholz’s campus. As soon as the system was in place, the team started winning and never stopped. """
Notice how the first step is collecting kids that are already good. The recipe is then broadly: collect the best kids you can get your hands on, train and coach them for years, watch them win. There might be some details of wider interest, but essentially this is a good old elitist project.
Competitions are always artificial. This school is apparently pulling some really bright students now. Are they teaching them skills that will allow them to excel academically later in life, or are they teaching them how to execute the competitive meta strategy quickly?
And to be honest, not only is the "honors stuff" and "common core" material deprioritized, it's not even taught explicitly. You just get to such a high level understanding of the subjects Frazer teaches that it becomes trivial.
I disagree. I think that having a strong sense of mathematical properties and numbers is more useful than any specific rote drilled into students.
I see a lot of students up in precalc doing rote and not understanding at all why things work and that have no chance when you throw a curveball. On the other hand, the competitive math students are asking questions like:
* What's the graph of this function look like?
* What's it for the trivial case n=4 before I think about n=100?
* Does symmetry or any other pattern collapse this down?
* What properties do I expect the answer to have? Why does this direction "feel right"?
The kids who excel in math competition and on the normal math academic track get there by playing with it and understanding it.
That's the tricky bit here, right? Math competition gamifies math, and encourages a level of play and understanding that normal math classes don't deliver.
But if you don't feel like you have some basic level of competence, being measured in this way is demotivating.
We need to figure out ways to make it interesting and involve exploration and that game-like feel for a broad slice of students.
I would rather a given student end their HS math journey in algebra I and have finished it with A) wonder, and B) a broad and solid understanding of the material that they can take into their adult lives... than to have ended it being able to do a big slice of AP Calc BC problems well, but without any kind of underlying fluency in math.
True mastery is one thing missing from all these discussions of math levels, tracks, etc.
Yes, but this is largely by convention for much of it. With some effort you can incorporate more playful and open exercises in a normal class. However few teachers have the spare time to spend this effort. It is also risky because you're likely to have some students that cannot cope with the challenge and if they do poorly the new thing you tried is likely to attract blame.
As an aside, a fundamental problem in any discussion about education is that it tends to happen with the various parties speaking about interventions aimed as only a section of the student population, but without this segmentation being explicitly acknowledged.
It is always important to remember there is a huge range of abilities and home circumstances in the student population the schools have to educate, so in a very real sense there is not just one, but rather a whole society of underlying problems that lead the the educational outcomes that then get summarised as a unitary PISA ranking or similar.
That's the big thing that has to be figured out. It needs to be fun. You need some randomness and handicapping. Effort and ability needs to affect outcome in gamified lessons but you need to feel like you have a fighting chance even if you're at the bottom.
I feel like good PE teachers know better how to do this than most in education. Their curriculum is intrinsically gamified and they need to manage to get effort and development from those with obviously different levels of ability.
> As an aside, a fundamental problem in any discussion about education is that it tends to happen with the various parties speaking about interventions aimed as only a section of the student population, but without this segmentation being explicitly acknowledged.
A bigger fundamental problem is that we don't get rigorous data on anything. We flit from trend to trend to trend, without measuring any of them well.
I'm data driven, and I read all the educational research, and I have very little rigorous guidance that I can believe. It falls to personal judgment, then, which is notoriously easy to fool.
> It is always important to remember there is a huge range of abilities and home circumstances in the student population the schools have to educate, so in a very real sense there is not just one, but rather a whole society of underlying problems that lead the the educational outcomes that then get summarised as a unitary PISA ranking or similar.
Yes, but it's similarly a mistake to think we're at some kind of global optimum and that there's not a set of different practices and curriculum that would result in a drastically better distribution of outcomes. In particular, I feel like we really, really screw up how math is taught.
I did recovery with a couple of students up in precalc levels that were struggling. They were missing some fundamental things. When they fell behind, it's everyone's (parents, teachers, tutors, etc) immediate intervention to help them with the problems they're struggling with, and drill them with rote. But if the real problem is that you don't have a good understanding of the associative property of multiplication, you end up memorizing a million special cases and getting yourself confused.
So when can you rearrange terms, and when can you not? It's time to play with it and find out...
Entirely typical of school reform efforts. Study or (more often) a book built around a study or two comes out, hype builds, consultants latch on, dumb-shit school admins get ahold of it (and use it as an excuse for a free trip or two to some BS conferences, for them and maybe a favored teacher or two), and then try to implement it without understanding it. They usually make two major mistakes:
1) Assuming the study's results will generalize to any school, disregarding even caveats or limitations called out in the very reference work that's the foundation of the reform.
