7 ms·

California’s proposed new math curriculum defies logic

48 points by georgecmu 5y ago

nanis 5y ago
> Even more worrisome is the plan to replace an algebra-centered curriculum with one emphasizing data science, described as “21st century math.” I've taught all sorts of subjects ranging from Linear/Nonlinear Programming to Stats to Economic Theory at levels ranging from Intro to Ph.D. I have no idea how one does "data science" (something like very basic Intro Stats at this level, I presume) without a good grounding in algebra in a way that has any meaning. Sure, it is possible to teach the students to add 10 numbers and divide by 10 on a calculator and say they did "Data Schmeince" or some such. Or maybe they look at pictures and try to discern associations. Does anyone know what this "data science" approach entails? Update: Drafts are here in Word format: https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ - High School 52 - Data Science for Equity and Inclusion 53 - Data for All Students: Living in a World Overloaded with Information 56 - Advanced high school data science 66 - Content Learning Outcomes 74 - Sample Courses 79 - High School Tools and Resources 81 Where's the math?
- skyde 5y ago
  I am as (liberal/democrat) as you can get and still find curriculum like this very worrisome. They seem to think that math is not "inclusive" and the solution is to teach less math. its very similar to those 2 documents: [1]:https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11... "The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false" is on p. 65. "The focus is on getting the correct answer is White Supremacy" "requiring student to 'show their work is racist" [2] https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2021/03/opinion-antiracist-math-education-adds-up-to-better-results-for-students.html https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2021/03/opinion-antiracis...
  - iudqnolq 5y ago
    Your second link never says the last two quotes. In fact, seems to me to support showing your work > Today, getting the correct answer to a math problem is still important. But teachers are also showing students that being “good at math” means applying that correct answer in service of a larger goal ... > In math classes, an answer becomes a launching point for conversations about how and why people solved the problem in different ways. As we expand our understandings, teachers often welcome the problem-solving strategies that students bring from their homes and cultures in addition to familiar formal U.S. strategies. This means teachers must make space for students to explore why solutions work. > To accomplish this, we encourage teachers to focus on math problems that invite curiosity and discussion ...
    - skyde 5y ago
      Quote are from the first link only. I agree second link does not seem as bad. If the goal is on letting the students use a different (procedure/algorithm) that they learned a home instead of using the common core algorithm then I support it 100%
MarkusWandel 5y ago
From the article: Take the example of a geometry problem in Chapter Two: “A farmer has 36 individual fences, each measuring one meter in length … the farmer wants to put them together to make the biggest possible area.” This problem is completely inappropriate: It cannot be solved without very sophisticated math, rarely studied even in college. Really? It's been a while since I've had high school math, new or otherwise, but how hard can it be? Obviously you arrange the fences in a 36-sided polygon that's as close as possible to a circle. That can be represented as 36 pointy isosceles triangles, each with the pointy bit having 10 degrees angle and the base having one unit of length. High school trigonometry to work out the area of one of these, multiply by 36, and done. Easily within the skills of the high school curriculum I had. What am I missing?
- betaby 5y ago
  You are a missing a proof of max area. Exactly what author complains about. According her (and not only) teaching math problems just to memorize is not very useful.
  - option_greek 5y ago
    Yes. Just remembering that circle has the maximum area for same perimeter is pointless like remembering capital of a country: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/461853/given-a-fixed-perimeter-which-shape-will-have-the-maximum-area https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/461853/given-a-fixe... To truly understand it, students have to go beyond and those concepts aren't available for them yet.
    - zepto 5y ago
      How is it ‘pointless’? It’s applicable and useful whether or not you understand the proof. Similarly, remembering the capital of a country is useful when you hear that capital mentioned in a discussion. Both of these can be scaffolding that enables you to learn the deeper concepts. A far greater problem is students faced with nobody willing or able to teach the deeper concepts when they want to know about them.
systemvoltage 5y ago
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. This is what’s being proposed here in Oakland, CA : https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11... Professors and professionals at Berkeley/Stanford and many major universities have written an open letter highlighting concerns to the California Governor: https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13658 https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13658 Apparently, this was heard and they’re postponed the proposal for a vote to next year: https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/ag/ag/yr21/agenda202107.asp https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/ag/ag/yr21/agenda202107.asp I’ll leave my personal opinion out of this one, make what you will.
- camgunz 5y ago
  I don't know if this is what OP's referencing. I quickly searched for "farmer" from OP's example critique in that doc and didn't find it.
  - georgecmu 5y ago
