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Comment by dpritchett | Hacker News Reader

I read cletus's post to suggest that primary math education (i.e. young children) isn't personalized very much. This is demonstrably true, at least in the U.S. A lot of it is budgets and politics. No need to infer that cletus believes he is a more thoughtful educator than people who spend their careers on it.

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I read cletus's post to suggest that primary math education (i.e. young children) isn't personalized very much. This is demonstrably true, at least in the U.S.

That's how I read it too. And that is a finding of international studies of primary mathematics education. The newly industrialized countries of east Asia do much better in primary mathematics education, using textbooks (and teacher professional development to ensure that the textbooks are well applied in the classroom) such that key concepts are presented from multiple points of view, to reach as many learners as possible. The TIMSS test results

http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf

suggest this is working out well for those countries. A book-length description of how mathematics primary education differs between much of the United States and much of China

http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

is an eye-opening read.

> This is demonstrably true, at least in the U.S.

Demonstrably true here in India as well.

True that I can't speak for all of India, or you can't speak for all of US; but I believe I have enough data points for the extrapolation to be valid.

I think that's enough to infer we have a problem, and it's largely ignored.

> cletus believes he is a more thoughtful educator than people who spend their careers on it.

I don't think it matters what cletus thinks. Conceited or not, I see his observations mostly hold in the real world.

> primary math education (i.e. young children) isn't personalized very much. This is demonstrably true, at least in the U.S.

I would say that it is demonstrably not true in many EU countries. Maybe "non personalisation" is the tendency of lazy teachers, but I remember pretty well how my math teachers repeated the same subject thrice: the first time describing its core in an abstract way, the second time with concrete examples (apples and pears) and the third time in very little incremental steps. The first explanation was for naturally able math learner, the second for those how needed practical examples and the third for less able pupils. Some of us complained about the fact that it was a boring way to teach (and you know how horrible bored kids can be in the class) but I'd say it was worth it to have all my classmates learning more or less at the same pace with nobody left behind.

Actually, I complain more about the fact that we had to change math teachers so many times because of educational reforms and budget cuts/reorganizations.

Which country do you live in? I don't know about the quality of schools in general here (the Netherlands), but I've met too many people who say they "can't do math" to think very highly of our elementary educational system. Granted, though, this may have more to do with the fact that it's generally acceptable to 'just not able to do math'.

(This is not to say that I think everyone can do math equally well, but I've seen some otherwise intelligent people making such comments that made me want to rip my eyes out.)

I think of it like Sturgeon's Law applied to humans. Most humans just are not very good at most stuff.

Look at the percentage of programmers that are basically not any good at programming all and yet are able to continue being called programmers; if we apply standards of expectation uniformly, then you would expect to see even people in technical fields be able to be useless at math and have everyone basically just shrug and accept it.

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