2) Ditching parts they're uncomfortable with, failing to appreciate that implementing 80% of something may not even achieve 20% of the desired effect. They do this even when it's super fucking obvious to anyone with a bit of common sense that the parts they're ignoring are key. They're especially bad about this with discipline systems, but it also frequently happens with other kinds of programs.
Then they do this again every 2-4 years. For a given kind of system (English instruction, math instruction, discipline, all kinds of things). Result: schools are constantly flailing around, with shit changing for no good reason almost every single year.
Honestly, you don't want everyone to be constantly iterating and trying to drastically upend things to find a new global optimum. Beyond the fact that many people are not cut out to do it (most people aren't above average ;), there's a survivorship bias in these stories. You don't hear all the times that radical new approaches had terrible outcomes.
If you want to build an extraordinary competitive program doing A, you should absolutely be doing lots different from what everyone else does. But the typical program that eschews hard-gained wisdom will do worse. Basically, you're buying volatility in outcomes for a lower expected value.
You need to apply knowledge from disparate areas, combine them creatively, prod it and often fail several times before you get it right.
It's a good way to prepare one's kids (or oneself) to solve hard problems in real life.
I’d also argue such problems ought to be part of the curriculum for “normal” kids too. They might just more time and hints along the way than gifted kids. Once they get the taste of solving interesting problems from a young age, they might enjoy math more as well.
Note how many kids are attracted to games—-some of which are objectively more challenging than routine school math problems.
Some contest problems for older kids: https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/AMC_Problems_...
There are also online gifted programs, incl at John Hopkins' Center for Talented Youth. The center is quite well-known in the gifted education community, with many famous alumni.
https://hub.jhu.edu/2019/10/24/center-for-talented-youth-40t...
It depends on their age and skill level. It goes without saying that younger kids need more guidance if they aren't extremely motivated.
This is worth looking into: https://artofproblemsolving.com, it's kind of the go-to website for the competitive math community. There are a lot of free high-quality resources on the wiki, and they sell courses and books.
A couple classic books: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Craft-Problem-Solving-3E/dp/11194... https://www.amazon.com/Problem-Solving-Strategies-Problem-Bo...
And obviously, competition problems! For example, this is the AMC: https://amc-reg.maa.org/default.aspx; competition websites usually have an archive of past editions freely available. Studying past problems is the meat and potatoes of actual competition training. Make sure they are age appropriate, because the difficulty level ramps up VERY fast.
There's a very large variety of difficulty levels in math competitions. You go from almost trivial to olympiad level (= almost impossible even for most professional mathematicians).
That level also steadily increases as time goes on. Problems from the same competitions are already vastly more difficult than ten years ago, when I used to compete. Might be that I'm growing white hair, but it's almost unbelievable what the very top kids can do. They're very, very, very good.
> I’d also argue such problems ought to be part of the curriculum for “normal” kids too.
I wish there was a way to do it. I agree that the educational value is simply off the charts, but even low-level competitions are way too hard if you won't train, and most kids understandably won't.
It does require a different approach for most kids. An effective approach would involve some or all of the following components:
- interactivity
- visual imagery
- gamification
- social problem solving
- customized problem set
It’s too bad this is no longer in fashion with the educational establishment.
>the pipeline for the high school’s math team must begin long before students reach high school, so Mr. Frazer searches for prospects in elementary school and steers them to accelerated math classes in middle school.
>“You wouldn’t grab a kid in ninth grade who’s never played football and expect him to be a great high-school football player,” he said. “For most of these kids, this is their football.”
So he immediately felt virtual learning would not be as good as in person, school wouldn’t let him teach in person (he is in his 60s) so he quits.
I’d trust this guy more then the Ed unions saying virtual is just as good as in person
To say that wealthy people can achieve systems is less exciting; if they couldn't, that would be a terrible leading indicator of bigger problems. I'm interested in stories of people making good use of scarce public resources, because that's what all local governments should be attempting, and I read too much about districts making pushes orthogonal or downright antithetical to goals of effective education.
There is a large public resource in question, the public school. All US Americans should be more or less familiar with public schools that make very poor use of those resources as suggested by our top-in-class spending per pupil and middling achievement levels. In this case a school had a great resource, a 'bored rich guy' with the requisite background and focus, and they recognized and took advantage of this fact.
