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California moves to recommend delaying algebra to 9th grade statewide

• friedman23 5y ago
  I always enjoy watching people experiment on themselves with this sort of social engineering when it doesn't affect me whatsoever. Even without this I would never consider sending my children to public schools anyway.
• _-david-_ 5y ago
  If racism is actually causing blacks and Hispanics to not make it into advanced classes then why are Asians making it in?
  • anm89 5y ago
    They are clearly excelling at math just to be racist. Also my brother's Chinese wife is on faculty at an Ivy League school and she was explicitly informed that when discussing diversity issues, she is white. The mind boggles
  • threatofrain 5y ago
    The very long multi-part document on white supremacy in mathematics does not mention Asians even once, despite that they are somewhere between 15.5% to 17% of the state population.
  • akomtu 5y ago
    US admits only the top 1% of Asians with its immigration policies. Same for most other countries. If average rural Chinese folks could immigrate to US, we'd see a more "equitable" picture.
    • Jensson 5y ago
      Then why would California school discriminate against Asians in admissions? Wasn't the point of affirmative action to counteract discrimination, but now it seems like it just makes the discrimination Asians already face even worse? If institutions openly discriminating against you is not "institutional racism" then I don't know what is.
    • barry-cotter 5y ago
      The Asian advantage in education long pre-dates selectivity in immigration. You see the same pattern in the children of Asian peasants. See every generatio of Asian immigrants to the US since teh California Gold Rush.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > If racism is actually causing blacks and Hispanics to not make it into advanced classes then why are Asians making it in? Because immigration policy and conditions highly selects Asians for educational achievement. Hispanic immigrants are basically selected inversely, whereas blacks are overwhelmingly not immigrants or early-generation Americans. https://items.ssrc.org/from-our-programs/it-takes-more-than-grit-reframing-asian-american-academic-achievement/ https://items.ssrc.org/from-our-programs/it-takes-more-than-...
    • _-david-_ 5y ago
      Asians in the past who came over 100 years ago and have lived in the US did not have selective immigration rules based on education. Their prodigy are doing better than blacks who have also lived here for generations. Some Asians were even put in concentration camps 80 years ago and were heavily discriminated against. I understand the argument about Hispanics since many are new immigrants though.
• rllearneratwork 5y ago
  what a shame. vote all those clowns out.
• Jansen312 5y ago
  Seems to even more dumbing down the populace starting from kids. How are we going to be competitive when every Asians from Koreans to Singaporean to Chinese to Indians kids are doing maths that majority American adult can't? I think Cali is just setting up excuse to mass import Asians in later decades.
• agent008t 5y ago
  The problem is that the US, and California in particular, has no shortage of brilliant engineers from all over the world willing to come and work there and to do research. As such, there is no incentive to make the best of home-grown talent. There is no skin in the game.
• Tieje 5y ago
  I disagreed at first, but it makes sense. This will probably not really affect high achievers while making math a more inclusive subject to minorities whose sub-cultures don't value math much. If math appreciation contributes to a love of learning then that's good enough for me.
• hellol-amda 5y ago
  tutors are the best when used wisely but the worst when they become necessacity. one size fit for for for all doesn't work, will never work. quality of teachers matters most than than anything. readiness of the kid is as important as the quality of teachers, rest is just bunch of opinions
• skbrownz 5y ago
  Math is racist cause the numbers are black but the paper is white!
• hanniabu 5y ago
  Well that's stupid. If anything they should introduce it sooner. There's tons of research that show the sooner it's introduced the better they are able to digest that (as in it becomes more second nature and are later able to reason with it and build off that knowledge better).
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    It's hard to introduce Algebra much earlier than 8th grade - the students just don't have the mathematical maturity for it. What you can do though is challenge and expose them to slightly more complex applications of ordinary math (often stated via increasingly elaborate "word problems") that make the introduction of algebra a lot more natural when the students are finally up for it. You tend to see this approach in the various "Singapore Math", "Russian Math", what have you.
    • Manuel_D 5y ago
      My elementary school was introducing algebra in 4th and 5th grade. Questions like "7 * ? = 21" aren't explicitly teaching algebra - student's aren't being taught the multiplicative property of equality, they're just remembering their times tables - but it's laying the foundation.
    • soperj 5y ago
      I introduced my kid to Algebra in gr.2 during that first stretch of covid last year. He's not particularly adept at Math(doesn't struggle with it - it was gr.2 though so simple + and -), but it really didn't take much.
    • pineconewarrior 5y ago
      Seems entirely arbitrary (if not false?). I was taught the basics of algebra and even trig (at least, how pi and radians work) in the 4th and 5th grade
      • zozbot234 5y ago
        Yes, but I'm talking about what works well for the average student, not just math whizs who post on HN.
• sys_64738 5y ago
  What age is ninth grade? We were doing Algebra by eleven.
