6 ms·

Why Did San Francisco Schools Stop Teaching Algebra in Middle School?

63 points by impostervt 10y ago

mathattack 10y ago
But as UNC's Domina points out, most schools have also found it very difficult to institute what Katy Tang calls a "one-size-fits-all" mathematical curriculum without boring the math nerds to tears. Here in lies the fundamental issue of the (well intentioned) focus on No Child Left Behind. The schools tend to underserve the best students because energy is focused on the weakest. (If the weakest were being well served, this would be a worthy trade. My experience in large cities is this is the exception rather than the rule.) This used to bother me quite a bit, but I think the best students can find other ways to be intellectually stimulated. (Online, etc) The downside is for most of school they're bored out of their mind, and this can develop bad habits for when school eventually catches up to their abilities.
- eitally 10y ago
  Your last point can't be overstated. It's a major problem, but imho can be remediated during high schools years with things like dual-enrollment in a local community college, MOOC participation, local special interest research groups, etc. My wife & I are taking the approach that responsibility for primary education lies with parents first, then teachers, so, to your first point, we don't particularly perceive this as a huge personal problem.... The fact is, education in America is classist and the kids of white collars households have incredibly unfair advantages. Bootstrapping from poverty & ignorance to professional success and higher education is harder than it's ever been.
  - mathattack 10y ago
    It does seem like things start to improve in high school because the class schedules are such that kids can have more flexibility. I think MOOCs aimed at younger kids will improve too. I hear you on parental ownership. Even in the most elite NYC private schools, parents pay for tutoring or scramble to cover what they perceive to be gaps. For public schools, it's the same. A school may be good at Math, but weak at music, or vice versa. It's up to the parents to close the gaps. (And parents know their kids best)
  - existencebox 10y ago
    Because this turned into a bit of an essay, let me frame it: I'll be discussing your statement about not worrying about harming the advanced students by requiring more from parents than schools, and following from that to consider the OP article concept of "one size fits all." An inverted anecdote re your statement on the the parents first point: I went to a "big east coast city public highschool". While you say that you don't see the lower effort on the top demographic as a (to your credit, personal, so I may be misinterpreting it as a generalization) problem, I'd make some following statements. Of the people in my AP/accelerated classes, about half were _definitely_ not white collar. Parents in manual labor working 2 jobs, non-english-speaking immigrant families, etc. If we did not have what little acceleration was given, they would _never_ have gotten ANY attention they needed because their parents simply did not have it in them. It can be said that "that's their job" but even decades later I can't find any fault to their focus on providing some vestige of financial stability first. What I'm saying is that by assuming all families CAN have the parents shoulder education is an assumption rooted in much more of what I've seen of white collar than blue collar families. Pushing all families to take this on would likely hurt those without the spare time and background far more than those with. ANY opportunities we provide in that sense will continue to cyclically reinforce those with the resources to better leverage future opportunities. While I am not disagreeing to how invaluable teaching at the home is, I see publically taxed schooling as the great leveler, where the people have the chance to reallocate some of this opportunity to where it is most effective. Now, for the "incendiary" part of this post; where is "most effective", while I'm no teacher I can also say that a one size fits all policy with only the option of "do this material more deeply" for extention would absolutely _gut_ what little educational value existed for some of the top tier students in a comparable fashion to if you pushed the remedial classes into middle school calc. If I've learned one thing from decades in school, (and as an interesting tidbit, supplemented by years of open offices) it's that humans are so hilariously far from "one size fits all" in how they learn, and while reasonably consistent in "you'll get to do less of this near-purgatory experience" being FAR more of a motivator than "you'll get to do more", it's individualization and communication that bridges this gap, not regimentation.
  - lettergram 10y ago
    I know several kids who never went to highschool. At 12-13 they enrolled in the local community college and got their GED at 16-17. It cost (at the time, in district) $2000 - $2500 per semester at the junior college. Although that's significant, the school district was actually paying ~$10,000 per student per year for public school so it was actually WAY cheaper. Regardless, those kids who went straight to college from middle school seemed 10x better off and all of the ones I know (or am friends with) are doing great.
    - jtbigwoo 10y ago
      A minor quibble: The state subsidizes all public colleges, most likely including your community college. Where I live (Minnesota) that subsidy accounts somewhere around half of the total cost. So community college probably costs about the same as high school.
      - lettergram 10y ago
        Fair point, I also know our city and county tax went there as well.
- douche 10y ago
  For math, at least, the solution is pretty simple: give them the book, and let them work through it at their own pace. Hopefully the teachers can keep up with the grading... We used the Saxon math program when I was in elementary/middle school, and the repetition was key there. I could get away with teaching myself, because I'd be seeing the same classes of problems over, and over, and over, long after I finished up the chapter introducing them. Unfortunately, after 7th grade, and burning through the Algebra 1 book, the district switched curriculums, and I didn't learn anything new until I took discrete math in college.
  - colanderman 10y ago
    As someone to whom that solution was "applied", it's crap. Most teachers don't know enough of the material to answer questions, so you lose the guidance of experts, and since you're no longer working with peers, you lose the social aspect as well.
    - douche 10y ago