    OP references something else. You can find the Chapter 2 (https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/mathfwchapter2.docx https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/mathfwchapter2.doc...) on this page linked from the article: https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ Here's the full vignette: Vignette–36 Fences Lori, a high school geometry teacher, introduces a problem to students. Lori explains that a farmer has 36 individual fences, each measuring one meter in length, and that the farmer wants to put them together to make the biggest possible area. Lori takes time to ask her students about their knowledge of farming, making reference to California’s role in the production of fruit, vegetables, and livestock. The students engage in an animated discussion about farms and the reasons a farmer may want a fenced area. While some of Lori’s long-term English learners show fluency with social/conversational English, she knows some will be challenged by forthcoming disciplinary literacy tasks. To support meaningful engagement in increasingly rigorous course work, she ensures images of all regular and irregular shapes are posted and labeled on the board, along with an optional sentence frame, “The fence should be arranged in a [blank] shape because [blank].” These support instruction when Lori asks students what shapes they think the fences could be arranged to form. Students suggest a rectangle, triangle, or square. With each response, Lori reinforces the word with the shape by pointing at the image of the shapes. When she asks, “How about a pentagon?” she reminds students of the optional sentence frame as they craft their response. Lori asks, the students think about this and talk about it as mathematicians. Lori asked them whether they want to make irregular shapes allowable or not. After some discussion, Lori asks the students to think about the biggest possible area that the fences can make. Some students begin by investigating different sizes of rectangles and squares, some plot graphs to investigate how areas change with different side lengths. Susan works alone, investigating hexagons––she works out the area of a regular hexagon by dividing it into six triangles and she has drawn one of the triangles separately. She tells Lori that she knew that the angle at the top of each triangle must be 60 degrees, so she could draw the triangles exactly to scale using compasses and find the area by measuring the height. Niko has found that the biggest area for a rectangle with perimeter 36 is a 9 x 9 square—which gave him the idea that shapes with equal sides may give bigger areas and he started to think about equilateral triangles. Niko was about to draw an equilateral triangle when he was distracted by Jaden who told him to forget triangles, he had found that the shape with the largest area made of 36 fences was a 36-sided shape. Jaden suggested to Niko that he find the area of a 36-sided shape too and he leant across the table excitedly, explaining how to do this. He explained that you divide the 36-sided shape into triangles and all of the triangles must have a one-meter base, Niko joined in saying, “Yes, and their angles must be 10 degrees!” Jaden said, “Yes, and to work it out we need tangent ratios which Lori has just explained to me.” Jaden and Niko move closer together, incorporating ideas from trigonometry, to calculate the area. As the class progressed many students started using trigonometry, some students were shown the ideas by Lori, some by other students. The students were excited to learn about trig ratios as they enabled them to go further in their investigations, they made sense to them in the context of a real problem, and the methods were useful to them. In later activities the students revisited their knowledge of trigonometry and used them to solve other problems.
rayiner 5y ago
My mom thought American math was already dumb and watered down in the 1990s when we came here from Bangladesh. Apparently it just keeps getting worse. The sad thing about all this is that the elites will just bypass this damage in the system. We just enrolled our 8 year old daughter in outside of school math tutoring. This will just hurt middle class kids who will get a watered down education.
- nix23 5y ago
  If read an article that parents in the US sends their children into "russian-math-classes" after school, but maybe gender/social studies are more important atm in the US ;)
- rootsudo 5y ago
  Same, was enrolled in private school in USA. Public schools in USA are more about babysitting vs teaching kids to critically think and learn. I don't see how people in the USA argue over specific spots of land/housing stock just to send their kid to a "good" school when the standards are so bad across the board.
  - rayiner 5y ago
    I went to public but got math tutoring from an Indian guy. It costs money but it’s not some outrageous expense. The best tutors are educated but underemployed Indians and Russians. My uncle was an electrical engineer “back in old country.” His degree didn’t carry over in Canada, so he does math tutoring.
sam_goody 5y ago
Tom Lehrer complained about "New Math" some 60 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIKGV2cTgqA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIKGV2cTgqA (To be honest, "new math" makes sense to me. But whatever, for us oldies this is as obligatory as a XKCD) He had no idea about where the world would go with "woke", though.
Tainnor 5y ago
> Another example is a 5th-grade lesson, where a problem with Ms. Hernandez knitting a scarf for her grandson is labeled noninclusive and then modified to one where Mr. Hernandez is knitting a scarf because “guys can knit too.” Unless the authors intend to imply that women should never knit, it is a crime against fundamental logic. What the hell is up with that weird example? The link sends me to a YouTube video completely devoid of context and in very poor quality. I don't know who made that video and in what way (if in any way) it is related to this proposed curriculum. If it is, the article should make this connection clear. Moreover, as much as it may be pointless to replace "Mrs. Hernandez" with "Mr. Hernandez" in that question, it's certainly not "defying logic", it's just arbitrarily redefining the (irrelevant) context for a maths problem. I find people who complain about such a change at least as annoying as the ones arguing incessantly for these kinds of changes. As the article is otherwise very light on details about what's wrong with the curriculum (the example with the fence is the only concrete thing that is being referred to that is not ridiculous, and even that is arguable), this just looks to me like some opinion piece that tries to fan the flames of some culture war. It's quite possible that there are problems with this proposed curriculum (I don't live in California, I know nothing about it), but this article is not making a very clear case.
the_only_law 5y ago
> Even more worrisome is the plan to replace an algebra-centered curriculum with one emphasizing data science As someone who never jumped on or even cared to investigate the whole “data science” hype train, what does that look like at a primary/secondary education level?