  • darth_avocado 5y ago
    The difference between education across the world and USA is that you treat algebra as one subject and therefore don't do it every year. In India, you had to do algebra starting grade 6 all the way to grade 12. The more complex the theory, the later you learn it. Makes sense to have that kind of gradual learning imho.
  • friedman23 5y ago
    I think around 13 years old.
    • mardifoufs 5y ago
      That's pretty much when we actually start algebra here in quebec. Agreed that it's a bit late though.
  • mlex 5y ago
    In Canada, ninth grade was around 14-15 years old, depending on the month you were born. I think the US has a similar timescale for primary/secondary schooling.
    • ng12 5y ago
      Yup, 14-15. It's freshman year of highschool in the US.
  • ksd482 5y ago
    So was I. I was introduced to it in 7th grade (India) and I was 12~13. Edit: fixed age range
  • chefandy 5y ago
    In a US public school, I was doing very basic algebra— math with variables— in 6th grade, which is around age 11. The class called 'Algebra' in the US school system, which this article references, is a subset of what Algebra actually is on a whole. Very basic algebra before high school (which starts at grade 9, or age 14/15) is often called pre-algebra.
• WillPostForFood 5y ago
  It’s the official shift from “we can lift everyone up” to “we need to hold everyone down”. It wasn’t that long ago the California was touting the success of Algebra for everyone in 8th grade.
  • RyJones 5y ago
    in this timeline, we are all Harrison Bergeron.
    • WillPostForFood 5y ago
      Both policies were an elaborate dance to avoid the reality that different kids have different needs and abilities.
      • ajmurmann 5y ago
        Germany solved this by past 4 years of primary school having three different advanced schools that prepare for different types of careers and that have different durations. That's in addition to having AP classes towards the end. It has the downside that it disadvantages late developing children, but there are also ways to continue at the higher schools if you do really well. Making the jump is harder though. I think this is a decent trade-off between going slower for some kids and holding others back who could go faster and more advanced.
  • TimTheTinker 5y ago
    This "single standard" to me is like outlawing adjustable seats in cars. In the UK, they start separating students into separate tracks around 8th grade. Some will excel in math and science, so give them the opportunity to really go for it and take hard classes. Others will excel in other areas. But if everyone is lumped together in the same bucket and forced into the same mold, the average student's highest level of achievement across all subjects goes significantly down.
    • ipaddr 5y ago
• zozbot234 5y ago
  This is not going to work well unless they massively improve math instruction in the lower grades. In fact they seem to be taking the opposite approach, where "equity" just means setting every student up for failure equally.
  • civilized 5y ago
    Many American K-12 education administrators dream of making schools into diploma mills: 100% graduation rates, 100% test scores, 100% meaningless and unaccountable. "Racial justice" is just their latest leverage to move closer to this goal.
    • imtringued 5y ago
      Also 100% less teachers and 100% more administrators...
• holonomically 5y ago
  I was doing algebra and Russian math word problems in 4th grade (maybe earlier, it's been a while). What exactly is the logic of pushing back mathematical training to later grades? [1] 1: https://www.edhelper.com/geography/Russia_Math1.htm https://www.edhelper.com/geography/Russia_Math1.htm
  • rhino369 5y ago
    " . . . as a means of promoting equity" and "The intent of the state mathematics framework, its designers say, is to maintain rigor while also helping remedy California’s achievement gaps for Black, Latino and low-income students, which remain some of the largest in the nation. It's Harrison Bergeron Math.
    • logicalmonster 5y ago
      Is there an achievement gap for other groups such as Asian students?
      • jdkee 5y ago
        Asian students outperform their white peers. See https://infogram.com/mathdisparities-ag-1h984wd3y7lv2p3 https://infogram.com/mathdisparities-ag-1h984wd3y7lv2p3
        • ibejoeb 5y ago
          This is exactly the reason NYC terminated the gifted and talented program. They're all so woke that they've reinvented anti-literacy laws.
        • carom 5y ago
          We shouldn't teach them until 11th grade, give everyone a few years head start.
      • aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
        Yes. But I'm afraid in the opposite direction.
• hprotagonist 5y ago
  "Yet for all the sound and fury, the proposed framework, about 800-pages long, is little more than a set of suggestions. Its designers are revising it now and will subject it to 60 more days of public review. Once it’s approved in July, districts may adopt as much or as little of the framework as they choose — and can disregard it completely without any penalty."
  • sharken 5y ago
    Sounds like a huge waste of taxpayers money, the silver lining is that sensible schools can disregard this bad idea altogether.
    • readams 5y ago
      The bad schools will embrace it though, further exacerbating unequal access to good education.
  • sieabahlpark 5y ago
    That's not a reason to ignore the stupidity of the premise in the first place. All your comment strives to do is highlight a lack of educational cohesion that will arise if they don't follow the guidelines.
• whyage 5y ago
  Are they trying to get everyone to be above average?
  • bregma 5y ago
    It's easy to do if you focus on bringing the average down. I can even show that algebraically.