      Well, it's better than the usual alternatives, in my experience. If your teachers are incompetent, they won't be able to help you one way or the other, so it's best if they just get out of the way. As for the "social aspect", you rarely actually get to work with peers, and instead are coerced into doing the teacher's job for them. It was incredibly frustrating to drag along with people who just didn't have the brainpower to deal with the material.
      - dpark 10y ago
        I hated group work in school. It is incredibly frustrating to be forced to work with people who are not pulling their own weight, whether because they don't want to or just can't. Nonetheless, this is an important thing to learn to deal with. Frustration is part of life. So is dealing with both struggling and apathetic people.
        CaptSpify 10y ago
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  When I was in HS, I was bored out of my mind and I would sleep through most of my classes. I had one teacher tell me I should just quit. I woke up to my accounting teacher telling another student that I've missed one question in nearly 2 semesters, so as long as my grades are that good, I can sleep all I want. Bored smart kids can be just as distracting as frustrated average (and below) kids.
- Kuiper 10y ago
  >The downside is for most of school they're bored out of their mind, and this can develop bad habits for when school eventually catches up to their abilities. This is something that I noticed as a significant problem when living in the freshman dorms during undergrad. You had a lot of smart kids who spent most of the school day bored, and they spend most of the school day reading novels in class before going home to spend 40+ hours a week playing video games or browsing reddit, all while maintaining perfect grades and never having to ask for help from teachers or peers. Then, they get to college where they encounter material that actually challenges them, but they're still in the habit of spending the hours of 3 PM to 11 PM playing World of Warcraft or League of Legends, and when they start falling behind they're still in the mindset of "I'm the smart kid, I shouldn't need to ask for help." You have kids who were high school valedictorians who end up failing classes during undergrad because they never learned how to properly function in a challenging academic environment. It can be quite a shock to transition from an environment where you might be in the 99th percentile of performers (top marks without having to try hard) to be one where you may not even be in the top 50% and actually need to put in more effort than your peers.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    It doesn't even have to be the valedictorians. I got B's and C's basically without studying until college. I had to learn how to study in college. We even had an introductory "how to study" class in college because it was such a problem. I was always told that "HS is hard, you can't just breeze through it", which was completely untrue, and I absolutely breezed through it. So I thought the same thing would apply to college, which it turns out, actually is hard.
    - mathattack 10y ago
      I agree. In undergrad Computer Science, I had my first "Oh sh*t" shocks. (My undergrad was a large state school, so I could coast outside of CS) I got a few more in grad school in other subjects.
    - amag 10y ago
      This is exactly my story as well. Even in HS, if I studied for an exam it would be a couple of hours the night before. Not so many A's maybe but plenty of B's and C's got me through just fine. Then it was quite a shock when I got to college/uni and learned the hard way that in many cases it took weeks of studying for an exam. Now in retrospect I'm quite proud of myself that I didn't give up. There were certainly times when I felt like doing just that.
- ack 10y ago
  In the elementary school my kids go to, everyone is grouped together. On a per-subject level, the kids who are stronger than the others go to a "plus-group" for that subject. It works pretty well. This is a school in the Netherlands, though.
arebop 10y ago
a teacher's rebuttal on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/4p0uc3/why_did_san_francisco_schools_stop_teaching/d4h7me7 https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/4p0uc3/why_di...
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  It's in full agreement with the article, it's just a rebuttal of the click-bait title.
- gshubert17 10y ago
  The teacher's last sentence: tl;dr Why Did San Francisco Schools Stop Teaching Algebra in Middle School? They didn't. The topics of algebra are now spread through the middle school courses along with other foundations of geometry and probability/statistics. However, they did restructure the names and pathways in high school in such a way that might impact the way ability of a student to take a 2nd course in Calculus by Senior year of high school.
  - justaman 10y ago
    I don't understand why they can't teach algebra in tandem with lower levels in math such as basic arithmetic. The abstract method of balancing both sides of the equation could boulster overall understanding. --Introduce algebra in grade school. As children learn things like fractions, introduce linear algebra. This, I think, would reduce some of the "when am I ever going to use this, i'm not going to even try".
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      They do, this is part of common core (which some people love and some people hate). My daughter has been doing very basic algebra since 2nd or 3rd grade? I do not remember EVER seeing an equation with an X in it until 6th grade.
pfarnsworth 10y ago
A couple of weeks ago, my Uber driver was a math teacher in the San Francisco school district. He advised me that if I could afford it, that I should unequivocally send my kids to private school and not to public school. The reason is that they now mix students of all abilities together, instead of separating them out and concentrating on each group separately like they did when we were kids. The thought was the good students would "pull up" and "positively influence" the students with less aptitude. However, what it did instead was to give the incentive to teachers to focus on worse students, who tended to be more disruptive, and essentially abandon the good students and let them fend for themselves. He mentioned that the "independent learners" were identified, and instead of being accelerated, they were left alone so that the poorer students could be concentrated on by the teachers. As a side note, I don't remember being taught algebra before the 9th grade either, in an excellent school district, and I was in a gifted class. I still kept my algebra textbook from the 10th grade and it's pretty standard algebra. In fact, I didn't even learn Calculus until college and I wasn't negatively impacted by that at all. However, this was almost 30 years ago so I'm sure educational standards have increased, but it's funny that what I learned back then is no longer "good enough".