In plenty of other circumstances in life, power struggles or many other flavors of bureaucracy would have prevented this outcome. In the linked story, this effort was allowed to flourish and supported, which is to the great credit of the school and probably the wider community. Consequently, a significant group of students are receiving phenomenal educations that extend far beyond the narrow scope of high school math curricula, and they are doing it seemingly all under the tutelage of a single teacher.
Finding the balance of lifting the tide for everyone while giving the most highly motivated/talented the support they need is the tricky part. This guy figured out the latter but the article doesn't say anything about if he knows anything about the former.
And the younger they get, the less often they'll have these characteristics.
So in my opinion, never teach children remotely. Or students. Adults? Depends.
We, in the US, did nothing to try and prepare people for a situation like that. On top of that, you have a whole segment of parents who don't care about whether or not kids were actually learning but just whether or not schools were open. The number of stats that I've seen that compare days that schools were opened (especially in red states compared to blue states) is horrifying. If the metric we're using to determine whether education was successful is whether the doors were open, then we're focusing on the wrong things. On top of that, they act like the schools open in person had better outcomes simply because they were in-person while ignoring the lack of preparation and any other factors.
The whole state of education in the US is sad.
What happened to the $190 billion schools got in COVID aid? Are both the paragraphs you wrote completely unsubstantiated and just based on your own gut feelings?
Why don't you look that up first before you write nonsense. Also, if you're not going to contribute anything to the conversation, why bother responding?
The guy still gets visits from people in their 60s that he taught decades before me. He really made the subject come to life, had a sense of humor, and was generally a good guy.
He also ran the school math teams. Several kids in the years above me did quite well on those, all down to him giving us accelerated content and questions that were "actually interesting" rather than dozens of the same thing over and over. Of course it varies what that means depending on where you are in your journey, but at each step there tends to be an aha! moment where things come together.
I caught up with him a few weeks ago, and he told me he actually didn't enjoy the university level of mathematics. Somehow things got very dry and boring, and that's part of why he ended up teaching high school.
I was really lucky to have a high school math teacher that made calculus interesting enough for me to want to learn it. I'm not sure I would have made it through the Comp Sci program at college without it, as we were required to take an advanced math class every semester, and having an understanding of calculus was critical to both getting through those math classes, as well as the physics classes that were also required for the degree.
Related (content around teaching is part way through the article): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/12/15/most-likely-to...
I blame my parents. They immigrated to a red/purple state for the low taxes and good schools and turned it into a solid blue state by voting straight ticket democrat. And then they’re all surprised at how this could happen.
it was a concerted effort by a small group of administrators at FCPS, and an even smaller group of 'anti-racist' students at TJ themselves.
Your second paragraph: what is the alternative to voting a straight Dem ticket if you support science and want to see women, Jews and brown people get a fair shake in life?
Politicians are like strippers, you fall in love with them at your own risk.
I'm a "brown" immigrant and grew up in Virginia when it was a red state. I got way more than a "fair shake," including the opportunity to attend TJ. Indeed, Democrats are the ones who are advocating to legalize discrimination against people like me (https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/12/9/biden-admin-bac...) and eliminate objective standards that enable immigrants to break into elite jobs in favor of subjective standards that require social connections and cultural capital to navigate.
edit: but reversed! so maybe you could...
See https://www.schooldigger.com/go/FL/schools/0003000029/school....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante
1982 - 18 students passed, but by 1991 "the number of Garfield students taking advanced placement examinations in math and other subjects jumped to 570".
I like it when teachers teach far and beyond the boring old curriculum and inspire kids far beyond what they thought capable of themselves.
> In his final years at Garfield, Escalante received threats and hate mail.[14] By 1990, he had lost the math department chairmanship. Escalante's math enrichment program had grown to more than 400 students. His class sizes had increased to over 50 students in some cases. That was far beyond the 35 student limit set by the teachers' union, which increased its criticism of Escalante's work.[14] In 1991, the number of Garfield students taking advanced placement examinations in math and other subjects jumped to 570. The same year, citing faculty politics and petty jealousies, Escalante and Jiménez left Garfield.[14] Escalante found new employment at Hiram W. Johnson High School in Sacramento, California. At the height of Escalante's success, Garfield graduates were entering the University of Southern California in such great numbers that they outnumbered all the other high schools in the working-class East Los Angeles region combined.[15] Even students who failed the AP exam often went on to study at California State University, Los Angeles.[14]
> Angelo Villavicencio, one of Escalante's handpicked instructors, took over the program after Escalante's departure, teaching the remaining 107 AP students in two classes over the following year. Sixty-seven of Villavicencio's students went on to take the AP exam and forty-seven passed. The math program's decline at Garfield became apparent following the departure of Escalante, Villavicencio, and other teachers associated with its inception and development. In just a few years, the number of AP calculus students at Garfield who passed their exams dropped by more than 80%. In 1996, Villavicencio contacted Garfield's new principal, Tony Garcia, and offered to come back to help revive the dying calculus program. His offer was rejected.[14]
It certainly helps that he develops an accelerated program but the effect of that program versus the selection process is the most important question of all.