48 points by georgecmu 5y ago

> Even more worrisome is the plan to replace an algebra-centered curriculum with one emphasizing data science, described as “21st century math.” I've taught all sorts of subjects ranging from Linear/Nonlinear Programming to Stats to Economic Theory at levels ranging from Intro to Ph.D. I have no idea how one does "data science" (something like very basic Intro Stats at this level, I presume) without a good grounding in algebra in a way that has any meaning. Sure, it is possible to teach the students to add 10 numbers and divide by 10 on a calculator and say they did "Data Schmeince" or some such. Or maybe they look at pictures and try to discern associations. Does anyone know what this "data science" approach entails? Update: Drafts are here in Word format: https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ - High School 52 - Data Science for Equity and Inclusion 53 - Data for All Students: Living in a World Overloaded with Information 56 - Advanced high school data science 66 - Content Learning Outcomes 74 - Sample Courses 79 - High School Tools and Resources 81 Where's the math?

skyde 5y ago
I am as (liberal/democrat) as you can get and still find curriculum like this very worrisome. They seem to think that math is not "inclusive" and the solution is to teach less math. its very similar to those 2 documents: [1]:https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11... "The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false" is on p. 65. "The focus is on getting the correct answer is White Supremacy" "requiring student to 'show their work is racist" [2] https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2021/03/opinion-antiracist-math-education-adds-up-to-better-results-for-students.html https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2021/03/opinion-antiracis...
- iudqnolq 5y ago
  Your second link never says the last two quotes. In fact, seems to me to support showing your work > Today, getting the correct answer to a math problem is still important. But teachers are also showing students that being “good at math” means applying that correct answer in service of a larger goal ... > In math classes, an answer becomes a launching point for conversations about how and why people solved the problem in different ways. As we expand our understandings, teachers often welcome the problem-solving strategies that students bring from their homes and cultures in addition to familiar formal U.S. strategies. This means teachers must make space for students to explore why solutions work. > To accomplish this, we encourage teachers to focus on math problems that invite curiosity and discussion ...
  - skyde 5y ago
    Quote are from the first link only. I agree second link does not seem as bad. If the goal is on letting the students use a different (procedure/algorithm) that they learned a home instead of using the common core algorithm then I support it 100%