- pc86 10y ago
  I'm 30 now and had a similar math education to you. Gifted track in middle/HS yet no algebra until 9th grade. No Calculus at all (although AP Calc was one of four AP classes my school offered). I did not major in CS so I've never taken a formal Calc class. If anyone has a good recommendation for a MOOC or similar for a working professional to learn Calculus I'd love to take it. Doesn't need to be free, would probably be more motivated to do well if it wasn't :)
  - clintonb 10y ago
    https://www.edx.org/high-school https://www.edx.org/high-school
  - onn_ 10y ago
    Coursera has a class called Calculus One for people with no previous calculus experience and another called Single Variable Calculus for people who've been exposed to it once. Pick your difficulty and there's an optional certificate you can pay for. The latter was definitely one of the best MOOCs I've taken.
zdw 10y ago
Why don't we start teaching the basics of set theory and algebra during elementary school? I know I'd have dealt with that far better than the "Do this page of 100 addition/subtraction problems as fast as you can" human calculator stupidity thrust upon us as math education. At least it sounds like common core is getting away from that sort of stuff.
- jerf 10y ago
  "Why don't we start teaching the basics of set theory and algebra during elementary school?" Based on what I'm saw coming home from my first grader, they are. The common core stuff at least comes from people who understood that having the student do a couple thousand "1 + 2 = ____" problems tends to promote the incorrect idea that the = symbol means "do the thing on the left and write it down", and I noticed a mix of "1 + __ = 3" and "___ = 1 + 2" in the problem sets. I noticed enough other places where the good ideas had been visibly chewed on by "the process" that I'm still not ecstatic about "common core", but at least the bits I've seen (up to first grade now) I do concede that there were good ideas at the beginning of the process. I'm not entirely convinced they made it through correctly, but they were there at the start. (Still a bit pissed that they took my kid who was adding single-digit numbers in his head and forced him to count on his fingers because That's What The Curriculum Says, though. Seems to have gotten over it by the end of the year, though, so no permanent damage. Still.)
  - vonmoltke 10y ago
    > I noticed enough other places where the good ideas had been visibly chewed on by "the process" that I'm still not ecstatic about "common core", but at least the bits I've seen (up to first grade now) I do concede that there were good ideas at the beginning of the process. I'm not entirely convinced they made it through correctly, but they were there at the start. (Still a bit pissed that they took my kid who was adding single-digit numbers in his head and forced him to count on his fingers because That's What The Curriculum Says, though. Seems to have gotten over it by the end of the year, though, so no permanent damage. Still.) The standards are being ruined by terrible curricula providers, to the point where people conflate the standards and the curricula.
adwf 10y ago
How old is 8th grade? I'm just curious to compare it to the UK school system where the subjects aren't broken up so rigidly. I only learnt Maths, not Algebra 1/Calc 1, etc.
- JMStewy 10y ago
  The average 1st grader is 6 years old. 8th graders are around 13 years old.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  The prototype is that a 12th grader turns 18 sometime during that year. So the prototypical 8th grader would be 13-14 years old. Variation exists.
- alistairSH 10y ago
  The sibling responses are correct. A little further detail... US schools generally follow this pattern... Elementary School (Primary in the UK): Kindergarten First through Sixth grades Middle School: 7th and 8th grades High School (Secondary in UK): 9th through 12th grade (or, freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior). The boundary between each level varies, but I'd guess 70-80% of districts follow the above. The most common variation seems to be grouping 6th grade into middle school.
FuturePromise 10y ago
hmmm... > but ensures that all students enter high school with the same mathematical foundation There's a saying among conservative wags: "The opposite of quality is equality." That seems to be the case here.
fnayr 10y ago
It's not all that great to be super advanced in math very early either. I tested out of pre algebra in 7th grade because my dad basically taught me it over the summer. Took geometry in 8th grade. Took algebra 2 at community college over summer took pre calculus my freshman year, and took ap calculus my sophomore year but halfway through the year I found it too slow so I took calc bc online with Stanford. But then I took multivariate calc my junior year at a local cc and got a B in a math class for the first time ever. I got burnt out. And I hadn't learned the study methods required to succeed in college level mathematics. So even though I had always loved math and went into college first semester taking upper div math, I found myself disliking it more and more and eventually switching to economics. I think, had I not rushed so much, I may have have actually enjoyed it more and fully majored in it.
- jboggan 10y ago
  No offense, but if you were really going to go for it as a math major I think a minor stumble like getting a 'B' would have just made you double down. Point set topology was the gut-check class for me. On the article topic, this is pretty bad. Common Core 'intuitive' BS aside, kids need earlier exposure to algebraic concepts, it was the main reason they failed the elementary calculus and probability courses in college that I ended up teaching them. It was very draining to be wasting my time trying to explain to a senior at Georgia Tech how to solve 2x=1 and then by analogy 3x=1, though they could see no similarities between the two equations.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
kingmanaz 10y ago
>Why Did San Francisco Schools Stop Teaching Algebra in Middle School? Mandated equal outcomes coupled with racial diversity.
jrkatz 10y ago