    • anm89 5y ago
      You should probably wait a few years before attempting that.
• darth_avocado 5y ago
  Here's a revolutionary idea that pretty much all of the world adopts, if students are having trouble with a topic, get them to do more of it, instead of running away from it. I always find it hilarious that the pre college education in US is so messed up. Instead of doing Algebra 1, Algebra 2, calculus, geometry as one subject that you do in a year and then completely forgetting about it till the next time you have to do it, how about you do a little bit of everything every year from grade 8-12. Problem solved. For e.g. in India you learn geometry, algebra, etc. every year from grade 6 to grade 12. i.e. You have a single subject called "Math" that teaches grade appropriate concepts in all the topics in math. Trains the mind gradually over 7 years instead of one big dump. In undergrad in USA, I cruised through most of my freshmen math classes because I had learnt most of it in high school.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • nottorp 5y ago
    > I always find it hilarious that the pre college education in US is so messed up. Instead of doing Algebra 1, Algebra 2, calculus, geometry as one subject that you do in a year and then completely forgetting about it for the rest of the high school, how about you do a little bit of everything every year from grade 8-12. Problem solved. I don't understand. US high school kids only do math one year out of the 4? And nothing else math related during the other 3 years? I mean, instead of doing a little bit of math spread across all the years so you know, they don't forget everything? Does this go for other subjects as well?
    • darth_avocado 5y ago
      No they do math every year, it's just not well designed so that each topic is spread evenly. [Updated the wording to make it more clear]
    • ramesh31 5y ago
      Math in US high schools ends at what most countries would consider a middle school level. Algebra 2 is generally the only requirement. The vast majority of students graduate without ever even knowing what calculus is.
• TravonteWells 5y ago
  Reminds me of the movie Idiocracy, but instead of wrestlers running the government, it’s wokesters.
• ghettoCoder 5y ago
  One more nail in the public education system. This will amplify the inequality through middle class folks hiring tutors and such or just opting for private schools where the curriculum is “modified”.
• ng12 5y ago
  > applies social justice principles to math lessons. ... huh? Does anyone know what this looks like?
  • tomatofarmer 5y ago
    They teach that math is subjective. Objectivity is the corner stone of white supremacy. > "The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so. Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict." https://equitablemath.org/ https://equitablemath.org/ https://www.newsweek.com/math-suffers-white-supremacy-according-bill-gates-funded-course-1571511 https://www.newsweek.com/math-suffers-white-supremacy-accord...
    • ibejoeb 5y ago
      From the text: Incorporate the history of mathematics into lessons. • Verbal Example: Why do you think we call it Pythagorean’s theorem, when it was used before he was even born? What should we call it instead? You can only cram so many failures into one excerpt...
    • pineconewarrior 5y ago
      from the Newsweek link: > She noted that an earlier draft of the framework included sample lessons on calculating a school cafeteria’s food waste — but that many of her students would have found the entire exercise alienating because they lack food security at home. .... .... how about we fix the lack of food security instead of all of this!?
  • frozenlettuce 5y ago
    I'm curious to see how this will turn out as other countries are not buying into this nonsense. In an increasingly competitive world this is a recipe for disaster.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• akomtu 5y ago
  JKR was really spot on with the Dolores Umbridge character. For those who didn't read HP, the plot was that their ministry of education sent Umbridge to the (only) school with the only goal: prevent students from learning certain subjects. I feel like this Umbridge character is the inspiration for the radical left.
• b5n 5y ago
  There's more value in flexibility than catering to the lowest common denominator. There's plenty of money to do so, unfortunately it gets leeched out before ever reaching the classroom. People learn at a different pace. Algebra should be available as early as 7th grade, and can be deferred to 9th for those with different aptitudes. The reason many minorities and POC lag behind has nothing to do with race. Like many issues in the US there are effective ways to address this, none of which survive the compromises and competing desires of bureaucracy.
• zz865 5y ago
  The program was also to allow Statistics and Data Science as alternatives, which tbh is probably more relevant for a lot of people.
• Nitrolo 5y ago
  As someone who's never been in an American school, what does algebra entail in the US curriculum usually? Is this the first time "solve for x" is introduced? How broad is the amount of teaching that happens in algebra?
• seibelj 5y ago
  Wow I took algebra in 6th grade and it was easy for me. This is sad and dumb.
• 63 5y ago
  The article does a great job of covering what people think about these changes, but a terrible job of covering what on earth the changes actually are. I felt like I was trying to solve a mystery where every paragraph buried in the opinions were small clues about what they're actually talking about.
• standardUser 5y ago
  I guess one benefit of this approach is it costs nearly nothing. The better approach would be providing qualified tutors for free to struggling students, or to make current math classes smaller, or to add TAs to existing classes. But all of that costs money. You could also argue that a more holistic approach could help. Things like better meals at schools, better transportation options to and from schools or a wider range of class times. Again, all expensive options compared to simply limiting options and forcing students into fewer buckets.