MarkusWandel 5y ago

From the article: Take the example of a geometry problem in Chapter Two: “A farmer has 36 individual fences, each measuring one meter in length … the farmer wants to put them together to make the biggest possible area.” This problem is completely inappropriate: It cannot be solved without very sophisticated math, rarely studied even in college. Really? It's been a while since I've had high school math, new or otherwise, but how hard can it be? Obviously you arrange the fences in a 36-sided polygon that's as close as possible to a circle. That can be represented as 36 pointy isosceles triangles, each with the pointy bit having 10 degrees angle and the base having one unit of length. High school trigonometry to work out the area of one of these, multiply by 36, and done. Easily within the skills of the high school curriculum I had. What am I missing?

betaby 5y ago
You are a missing a proof of max area. Exactly what author complains about. According her (and not only) teaching math problems just to memorize is not very useful.
- option_greek 5y ago
  Yes. Just remembering that circle has the maximum area for same perimeter is pointless like remembering capital of a country: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/461853/given-a-fixed-perimeter-which-shape-will-have-the-maximum-area https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/461853/given-a-fixe... To truly understand it, students have to go beyond and those concepts aren't available for them yet.
  - zepto 5y ago
    How is it ‘pointless’? It’s applicable and useful whether or not you understand the proof. Similarly, remembering the capital of a country is useful when you hear that capital mentioned in a discussion. Both of these can be scaffolding that enables you to learn the deeper concepts. A far greater problem is students faced with nobody willing or able to teach the deeper concepts when they want to know about them.

systemvoltage 5y ago

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. This is what’s being proposed here in Oakland, CA : https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11... Professors and professionals at Berkeley/Stanford and many major universities have written an open letter highlighting concerns to the California Governor: https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13658 https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13658 Apparently, this was heard and they’re postponed the proposal for a vote to next year: https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/ag/ag/yr21/agenda202107.asp https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/ag/ag/yr21/agenda202107.asp I’ll leave my personal opinion out of this one, make what you will.

camgunz 5y ago
I don't know if this is what OP's referencing. I quickly searched for "farmer" from OP's example critique in that doc and didn't find it.
- georgecmu 5y ago
  OP references something else. You can find the Chapter 2 (https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/mathfwchapter2.docx https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/mathfwchapter2.doc...) on this page linked from the article: https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ Here's the full vignette: Vignette–36 Fences Lori, a high school geometry teacher, introduces a problem to students. Lori explains that a farmer has 36 individual fences, each measuring one meter in length, and that the farmer wants to put them together to make the biggest possible area. Lori takes time to ask her students about their knowledge of farming, making reference to California’s role in the production of fruit, vegetables, and livestock. The students engage in an animated discussion about farms and the reasons a farmer may want a fenced area. While some of Lori’s long-term English learners show fluency with social/conversational English, she knows some will be challenged by forthcoming disciplinary literacy tasks. To support meaningful engagement in increasingly rigorous course work, she ensures images of all regular and irregular shapes are posted and labeled on the board, along with an optional sentence frame, “The fence should be arranged in a [blank] shape because [blank].” These support instruction when Lori asks students what shapes they think the fences could be arranged to form. Students suggest a rectangle, triangle, or square. With each response, Lori reinforces the word with the shape by pointing at the image of the shapes. When she asks, “How about a pentagon?” she reminds students of the optional sentence frame as they craft their response. Lori asks, the students think about this and talk about it as mathematicians. Lori asked them whether they want to make irregular shapes allowable or not. After some discussion, Lori asks the students to think about the biggest possible area that the fences can make. Some students begin by investigating different sizes of rectangles and squares, some plot graphs to investigate how areas change with different side lengths. Susan works alone, investigating hexagons––she works out the area of a regular hexagon by dividing it into six triangles and she has drawn one of the triangles separately. She tells Lori that she knew that the angle at the top of each triangle must be 60 degrees, so she could draw the triangles exactly to scale using compasses and find the area by measuring the height. Niko has found that the biggest area for a rectangle with perimeter 36 is a 9 x 9 square—which gave him the idea that shapes with equal sides may give bigger areas and he started to think about equilateral triangles. Niko was about to draw an equilateral triangle when he was distracted by Jaden who told him to forget triangles, he had found that the shape with the largest area made of 36 fences was a 36-sided shape. Jaden suggested to Niko that he find the area of a 36-sided shape too and he leant across the table excitedly, explaining how to do this. He explained that you divide the 36-sided shape into triangles and all of the triangles must have a one-meter base, Niko joined in saying, “Yes, and their angles must be 10 degrees!” Jaden said, “Yes, and to work it out we need tangent ratios which Lori has just explained to me.” Jaden and Niko move closer together, incorporating ideas from trigonometry, to calculate the area. As the class progressed many students started using trigonometry, some students were shown the ideas by Lori, some by other students. The students were excited to learn about trig ratios as they enabled them to go further in their investigations, they made sense to them in the context of a real problem, and the methods were useful to them. In later activities the students revisited their knowledge of trigonometry and used them to solve other problems.