Over the past ten years I've spent a lot of time volunteering in poor urban middle schools, mostly in math tutoring/teaching roles. Sure enough, one of the big hangups kids have is algebra. The article is right that it's one of the first real abstract problem solving skills we try to teach kids, and that definitely makes it harder for them. In my experience there is an additional problem: Basic arithmetic skills. If a kid can't do division and knows it, how can they approach a problem like, "It is 800 miles from Denver to LA by train. train A leaves from Denver to LA at 80mph while train B leaves from LA to Denver at 70mph. How far from LA do the trains cross paths?" We can start breaking this down: 70mi*x/h + 80mi*x/h = 800mi x * 70mi/h = M 150mi*x/h = 800mi x = 800mi/(150mi/h) x = 5.33...h M = 5.33h * 70mi/h M = 373.333...mi OK, that's all well and done. Now do that without division. Do that without a clear grasp of 1. what division does and 2. how to do division. The only thing you really know about division is that when you take tests on it, you tend to do poorly. You can't do this problem. You look at it and don't see any tools you can use to attack it because the only thing that works on it is division and you do not get division. The problem is, a lot of kids don't get division. Why? That's above my pay grade. If I was going to take a stab in the dark, I'd say that at the highest level it's to do with passing kids who shouldn't be passing, and then teaching the next year's class as if they already know what they need to know. Every year they fall a little bit more behind, until finally they're so lost it's hopeless. It's easy to take aim at algebra but what about the shaky foundation we're trying to build it on? Of course, this would require a lot of kids to be held back, and that's not an appealing solution. I think we need to assess where in our math education kids start to fall behind, and figure out what's wrong there. Unfortunately for the kids, the solution will probably involve more multiplication/division drill sheets, and more word problems to test those skills. The article also points out the difficulty in starting a STEM degree without calculus. I started a STEM degree without calculus. I was lucky to get into the university I got into without calculus, and the calc 1 course was taught as a remedial class for all the folks who got 4s instead of 5s on their AP calc exams. This is where I had my own first brush with trying to build the next layer of mathematics education on a shaky foundation. It was very difficult, I nearly quit, and it fucked up my GPA enough I was still paying for it four years later at my graduation. I was 18 and had a bright future to look forward to in graduating from a respected university with a STEM degree, and it was nearly too much for me. I don't see how we can ask 13 year old kids to do the same with algebra. We need to work out the kinks on the way there. When it's time for them to learn algebra we want them to have all the tools they need so they can focus on the algebra, not on the arithmetic. To be clear, I don't have any solutions here. Just a lot of problems.
frogpelt 10y ago
And the answer is: because all the kids have to be taught the same thing and they all have to be fit to the public school mold. I've heard it said that public schools are great for making factory workers. Of course, in most places private schools and even home schooling is an option, so all hope is not lost. And public education is good for many kids. It's the one-size-fits-all approach that is not always so effective.
danielmorozoff 10y ago
I grew up in San Francisco and experienced both public and private school mathematics . The former of which was astoundingly poorly run. It seemed the only way to actually make headway for students that were ahead was for them to study on their own. The primary issue imo is that math teachers do not seek to inspire students to see mathematics for what is is- a structure way to reason as opposed to a calculation tool replaced by computers. These breeds not only an aversion to the subject by fails to fulfill the basic reason for teaching math. My best math teacher in school gave us a lecture on chaos - this was algebra class and we were able to generate a fractal by a simple set of coin tosses. This evolved into the discussion of how prbability, physics/randomness of coin tosses and the general notions of chaos and dynamical systems. But such initiative and teachers were never rewarded. It's sad to see that the education problems seem to be regressing
Hexanite 10y ago
Having finished high school, a little over a year ago, I cannot understand how this can be beneficial in any way. We began pre-algebra in 6th grade and a large majority of kids did Algebra I 7th grade, possibly a harder class like Geometry, depending on how ahead they are. Sure, you could delve deeper into each topic, but when your classmates, are still struggling with basic Algebra, how much time does your teacher have to focus on giving you extra work? The accelerated kids would essentially be forcibly held back. The curriculum at my high school for the normal accelerated student was Algebra II, Trig/Calc A (calc I), calc BC (calc II), then calc III, and we had students even more accelerated than this. Starting at Algebra I in high school, would essentially shift everything back two years.
droithomme 10y ago
I read the district's explanation. http://www.sfusdmath.org/uploads/2/4/0/9/24098802/ccss-math-faq.pdf http://www.sfusdmath.org/uploads/2/4/0/9/24098802/ccss-math-... It says that Algebra was previously introduced in 8th grade and students were not prepared. Therefore they have moved that algebra content into normal math for grades 6-8, gradually introducing contents, along with other concepts. Then the full Common Core compliant Algebra class that focuses solely on Algebra is in 9th grade and they are hoping that students will do better with this approach. The article and the commentary here indicate that neither the author nor any but a very small number of commenters here bothered to look at the actual program, preferring to revel in personal suppositions and speculations.
Decade 10y ago
> Why did San Francisco Schools Stop Teaching Algebra in Middle School? Because the school superintendent and the board of education believe much more strongly in wealth redistribution and social equality than many of the constituents do. Local elections: They matter. Also, as the article says, the headline is clickbait. Common Core scatters algebra all over elementary school. The “traditional” curriculum, many years of arithmetic followed by Algebra I and II, geometry (plus proofs), trigonometry, and calculus, that is a harmful segmentation of math. Many students learn to hate and reject math before they even reach the parts that are useful to daily life. The trick is getting teachers to teach the Common Core curriculum. The uncomfortable truth is that many teachers have no business teaching math, and leave students horribly confused about what math actually is. I even encountered a (SFUSD) middle school math teacher who uses jokes to try to make math fun, but his children (going to SFUSD schools) grew up hating math.
blahblah3 10y ago
This really hurts the talented kids with less educated parents. Educated or well-off parents can always supplement with lessons at home or supplementary school (kumon)