  • twofornone 5y ago
    The costs come later in a form of a generally less competent society.
• justinzollars 5y ago
  This state has lost its mind. When I have kids, they are going to private schools or if I can't afford that home school. Seems like the aim of California schools is to create politically radical students, who can't do math. Perfect for our times!
  • rllearneratwork 5y ago
    we have two kids: 4 and 7 and live in the Bay Area. And at this point every other parents we know of with kids of similar age are either private school, homeschool or are moving/have moved to Texas/Florida.
    • sg47 5y ago
      Texas/Florida, the bastions of intelligence
    • justinzollars 5y ago
      I've been in SF for 12 years. All of my friends with Kids have moved.
  • friedman23 5y ago
    Let's say you are an extremist of any sort of ideology. Generally people that are obsessed with such ideologies are also obsessed with the idea of spreading it via indoctrination. So whereas a normal well adjusted human would design an education curriculum for improving the lives of the students an ideologically obsessed person will design it to promote their ideology at all other cost.
• fsn4dN69ey 5y ago
  My parents introduced it to me at home around 4th-5th grade? So I was ~9-10yo? Not sure why delaying it will help, if anything the earlier the better. Everything I hear about "equity in education" seems to be making it worse, but more equally I guess. Like another poster already mentioned, reminds me of the Harrison Bergeron story by Vonnegut - seems like we are rapidly approaching that point. http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
  • Aerroon 5y ago
    To be fair, the basics of algebra are already taught in first grade (or whenever you learn arithmetic). Kids at that age won't have questions such as x + 3 = 7 Instead, they will get questions such as __ + 3 = 7 They might not formally learn it, but they'll learn the patterns that they will eventually apply in algebra.
    • gpm 5y ago
      And if we were any good at teaching math we would just naturally go with it from there, "algebra" wouldn't even be a subject, it would just be something you do by default as teachers first replaced _ with x (hopefully before you even got too used to _), and then started making the equations gradually more complex. "Solving linear equations with multiple variables", "solving quadratic equations", "solving polynomials", etc. Those are things you really need to teach as a distinct concept. Algebra is just the language, introduced in a pedagogically sound way you wouldn't even realize you were learning it.
      • mlyle 5y ago
        Yah. I think we go about things all wrong. Even "new math" is too rote/heavy on memorization of process. And not enough patterns/puzzles/games/etc. We need to find a way that the math content can be interesting for 80% of the room, and provide competition where there's multiple axes of success and multiple ways to stand out. Then you get everyone in the room really trying. Instead, what happens is this: we start with curriculum that is very algorithm-heavy, taught by elementary teachers who generally do not love math. Half of the kids struggle with the rote-heavy workload and fall behind, and it becomes a frantic effort to try and drill steps into kids' heads who just hate it more and more. For a lot of the class, this is very painful and zero-sum, and it's only fear of what the teacher will say to parents that generates any effort. [Note, I do think there is a point around 3rd grade developmentally where it makes sense to drill some arithmetic processes, and around 8th-9th grade to drill some algebraic process... but algebraic ideas can come in well before that time and hopefully be taught in a way that makes them interesting].
• jdkee 5y ago
  "A key sticking point in the approval process has been the framework’s recommendation that teachers refrain from labeling students as “naturally talented” in math. This has led to accusations from parents and educators that it holds back “gifted” students." Along with NYC mayor deBlasio seeking to terminate that city's gifted and talented education programs as well as Virginia's recent approach to "equity" by decontenting gifted education. The examples demonstrate the illiberal trends we are seeing in the U.S. wherein novel concepts like "equity" replace "equality" and merit is seen as racist. See https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/world/nyc-schools-will-replace-the-gifted-and-talented-admissions-exam-with-a-lottery-this-year.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/world/nyc-schools-will-re... See also https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4979 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4979 See also https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/mit-abandons-its-mission-and-me https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/mit-abandons-its-mission-an...
  • akomtu 5y ago
    These days when I need to vote for a representative or a school board administrator, I read their website and if I see words "equity" or "social justice" there, I cross that candidate out of my list.
  • xsmasher 5y ago
    The podcast "Nice White Parents" makes a good case that gifted programs in NYC were essentially used to create two separate-and-unequal systems of education for black and white students inside the public schools. If you don't want to call that a "racist" system we can call it an unequal system or a caste system; but the trend you're seeing is an effort to fix that system. The people who were (unknowingly?) on the PLUS side of the equation, they're going to complain loudly as it gets leveled out.
    • barry-cotter 5y ago
      > The podcast "Nice White Parents" makes a good case that gifted programs in NYC were essentially used to create two separate-and-unequal systems of education for black and white students inside the public schools. And let's pretend Asians don't exist. Affirmative action is about keeping Asian numbers down. So is getting rid of gifted programmes.
• aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
  I have a better idea. Delay it indefinitely, as long as there's as much as a single kid who struggles with it! It's the only way for true equality of outcome.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• bko 5y ago
  This is one of those issues that I can't understand the opposing argument. It's just an issue I find so objectionable that I cannot understand why anyone would be imposing this. Literally holding kids back. The only defense I hear is that kids don't really benefit from advanced classes and they'll be fine anyway. But gifted children will not necessarily be fine. Most of the smartest people I know struggled in school just, but most were fortunately saved by advanced placement classes that put them in classes where they can learn at a faster pace than the rest of the children. Were they forced to stay in what to them amounted to remedial classes, they would grow to resent education and actually underperform. The utter disregard the people pushing these policies have for children is appalling. Hopefully this is just a weird time in our countries history where that we'll look back on and think how absurd the policies were.
  • unanswered 5y ago
    You're not supposed to understand "the opposing argument", because it's fake. The real goal of this change is to increase the gap between kids whose family situation will give them an opportunity to learn actual math before college, and those whose family situation will keep them permanently locked out of college. This will ensure that the demographics of the next generation are even more skewed toward social instability and opportunities to replace "the current system".
    • carom 5y ago
      This is absolutely what will happen. The state is forcing people to teach their kids at home and the children who don't have that support structure are going to get left behind. It almost seems like it will become common for students to skip grades.
      • onecommentman 5y ago
        Are there still public summer school programs for gifted students on advanced topics? There were in my day. And I assume those programs nowadays would teach students how to use online resources to advance even farther in math in their spare time than the summer school. Maybe extend those options to a broader range of students. Yeah, home schooling may also get a big boost, with a stronger use of online resources that allow students to advance at their own pace. Maybe partial home schooling for math and science? Motivated gifted kids with access to the Internet at home, and a stable home environment, aren’t going to have a problem. But they will need to pick up the ball that the public schools will be dropping. Gifted students in public schools are used to working around those sorts of issues. Skipping grades would be problematic in my experience. Socialization and broadened perspectives have to be gotten somehow. Crash-and-burns are pretty common.
• kelnos 5y ago
  I took my first algebra class in 7th grade (early 90s, Maryland). I remember struggling initially (in part because we had moved from another state the summer before, and my prior math class didn't quite prepare me for it), but an hour or two of my dad explaining it to me at home made things "click" and I was fine after that. The class was a good size (probably around 30 kids), so it's not like this was a tiny accelerated-learning class (it wasn't the "standard" class, though; it was definitely the "honors" level or something like that). By the end of high school, I'd taken the equivalent of two semesters of university-level calculus, which allowed me to skip those classes when I went to college, and take more challenging courses. It's hard to imagine students who first take algebra in 9th grade progressing to anything beyond the most basic of calculus (at best) before graduating from high school. Judging by other responses here, I'm not even a particularly special or advanced case, with some kids being introduced to basic algebra many years before I was. Which makes sense. If you can teach a kid "1 + 1 = ?", then at some point shortly after, you can start to teach "1 + ? = 2". Bam: basic algebra. It just sounds like instead of getting students to stretch, we're pushing the gifted kids down to the lowest common denominator. It makes me assume that school administrators just want to avoid conflict with parents and hurt feelings among kids when they bucket students between remedial/standard/honors classes. We're sacrificing education for temporary good feelings.
• _prototype_ 5y ago
  you vote for leftist politicians, that's what you get. reap what you sow
  • sg47 5y ago
    [flagged]
• lacker 5y ago
  This is really making the public school system more unequal. Since this is just a "recommendation", the good public schools like Cupertino or Piedmont will ignore it, and keep teaching children algebra. The bad public schools that are having trouble hiring algebra teachers will use this as an excuse to stop teaching algebra.
• anm89 5y ago
  I think we should really hold off on addition and reading until the post graduate level. Once we take this to it's logical conclusion and reset the achievment bar to absolute zero, it will be impossible for there to be any inequality. All classess straight through undergrad could be limited to a combination of nap time and snack time.
  • felistoria 5y ago
    Please stop giving these people ideas...
  • kelnos 5y ago
    The funny thing is that the actual logical conclusion is that parents with money will pay to have their kids sent to private schools that do teach the "advanced" stuff, and poor folks won't be able to afford it, so you end up with the same (or worse) inequality.
    • anm89 5y ago
      Yeah thats sort of the ultimate irony. You make it so the only way to get a good education is to pay for it
  • ipaddr 5y ago
    Grades are assigned through a weighed lottery system.
• devmunchies 5y ago
  at this rate, all California schools will just give a "P" grade for "participation". Just teach algebra in 8th grade but give everyone a "P", then nobody struggles!
  • _-david-_ 5y ago
    San Diego is already heading in that direction https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/san-diego-unified-school-district-changes-grading-system-to-combat-racism/2425346/ https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/san-diego-unified-sch...