To echo the parent, though: the school is NOT bragging about success on AMC contests. Probably because they do not have it.
Similar prep with a strong group of incoming students does work to produce successful AMC and AIME results, I can attest.
Because their 'preparations' usually suck. As someone has gone down the path many years ago (think pre 00), the problem is that many teachers didn't teach the right way to tackle the hard problem consistently. I quit the math olympic class half way in high school because I couldn't keep up with it anymore, as I was only brute forcing. I only learnt how to consistently tackle hard problems and being self introspective to maintain the high performance relatively easily many years later when I joined the workforce and being much better at learning.
I feel like this kind knowledge is lost in the current schools especially under circumstances, where let the students to explore their best potentials are no longer the goal.
And many ppl like me only rediscovered how to learn and work hard correctly and joyfully after adulthood through various online articles and videos.
I think we're much better off now, thanks to Art of Problem Solving's Alcumus, Richard Rusczyk, all the top-tier video lessons out there, etc-- along with just things like being able to hand out Khan practice for general math topics. We're getting much better at teaching top students how to solve hard problems (and, as a result, the AMC8/10/12, AIME, Olympiads, MathCounts, et al... are getting much harder-- these days if you want to prepare for the AMC8 you should be studying old AMC10 problems).
The same can't be said about overall societal performance in teaching the entire population.
i guess it's a for-fun name?
That is impressive, even if it looks like Lexington HS (MA) finished ahead of them. Are there any other similar school-based team math competitions (I know there are lots of individual ones)?
So it's essentially the same as an all-star team, but putting them all together in the same class and recruiting some university-level talent to help teach them.
The article tries to present it as an 'average school', but it's not an average class of kids. That said, it could definitely still help kids who wouldn't have that opportunity at their own schools.
I wonder what carrots he dangled in front of the parents to get them to switch schools. Doing this for football is a big no-no and has resulted in a few scandals over the years in Texas.
> Mr. Frazer searches for prospects in elementary school and steers them to accelerated math classes in middle school.
> Mr. Frazer’s insight was to connect four levels of education: The kids he scouts in elementary school develop in middle school, compete in high school and take specialized classes from college professors that he brings to Buchholz’s campus.
Sounds about right that he'd push them to the same magnet school if it's the only good one in the area.
I can understand why many teachers try to give disproportionate assistance to students who are disinterested in or untalented at math, but a lot of these kinds of students are just taking the harder math class to pad their university applications. If a student is on the border, a committed teacher can get them into maximum-mark territory. But the odds of such students building on these learnings throughout their lives is probably very low. In other words, it seems like a poor investment of time.
And university rankings are obnoxious enough, but my goodness - this article invokes high school ranking? We live in a world where people want to rank everything and live with the false certainty of a nonsensical hierarchy. Well, I suppose that describes humankind for at least the past few millennia, so never mind. Back to work I go...
It's only a bad investment of time because of ineffective teaching methods. What these students need is rigorous yet effective instruction that doesn't simply expect them to "learn all the math by themselves" and actively helps them master the subject, in a step by step fashion. Unfortunately, this is very unpopular with current teachers because it's seen as "demeaning" the profession.
There are about 27k high schools in the US, and 774 FL high schools. Bucholz high school has 2254 student and is the largest in Gainesville, per Wikipedia. All that to say that the article understates the starting point for this impressive endeavor.
Weird to see Frazer still kicking, all the Eastside math teachers seem to move on pretty quickly.
> Many of the gifted kids in his program have parents who work at the nearby University of Florida and push to get on Mr. Frazer’s radar.
Is there any data comparing how these kids perform compared to other kids whose parents also work for a top-100-ranked university? (US News ranks University of Florida as #38 nationwide.) Do these kids do better or worse than their comparable peers nationwide?