63 points by impostervt 10y ago

But as UNC's Domina points out, most schools have also found it very difficult to institute what Katy Tang calls a "one-size-fits-all" mathematical curriculum without boring the math nerds to tears. Here in lies the fundamental issue of the (well intentioned) focus on No Child Left Behind. The schools tend to underserve the best students because energy is focused on the weakest. (If the weakest were being well served, this would be a worthy trade. My experience in large cities is this is the exception rather than the rule.) This used to bother me quite a bit, but I think the best students can find other ways to be intellectually stimulated. (Online, etc) The downside is for most of school they're bored out of their mind, and this can develop bad habits for when school eventually catches up to their abilities.

eitally 10y ago
Your last point can't be overstated. It's a major problem, but imho can be remediated during high schools years with things like dual-enrollment in a local community college, MOOC participation, local special interest research groups, etc. My wife & I are taking the approach that responsibility for primary education lies with parents first, then teachers, so, to your first point, we don't particularly perceive this as a huge personal problem.... The fact is, education in America is classist and the kids of white collars households have incredibly unfair advantages. Bootstrapping from poverty & ignorance to professional success and higher education is harder than it's ever been.
- mathattack 10y ago
  It does seem like things start to improve in high school because the class schedules are such that kids can have more flexibility. I think MOOCs aimed at younger kids will improve too. I hear you on parental ownership. Even in the most elite NYC private schools, parents pay for tutoring or scramble to cover what they perceive to be gaps. For public schools, it's the same. A school may be good at Math, but weak at music, or vice versa. It's up to the parents to close the gaps. (And parents know their kids best)
- existencebox 10y ago
  Because this turned into a bit of an essay, let me frame it: I'll be discussing your statement about not worrying about harming the advanced students by requiring more from parents than schools, and following from that to consider the OP article concept of "one size fits all." An inverted anecdote re your statement on the the parents first point: I went to a "big east coast city public highschool". While you say that you don't see the lower effort on the top demographic as a (to your credit, personal, so I may be misinterpreting it as a generalization) problem, I'd make some following statements. Of the people in my AP/accelerated classes, about half were _definitely_ not white collar. Parents in manual labor working 2 jobs, non-english-speaking immigrant families, etc. If we did not have what little acceleration was given, they would _never_ have gotten ANY attention they needed because their parents simply did not have it in them. It can be said that "that's their job" but even decades later I can't find any fault to their focus on providing some vestige of financial stability first. What I'm saying is that by assuming all families CAN have the parents shoulder education is an assumption rooted in much more of what I've seen of white collar than blue collar families. Pushing all families to take this on would likely hurt those without the spare time and background far more than those with. ANY opportunities we provide in that sense will continue to cyclically reinforce those with the resources to better leverage future opportunities. While I am not disagreeing to how invaluable teaching at the home is, I see publically taxed schooling as the great leveler, where the people have the chance to reallocate some of this opportunity to where it is most effective. Now, for the "incendiary" part of this post; where is "most effective", while I'm no teacher I can also say that a one size fits all policy with only the option of "do this material more deeply" for extention would absolutely _gut_ what little educational value existed for some of the top tier students in a comparable fashion to if you pushed the remedial classes into middle school calc. If I've learned one thing from decades in school, (and as an interesting tidbit, supplemented by years of open offices) it's that humans are so hilariously far from "one size fits all" in how they learn, and while reasonably consistent in "you'll get to do less of this near-purgatory experience" being FAR more of a motivator than "you'll get to do more", it's individualization and communication that bridges this gap, not regimentation.
- lettergram 10y ago
  I know several kids who never went to highschool. At 12-13 they enrolled in the local community college and got their GED at 16-17. It cost (at the time, in district) $2000 - $2500 per semester at the junior college. Although that's significant, the school district was actually paying ~$10,000 per student per year for public school so it was actually WAY cheaper. Regardless, those kids who went straight to college from middle school seemed 10x better off and all of the ones I know (or am friends with) are doing great.
  - jtbigwoo 10y ago
    A minor quibble: The state subsidizes all public colleges, most likely including your community college. Where I live (Minnesota) that subsidy accounts somewhere around half of the total cost. So community college probably costs about the same as high school.
    - lettergram 10y ago
      Fair point, I also know our city and county tax went there as well.
douche 10y ago
For math, at least, the solution is pretty simple: give them the book, and let them work through it at their own pace. Hopefully the teachers can keep up with the grading... We used the Saxon math program when I was in elementary/middle school, and the repetition was key there. I could get away with teaching myself, because I'd be seeing the same classes of problems over, and over, and over, long after I finished up the chapter introducing them. Unfortunately, after 7th grade, and burning through the Algebra 1 book, the district switched curriculums, and I didn't learn anything new until I took discrete math in college.
- colanderman 10y ago
  As someone to whom that solution was "applied", it's crap. Most teachers don't know enough of the material to answer questions, so you lose the guidance of experts, and since you're no longer working with peers, you lose the social aspect as well.
  - douche 10y ago
    Well, it's better than the usual alternatives, in my experience. If your teachers are incompetent, they won't be able to help you one way or the other, so it's best if they just get out of the way. As for the "social aspect", you rarely actually get to work with peers, and instead are coerced into doing the teacher's job for them. It was incredibly frustrating to drag along with people who just didn't have the brainpower to deal with the material.
    - dpark 10y ago
      I hated group work in school. It is incredibly frustrating to be forced to work with people who are not pulling their own weight, whether because they don't want to or just can't. Nonetheless, this is an important thing to learn to deal with. Frustration is part of life. So is dealing with both struggling and apathetic people.
      - CaptSpify 10y ago
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
When I was in HS, I was bored out of my mind and I would sleep through most of my classes. I had one teacher tell me I should just quit. I woke up to my accounting teacher telling another student that I've missed one question in nearly 2 semesters, so as long as my grades are that good, I can sleep all I want. Bored smart kids can be just as distracting as frustrated average (and below) kids.
Kuiper 10y ago
>The downside is for most of school they're bored out of their mind, and this can develop bad habits for when school eventually catches up to their abilities. This is something that I noticed as a significant problem when living in the freshman dorms during undergrad. You had a lot of smart kids who spent most of the school day bored, and they spend most of the school day reading novels in class before going home to spend 40+ hours a week playing video games or browsing reddit, all while maintaining perfect grades and never having to ask for help from teachers or peers. Then, they get to college where they encounter material that actually challenges them, but they're still in the habit of spending the hours of 3 PM to 11 PM playing World of Warcraft or League of Legends, and when they start falling behind they're still in the mindset of "I'm the smart kid, I shouldn't need to ask for help." You have kids who were high school valedictorians who end up failing classes during undergrad because they never learned how to properly function in a challenging academic environment. It can be quite a shock to transition from an environment where you might be in the 99th percentile of performers (top marks without having to try hard) to be one where you may not even be in the top 50% and actually need to put in more effort than your peers.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  It doesn't even have to be the valedictorians. I got B's and C's basically without studying until college. I had to learn how to study in college. We even had an introductory "how to study" class in college because it was such a problem. I was always told that "HS is hard, you can't just breeze through it", which was completely untrue, and I absolutely breezed through it. So I thought the same thing would apply to college, which it turns out, actually is hard.
  - mathattack 10y ago
    I agree. In undergrad Computer Science, I had my first "Oh sh*t" shocks. (My undergrad was a large state school, so I could coast outside of CS) I got a few more in grad school in other subjects.
  - amag 10y ago
    This is exactly my story as well. Even in HS, if I studied for an exam it would be a couple of hours the night before. Not so many A's maybe but plenty of B's and C's got me through just fine. Then it was quite a shock when I got to college/uni and learned the hard way that in many cases it took weeks of studying for an exam. Now in retrospect I'm quite proud of myself that I didn't give up. There were certainly times when I felt like doing just that.
ack 10y ago
In the elementary school my kids go to, everyone is grouped together. On a per-subject level, the kids who are stronger than the others go to a "plus-group" for that subject. It works pretty well. This is a school in the Netherlands, though.