  • poulsbohemian 5y ago
    There's more truth to this than you realize. My two middle schoolers now get a number grade for science, representing whether you are on, below, or above grade level. So as a parent if I see they have a 2.5 do I get worked up or not? They've made the grade meaningless and incomprehensible.
• vadfa 5y ago
  Xi Jinping laughing his butt off.
• Kluny 5y ago
  So what, continue wasting student's time teaching them addition and subtraction over and over again? Why not just let students advance when they grasp the subject, instead of withholding knowledge from them for the sake of slower peers?
• busymom0 5y ago
  I immigrated from India after high school and we had already studied advanced calculus and other subjects by high school. Basic Calculus was introduced in grade 9 onwards if I remember right. When I immigrated for university to Canada, I was teaching algebra, trig, calculus etc to university students 1 year above me. All these delaying important subjects is going to let immigrants from other countries like India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc excel while Canadians and Americans to fall behind. This is a stupid idea.
  • ryanobjc 5y ago
    Dude, you have no damned idea what you're talking about. You are extrapolating from N=1 to a state of 36,000,000 people. Your experience is not the guiding star for state-wide policy. Also consider this... the people who work on this stuff, have spend years and years on this stuff. Perhaps... they... know what they are talking about? As someone with a kid, introducing subjects before kids are ready for it is counterproductive. It can cause confidence issues later, and doesn't help them learn earlier. By way of a small example, try to teach a 3 month old how to walk. Good luck, you aren't doing anything useful. Now back to the immigrant thing, by now you surely must have realize you are in the upper X percentile of your peers from India. There are many many many, in fact most, Indians, who cannot do what you can do. Not even close. Basing educational policy on what you found easy with your Xth percentile intelligence is not going to be a great idea.
    • busymom0 5y ago
      I am sorry but I don't think you have any idea of what you are talking about. No, I am not N=1, nor was I upper X percentile of my peers in India. CBSE and ICSE boards, 2 of the major boards of education in India had calculus in grade 11 and 12. This wasn't me being exceptional, it was standard practice and millions of us learnt it. The millions of kids in India in CBSE and ICSE board education is much higher than CA's population. You can check out the syllabus for grade 11 for ICSE board: https://www.cisce.org/pdf/ISC-Class-XII-Syllabus-2016/17.%20ISC%20Mathematics.pdf https://www.cisce.org/pdf/ISC-Class-XII-Syllabus-2016/17.%20... Very basic differential calculus was introduced in grade 9/10 and then by grade 11, we were performing decently advanced differential calculus. In grade 11, integration calculus was also introduced and it went on to pretty advanced level by grade 12. Calculus was also used in our Physics classes, so it was pretty much needed. > try to teach a 3 month old how to walk That's a ridiculous comparison.
• monkeybutton 5y ago
  Public school is just state sponsored daycare so parents can work full-time and be productive first. Then a means of socializing children so they can be minimally functional in society and also work and be productive. Lastly to produce individuals that can think for themselves.
• leftymcleft 5y ago
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• powera 5y ago
  Everything about this movement is rotten. SFUSD claims their reforms pushing algebra to 9th grade decreased the algebra re-take rate from 40% to 7%. However, the drop in re-take rate was actually caused primarily by the removal of the requirement to pass a curriculum exam. Quite simply, if “knowing algebra” is removed as a requirement to pass algebra, more people will pass algebra. More at https://www.familiesforsanfrancisco.com/updates/inequity-in-numbers https://www.familiesforsanfrancisco.com/updates/inequity-in-...
• satronaut 5y ago
  They should stop lowering expectations for students. There isn't any reason that they can't start teaching it in 6th grade.
• a-dub 5y ago
  i think a better approach would be more things like after school robotics programs and outreach to try and recruit historically underrepresented groups into them. not only do they provide additional space for engagement in a healthy environment, they also provide something that was always important for me when i was younger, longer goals or projects that learning lands in the critical path for. problem sets are pretty boring, especially grade school calculations, i always needed a carrot to do boring things.
• leftymcleft 5y ago
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• simion314 5y ago
  I am not from US so don't interpret my comment trough US blue vs red or similar lenses. My observations is that students learn at different speed, the issue with a teacher that is forced to teach a class of 25 students is very obvious, at each step some student will fall behind, then if he is behind he will have more trouble comprehending the next topic and in the end you get a student that does not know the basic rules of signs when multiplying. I know such a person that failed his national exam, he did not know how to multiply negative integers , but this person had the ambition to get his dream job so he found a tutor and he learned and then he got a good grade. The difference was that you had a tutor with 1 or maybe 2 students at a time and that the student wanted to learn. When I am doing homework with my son or check is lessons I always wonder what is happening with students that parents don't have the time or the skill to do math,physics,programming together with the child. Some will hire private tutors but to few. Seems to me that either you get fewer students to a teacher, or have less dense material to work with so the teacher can have the time to check each student and figure-out what exactly is unclear. And you ofcourse you need good teachers,
  • rahimnathwani 5y ago
    "the issue with a teacher that is forced to teach a class of 25 students is very obvious" It's not obvious to the authors of the California Math Framework, who believe that: - we should sort kids into classes purely by age, and that any other method of sorting is inequitable - every child should be taught grade-level material (no matter how far behind, or far ahead, they may be) - teachers are capable of successfully teaching mixed ability classes (irrespective of how the min/max) using 'differentiated instruction'
    • chii 5y ago
      > classes purely by age, and that any other method of sorting is inequitable It's just "strange" that this is only done for academics, but never for athletics. The fact that academic results can be thought of in "equitable" terms, but not athletic results (aka, you must be able to run 100m in X seconds), points to some systemic, cultural bias in thinking that everyone is just as smart, and that genetics don't play a role in intelligence.