rayiner 5y ago

My mom thought American math was already dumb and watered down in the 1990s when we came here from Bangladesh. Apparently it just keeps getting worse. The sad thing about all this is that the elites will just bypass this damage in the system. We just enrolled our 8 year old daughter in outside of school math tutoring. This will just hurt middle class kids who will get a watered down education.

nix23 5y ago
If read an article that parents in the US sends their children into "russian-math-classes" after school, but maybe gender/social studies are more important atm in the US ;)
rootsudo 5y ago
Same, was enrolled in private school in USA. Public schools in USA are more about babysitting vs teaching kids to critically think and learn. I don't see how people in the USA argue over specific spots of land/housing stock just to send their kid to a "good" school when the standards are so bad across the board.
- rayiner 5y ago
  I went to public but got math tutoring from an Indian guy. It costs money but it’s not some outrageous expense. The best tutors are educated but underemployed Indians and Russians. My uncle was an electrical engineer “back in old country.” His degree didn’t carry over in Canada, so he does math tutoring.

sam_goody 5y ago

Tom Lehrer complained about "New Math" some 60 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIKGV2cTgqA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIKGV2cTgqA (To be honest, "new math" makes sense to me. But whatever, for us oldies this is as obligatory as a XKCD) He had no idea about where the world would go with "woke", though.

Tainnor 5y ago

> Another example is a 5th-grade lesson, where a problem with Ms. Hernandez knitting a scarf for her grandson is labeled noninclusive and then modified to one where Mr. Hernandez is knitting a scarf because “guys can knit too.” Unless the authors intend to imply that women should never knit, it is a crime against fundamental logic. What the hell is up with that weird example? The link sends me to a YouTube video completely devoid of context and in very poor quality. I don't know who made that video and in what way (if in any way) it is related to this proposed curriculum. If it is, the article should make this connection clear. Moreover, as much as it may be pointless to replace "Mrs. Hernandez" with "Mr. Hernandez" in that question, it's certainly not "defying logic", it's just arbitrarily redefining the (irrelevant) context for a maths problem. I find people who complain about such a change at least as annoying as the ones arguing incessantly for these kinds of changes. As the article is otherwise very light on details about what's wrong with the curriculum (the example with the fence is the only concrete thing that is being referred to that is not ridiculous, and even that is arguable), this just looks to me like some opinion piece that tries to fan the flames of some culture war. It's quite possible that there are problems with this proposed curriculum (I don't live in California, I know nothing about it), but this article is not making a very clear case.

the_only_law 5y ago

> Even more worrisome is the plan to replace an algebra-centered curriculum with one emphasizing data science As someone who never jumped on or even cared to investigate the whole “data science” hype train, what does that look like at a primary/secondary education level?