arebop 10y ago

a teacher's rebuttal on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/4p0uc3/why_did_san_francisco_schools_stop_teaching/d4h7me7 https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/4p0uc3/why_di...

bryanlarsen 10y ago
It's in full agreement with the article, it's just a rebuttal of the click-bait title.
gshubert17 10y ago
The teacher's last sentence: tl;dr Why Did San Francisco Schools Stop Teaching Algebra in Middle School? They didn't. The topics of algebra are now spread through the middle school courses along with other foundations of geometry and probability/statistics. However, they did restructure the names and pathways in high school in such a way that might impact the way ability of a student to take a 2nd course in Calculus by Senior year of high school.
- justaman 10y ago
  I don't understand why they can't teach algebra in tandem with lower levels in math such as basic arithmetic. The abstract method of balancing both sides of the equation could boulster overall understanding. --Introduce algebra in grade school. As children learn things like fractions, introduce linear algebra. This, I think, would reduce some of the "when am I ever going to use this, i'm not going to even try".
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    They do, this is part of common core (which some people love and some people hate). My daughter has been doing very basic algebra since 2nd or 3rd grade? I do not remember EVER seeing an equation with an X in it until 6th grade.

pfarnsworth 10y ago

A couple of weeks ago, my Uber driver was a math teacher in the San Francisco school district. He advised me that if I could afford it, that I should unequivocally send my kids to private school and not to public school. The reason is that they now mix students of all abilities together, instead of separating them out and concentrating on each group separately like they did when we were kids. The thought was the good students would "pull up" and "positively influence" the students with less aptitude. However, what it did instead was to give the incentive to teachers to focus on worse students, who tended to be more disruptive, and essentially abandon the good students and let them fend for themselves. He mentioned that the "independent learners" were identified, and instead of being accelerated, they were left alone so that the poorer students could be concentrated on by the teachers. As a side note, I don't remember being taught algebra before the 9th grade either, in an excellent school district, and I was in a gifted class. I still kept my algebra textbook from the 10th grade and it's pretty standard algebra. In fact, I didn't even learn Calculus until college and I wasn't negatively impacted by that at all. However, this was almost 30 years ago so I'm sure educational standards have increased, but it's funny that what I learned back then is no longer "good enough".