• lykahb 5y ago
  I have got another bright idea: let's rename elementary mathematics to algebra. Anyone who can do addition, passes the course. This is going to be great for the metrics California measures. I am sure that nothing can go wrong here. Seriously speaking, this is going to increase the social divide between the families who rely on the public schools, and the families who are educated enough to teach their own children or can hire the tutors.
• arrakis2021 5y ago
  With such an overwhelmingly negative response in the comments on these things, you have to wonder who actually supports this stuff and how is it possible that such a small group yields so much power
  • pm90 5y ago
    Hacker news is not representative of the State of California.
  • john_moscow 5y ago
    Social media bias. If you are happy with your work, you spend your time working. If you love your family, you spend time with them. If you have a rewarding hobby, you enjoy pursuing it. If you are a bitter miserable loser with nothing else to do, you spend your day shitposting on Twitter.
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• threatofrain 5y ago
  The program is called Equitable Math and it frames current mathematics pedagogy as a mechanism by which White Supremacy is sustained.¹ Note that in a very long multi-part document on White Supremacy, there is absolutely zero mention of Asians, despite that they are somewhere between 15.5% to 17% of the state population.² Program goals includes the de-emphasis of Algebra for middle school and Calculus for high school. Under Equitable Math, all students must take the same level of courses up until the senior year. [1]: https://equitablemath.org https://equitablemath.org [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Americans_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Americans_in_California
  • spacecaps 5y ago
    For anyone interested, I think it's probably worth actually digging into Equitable Math's "Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction" [0]. I just skimmed some of it based on your link, and the majority of it just reads like "stop teaching math poorly." I was looking for some real burn-down-the-establishment stuff, but it's honestly pretty prosaic. For example: > "There is a greater focus on getting the "right" answer than understanding concepts and reasoning." Probably most people would be on-board with the idea that concepts/reasoning are more important than blindly getting to the right answer, but "right" in quotes seems like a tell that some math-is-objective nonsense is on the way. Reading further, though, it turns out it's just talking about how word problems can be imprecise! > "Math is taught in a linear fashion and skills are taught sequentially without true understanding of prerequisite knowledge." This seems like the flexibility the other commenters are gunning for, even if California isn't on board with it. > "Rigor is expressed only in difficulty." I immediately thought, ugh, they're just trying to dumb everything down! But if we read further: > "Too often in math, we limit the definition of rigor to difficulty, rather than its full complexity including thoroughness; exhaustiveness; interdisciplinary; and balancing conceptual understanding, procedural skills and fluency, and application. This allows math teachers to shy away from complex problems and tasks and instead streamline teaching like we are spoon-feeding..." A thorough, conceptual understanding is superior to a surface-level ability to step through a process without understanding? Sign me up! I poked around for anything more aggressive, but from what I can tell that's generally the vibe of the PDF. Yes, the framing is unnecessarily antagonistic, but if we took the white supremacy dressings off of it I doubt the ideas inside would be divisive at all. Of course, I've only skimmed that one document! But if "Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction" is this inoffensive I'm not sure where they're hiding the real good stuff. [0]: https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
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• nostrademons 5y ago
  The irony is that this is probably going to exacerbate social injustice. Cupertino kids are going to be taking extracurricular math through RSM or Kumon in elementary school, and then the Cupertino school district (in the article) says that they have no intention to comply with the recommendations. SF kids aren't going to be exposed to algebra until 9th grade and then get a rude awakening in college when they realize all the cool courses have pre-reqs. I've heard a good argument that algebra specifically should be moved the other way: teach it in elementary school, when kids are first exposed to arithmetic. There's a really natural progression from addition/subtraction/zero and multiplication/division/one to inverses and identities, and from addition/multiplication to distribution and associativity. My 3-year-old understands that if he has 5 raspberries on his fingers and he takes away one, he has 4, and then if he grabs another one and puts it on his finger, he has 5 again. Not a huge leap from there to the concept of equations, inverse operations, and solving for unknowns.