This may sound like a stretch, but the Buchholz math team and Mr Frazer are probably the single biggest life-changing factor in my life so far, and in a lot of my teammates' as well. The effect that Frazer's culture puts on his students over their (potentially) 7-year career with him through middle and high school just dominos throughout college and your career. The team shaped who I am, where I went to school, and what I studied greatly, which I am so unbelievably thankful for (which I will get into at the end).
Most of the smartest people I know are friends I made on the team. To put it simply, these kids are so driven that being able to pursue a talent outside of the math team is certainly feasible. Now, almost everyone on the math team is taking the hardest classes they can at the school, a lot of which doing so with almost perfect GPAs. But the math team is very time consuming, and I think a lot of the team members share the ideology that there isn't a more valuable talent to expand upon in high school than math.
I was unfortunately only on the team for 2 short years, because I moved to a different state (and the year we lost both state and nationals is the year I went to both competitions, unfortunate correlation). As smart as the kids are on the team, Frazer's game plan is so well made at this point, it teaches you how to win. This means success is more correlated to hard work than intelligence in most cases.
My biggest regret about being the team is not working harder. I really feel like I was lazy and didn't take it as seriously as I should have, but looking back I don't think it affected my trajectory much. Fortunately, after I moved I tried to keep the Frazer culture with me, made friends with the smartest people at my new school, and I matured and worked harder. Absolutely none of which would have happened without the math team.
I am now doing computer science at a top 10 school and interning at a large tech company this summer. I am extremely thankful for where I am, much of which I attribute to Mr. Frazer. Plenty other students have far more inspiring stories than I have, come from lower socioeconomic statuses than I come from, or ended up in a better school than where I ended up. Thanks for letting me write that.
Now, we did all of Geometry and Algebra II (Frazer's competition courses, not just regular courses) in a year. When students are excited about learning, and you make it fun, you can really throw a lot of material at them.
But any part of Frazer's "system" outside of the content I think pretty irrelevant for regular teaching, like him using class time to teach competition material. That's just how math class is for every other kid. 8 hours a day for a month over the summer learning and teaching math? Hard to organize that without having a team, among other things.
My question to you is what are some typical criticisms your team gets from competitors or other sources?
I think the state/national runner ups, American Heritage has copied this in class teaching method, among other Frazer tactics.
Art of Problem Solving is also something Frazer swears by and is a good resource.
Honestly, as early as I can remember learning math. I always did "math club" in school. My parents always stressed it and it always interested me. I would say I started loving math once I joined the Buchholz team though.
ADOS, or recent African immigrant?
Why aren't AMC/AIME/USAMO/IMO mentioned?
They've cracked a code but we act like it's individual excellence that can't be transferred.
The difference was one teacher. My younger one was tapped by their teacher for a special program in 5th grade that put her in a class with other "smart" kids for a day each week in 6th grade. From there, those kids blossomed to honors classes later.
For my other kid, the distractions in classrooms full of kids who didn't care about learning proved to be too much at times. The honor student had to occasionally take classes with "normal" students, and found the environment very distracting. It matters how much the kids in the class want to learn, as opposed to make fun of each other and the teacher, or be disruptive in other ways. The older one still did fine, has a degree and a job, but it was a struggle.
So, I get your point. I have strongly felt for a long time now that even average students should have received the experience my honor student did in 6th grade. It was a great break from the average day of going from class to class, broke up the monotony of standard curriculum, and provided those kids with a good foundation for thinking out of the box and learning to learn in a focused environment. It provided a clear pathway through honors curriculum in classrooms full of students and teachers who cared.
I want that for every kid, but with Republicans doing their damnedest destroy public education and the impact it's having on teachers' mental well-being (for those who can even be bothered to become teachers anymore, given the low pay and guaranteed bullshit from not just students but parents and the government itself), it's hard to imagine it becoming a reality in the short term.
I was consistently the teacher's pet in my English classes because I chose those to be my "normal" classes in high school because I thought they were boring. Even without putting in much effort, being quiet and actually able to answer the questions endeared me to my teachers.
The average kids are the problem and will poison any class they're a part of, otherwise the standard classes would do just fine serving this purpose.
The real question is how much better your kid could have done if he or she’d had only gifted classes rather than once a week.
The ancestor commenter is cynically pointing out that support systems are major factors in why the other students are more disproportionately not signaling potential to begin with
It is great that individuals picked are applying themselves and doing the work, it is noticeable this has some selective evolution towards some ethnicities pretty reliably, it is not recognizing how a deeper holistic solution can address the disparity in how other students can be motivated and presented with opportunities or how their home circumstance and support systems can be addressed
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/HolUp/comments/nkhgcs/american_math...