pc86 10y ago
I'm 30 now and had a similar math education to you. Gifted track in middle/HS yet no algebra until 9th grade. No Calculus at all (although AP Calc was one of four AP classes my school offered). I did not major in CS so I've never taken a formal Calc class. If anyone has a good recommendation for a MOOC or similar for a working professional to learn Calculus I'd love to take it. Doesn't need to be free, would probably be more motivated to do well if it wasn't :)
- clintonb 10y ago
  https://www.edx.org/high-school https://www.edx.org/high-school
- onn_ 10y ago
  Coursera has a class called Calculus One for people with no previous calculus experience and another called Single Variable Calculus for people who've been exposed to it once. Pick your difficulty and there's an optional certificate you can pay for. The latter was definitely one of the best MOOCs I've taken.

zdw 10y ago

Why don't we start teaching the basics of set theory and algebra during elementary school? I know I'd have dealt with that far better than the "Do this page of 100 addition/subtraction problems as fast as you can" human calculator stupidity thrust upon us as math education. At least it sounds like common core is getting away from that sort of stuff.

jerf 10y ago
"Why don't we start teaching the basics of set theory and algebra during elementary school?" Based on what I'm saw coming home from my first grader, they are. The common core stuff at least comes from people who understood that having the student do a couple thousand "1 + 2 = ____" problems tends to promote the incorrect idea that the = symbol means "do the thing on the left and write it down", and I noticed a mix of "1 + __ = 3" and "___ = 1 + 2" in the problem sets. I noticed enough other places where the good ideas had been visibly chewed on by "the process" that I'm still not ecstatic about "common core", but at least the bits I've seen (up to first grade now) I do concede that there were good ideas at the beginning of the process. I'm not entirely convinced they made it through correctly, but they were there at the start. (Still a bit pissed that they took my kid who was adding single-digit numbers in his head and forced him to count on his fingers because That's What The Curriculum Says, though. Seems to have gotten over it by the end of the year, though, so no permanent damage. Still.)
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  > I noticed enough other places where the good ideas had been visibly chewed on by "the process" that I'm still not ecstatic about "common core", but at least the bits I've seen (up to first grade now) I do concede that there were good ideas at the beginning of the process. I'm not entirely convinced they made it through correctly, but they were there at the start. (Still a bit pissed that they took my kid who was adding single-digit numbers in his head and forced him to count on his fingers because That's What The Curriculum Says, though. Seems to have gotten over it by the end of the year, though, so no permanent damage. Still.) The standards are being ruined by terrible curricula providers, to the point where people conflate the standards and the curricula.

adwf 10y ago

How old is 8th grade? I'm just curious to compare it to the UK school system where the subjects aren't broken up so rigidly. I only learnt Maths, not Algebra 1/Calc 1, etc.

JMStewy 10y ago
The average 1st grader is 6 years old. 8th graders are around 13 years old.
thaumasiotes 10y ago
The prototype is that a 12th grader turns 18 sometime during that year. So the prototypical 8th grader would be 13-14 years old. Variation exists.
alistairSH 10y ago
The sibling responses are correct. A little further detail... US schools generally follow this pattern... Elementary School (Primary in the UK): Kindergarten First through Sixth grades Middle School: 7th and 8th grades High School (Secondary in UK): 9th through 12th grade (or, freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior). The boundary between each level varies, but I'd guess 70-80% of districts follow the above. The most common variation seems to be grouping 6th grade into middle school.

FuturePromise 10y ago

hmmm... > but ensures that all students enter high school with the same mathematical foundation There's a saying among conservative wags: "The opposite of quality is equality." That seems to be the case here.

fnayr 10y ago

It's not all that great to be super advanced in math very early either. I tested out of pre algebra in 7th grade because my dad basically taught me it over the summer. Took geometry in 8th grade. Took algebra 2 at community college over summer took pre calculus my freshman year, and took ap calculus my sophomore year but halfway through the year I found it too slow so I took calc bc online with Stanford. But then I took multivariate calc my junior year at a local cc and got a B in a math class for the first time ever. I got burnt out. And I hadn't learned the study methods required to succeed in college level mathematics. So even though I had always loved math and went into college first semester taking upper div math, I found myself disliking it more and more and eventually switching to economics. I think, had I not rushed so much, I may have have actually enjoyed it more and fully majored in it.

jboggan 10y ago
No offense, but if you were really going to go for it as a math major I think a minor stumble like getting a 'B' would have just made you double down. Point set topology was the gut-check class for me. On the article topic, this is pretty bad. Common Core 'intuitive' BS aside, kids need earlier exposure to algebraic concepts, it was the main reason they failed the elementary calculus and probability courses in college that I ended up teaching them. It was very draining to be wasting my time trying to explain to a senior at Georgia Tech how to solve 2x=1 and then by analogy 3x=1, though they could see no similarities between the two equations.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

kingmanaz 10y ago

>Why Did San Francisco Schools Stop Teaching Algebra in Middle School? Mandated equal outcomes coupled with racial diversity.

jrkatz 10y ago

Over the past ten years I've spent a lot of time volunteering in poor urban middle schools, mostly in math tutoring/teaching roles. Sure enough, one of the big hangups kids have is algebra. The article is right that it's one of the first real abstract problem solving skills we try to teach kids, and that definitely makes it harder for them. In my experience there is an additional problem: Basic arithmetic skills. If a kid can't do division and knows it, how can they approach a problem like, "It is 800 miles from Denver to LA by train. train A leaves from Denver to LA at 80mph while train B leaves from LA to Denver at 70mph. How far from LA do the trains cross paths?" We can start breaking this down: 70mi*x/h + 80mi*x/h = 800mi x * 70mi/h = M 150mi*x/h = 800mi x = 800mi/(150mi/h) x = 5.33...h M = 5.33h * 70mi/h M = 373.333...mi OK, that's all well and done. Now do that without division. Do that without a clear grasp of 1. what division does and 2. how to do division. The only thing you really know about division is that when you take tests on it, you tend to do poorly. You can't do this problem. You look at it and don't see any tools you can use to attack it because the only thing that works on it is division and you do not get division. The problem is, a lot of kids don't get division. Why? That's above my pay grade. If I was going to take a stab in the dark, I'd say that at the highest level it's to do with passing kids who shouldn't be passing, and then teaching the next year's class as if they already know what they need to know. Every year they fall a little bit more behind, until finally they're so lost it's hopeless. It's easy to take aim at algebra but what about the shaky foundation we're trying to build it on? Of course, this would require a lot of kids to be held back, and that's not an appealing solution. I think we need to assess where in our math education kids start to fall behind, and figure out what's wrong there. Unfortunately for the kids, the solution will probably involve more multiplication/division drill sheets, and more word problems to test those skills. The article also points out the difficulty in starting a STEM degree without calculus. I started a STEM degree without calculus. I was lucky to get into the university I got into without calculus, and the calc 1 course was taught as a remedial class for all the folks who got 4s instead of 5s on their AP calc exams. This is where I had my own first brush with trying to build the next layer of mathematics education on a shaky foundation. It was very difficult, I nearly quit, and it fucked up my GPA enough I was still paying for it four years later at my graduation. I was 18 and had a bright future to look forward to in graduating from a respected university with a STEM degree, and it was nearly too much for me. I don't see how we can ask 13 year old kids to do the same with algebra. We need to work out the kinks on the way there. When it's time for them to learn algebra we want them to have all the tools they need so they can focus on the algebra, not on the arithmetic. To be clear, I don't have any solutions here. Just a lot of problems.

frogpelt 10y ago

And the answer is: because all the kids have to be taught the same thing and they all have to be fit to the public school mold. I've heard it said that public schools are great for making factory workers. Of course, in most places private schools and even home schooling is an option, so all hope is not lost. And public education is good for many kids. It's the one-size-fits-all approach that is not always so effective.

danielmorozoff 10y ago

I grew up in San Francisco and experienced both public and private school mathematics . The former of which was astoundingly poorly run. It seemed the only way to actually make headway for students that were ahead was for them to study on their own. The primary issue imo is that math teachers do not seek to inspire students to see mathematics for what is is- a structure way to reason as opposed to a calculation tool replaced by computers. These breeds not only an aversion to the subject by fails to fulfill the basic reason for teaching math. My best math teacher in school gave us a lecture on chaos - this was algebra class and we were able to generate a fractal by a simple set of coin tosses. This evolved into the discussion of how prbability, physics/randomness of coin tosses and the general notions of chaos and dynamical systems. But such initiative and teachers were never rewarded. It's sad to see that the education problems seem to be regressing

Hexanite 10y ago

Having finished high school, a little over a year ago, I cannot understand how this can be beneficial in any way. We began pre-algebra in 6th grade and a large majority of kids did Algebra I 7th grade, possibly a harder class like Geometry, depending on how ahead they are. Sure, you could delve deeper into each topic, but when your classmates, are still struggling with basic Algebra, how much time does your teacher have to focus on giving you extra work? The accelerated kids would essentially be forcibly held back. The curriculum at my high school for the normal accelerated student was Algebra II, Trig/Calc A (calc I), calc BC (calc II), then calc III, and we had students even more accelerated than this. Starting at Algebra I in high school, would essentially shift everything back two years.

droithomme 10y ago

I read the district's explanation. http://www.sfusdmath.org/uploads/2/4/0/9/24098802/ccss-math-faq.pdf http://www.sfusdmath.org/uploads/2/4/0/9/24098802/ccss-math-... It says that Algebra was previously introduced in 8th grade and students were not prepared. Therefore they have moved that algebra content into normal math for grades 6-8, gradually introducing contents, along with other concepts. Then the full Common Core compliant Algebra class that focuses solely on Algebra is in 9th grade and they are hoping that students will do better with this approach. The article and the commentary here indicate that neither the author nor any but a very small number of commenters here bothered to look at the actual program, preferring to revel in personal suppositions and speculations.

Decade 10y ago

> Why did San Francisco Schools Stop Teaching Algebra in Middle School? Because the school superintendent and the board of education believe much more strongly in wealth redistribution and social equality than many of the constituents do. Local elections: They matter. Also, as the article says, the headline is clickbait. Common Core scatters algebra all over elementary school. The “traditional” curriculum, many years of arithmetic followed by Algebra I and II, geometry (plus proofs), trigonometry, and calculus, that is a harmful segmentation of math. Many students learn to hate and reject math before they even reach the parts that are useful to daily life. The trick is getting teachers to teach the Common Core curriculum. The uncomfortable truth is that many teachers have no business teaching math, and leave students horribly confused about what math actually is. I even encountered a (SFUSD) middle school math teacher who uses jokes to try to make math fun, but his children (going to SFUSD schools) grew up hating math.

blahblah3 10y ago

This really hurts the talented kids with less educated parents. Educated or well-off parents can always supplement with lessons at home or supplementary school (kumon)