  • csa 5y ago
    > Not a huge leap from there to the concept of equations, inverse operations, and solving for unknowns. Unfortunately, for a child it typically is a huge leap. There are certain abstractions that young children simply cannot do. The ability to do certain abstractions is distributed along a bell curve (edit: of age), and maybe your child is on the very far left of that curve, but most kids won’t be able to handle the abstractions you speak of until at least a little later. To be fair, that “later” is definitely not 8th or 9th grade (much earlier), but it’s also not immediately after learning basic arithmetic.
    • dkhenry 5y ago
      The only thing distributed along the bell curve is adults who are willing to help the kids. Yes for some kids it will come pretty easy, even at very young ages, but even very young children can learn these concepts if you would just spend some time teaching it to them. When you have a system set up to force one adult to teach 30+ children you will never be able to spend the time required to ensure everyone gets the concept, but that neglect comes at the cost of compressing the learning in later years which still only benefits those who have high aptitude. Which is exactly why they are pushing it back further, not because it will help kids learn more, but because more children will have the ability to learn it without much interaction from an instructor.
• bparsons 5y ago
  Very shocked that after 40 years of undermining public services, the quality of those services decline.
• FpUser 5y ago
  This is quite pathetic. But I guess the lower the education the easier it gets to keep people under control.
• TedShiller 5y ago
  If you are high income, then this won’t affect you at all. Your kids will be doing calculus and algebra early because they enjoy it and are probably good at it. It’ll just be outside of school.
  • ldiracdelta 5y ago
    Only if the parents are also highly conscientious and heavily invested in their children, which is not given. I've encountered a number of people in my career who are being under-utilized, because no one pushed them in their education. Not everyone has internal motivation or parental structure, unfortunately.
    • TedShiller 5y ago
      I agree. So it would be better said as: If you’re high income and care about your kids education
• cwp 5y ago
  I really wish we could get past this idea that all the kids have to do the same thing at the same time, always. Teachers have individual relationships with their pupils, and can introduce them to ideas when they're ready. We don't have to treat schools like factories, with students on conveyer belts from one grade to the next.
• bmcahren 5y ago
  In an advanced program, I was introduced to algebra in the 3rd grade with something like this: https://www.borenson.com/ https://www.borenson.com/ We were solving more complex polynomials in 5th grade. By 8th grade, we were already through trigonometry and some were taking entry level calculus. To me, the concept that you won't be introduced to algebra as a class until 9th grade is frightening. Even in regular classes by the 5th grade they were introducing the concepts of algebra to the rest of the class.
• giantg2 5y ago
  "... and applies social justice principles to math lessons." I wish the article gave some examples and explanations for this.
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• seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  I went to a high school in Mississippi, and, despite the school being good for that state, I still didn't get to take Algebra 1 until 9th grade. I made up for that by cramming Algebra 2 and Geometry into 10th grade. That was annoying. If I was able to take Algebra in 7th or 8th grade, I could have gone further in high school.
• dkhenry 5y ago
  When I pulled my kids out of traditional school we started introducing concepts of Algebra and Geometry to them immediately (2st and 4th grades). It takes extra work, but they understand everything just fine. The problem isn't that the kids can't understand it. The problem is our education system is broken and no longer has the ability to teach children anything other than what might be on a standardized test. This is literally every subject, not just math. Writing, history, spelling, science, even physical education has suffered the same decline. The whole of the education system is a shell of its former self, and is more concerned with providing child care rather than instruction.
  • staunch 5y ago
    > ...is more concerned with providing child care rather than instruction. Which could actually be a reasonable design for school. If public schools can't teach advanced topics, they could still handle the basics, provide childcare, and help to socialize kids. And then tutors (backed by a voucher system), parents, and the internet can do the teaching of advanced topics.
• ryanobjc 5y ago
  Most of the comments in here are way way off base. First off, I believe in and trust the policy experts. If they are saying that algebra for everyone as a compulsory subject in grade 9 isn't helpful, it's quite possible they know what they are talking about. A lot of the comments in here are varities of "if you don't try harder then you wont win" basically. The problem... is that really how teaching kids work? How do you know that is how it works? Your N=1 personal experience is not really the right evidence for running a state-wide policy. Additionally, some of you are probably 99th percentile intelligence, and really what worked for you won't work for, say, the other 99% of people. Secondly, education is a complex issue. Schools are being expected to pick up the slack from every single societal problem, all the while Oh So Smart People endlessly shit on them. I'm not even joking about every single societal problem... here are some things schools are expected to pick up for: - Food poverty: Feeding kids at school because they didn't eat at home - Food quality: Feeding kids RIGHT with GOOD food - Parental availability: Hard to read to your kids when you are working tons of hours or extra jobs. Schools are expected to paper over this deficit. - Redlining/poverty: Schools are expected to raise kids up out of poverty, with practically no other help, and a lot of un-help (police at schools arent helping) - Gun violence: Kids are expected to do active shooter drills, nuff said. That's messed up. One thing to remember about people who are from other places like India and such, if you are here and commenting here, perhaps your school isn't a representative sample of everyone where you were from. Here in the US, it's common for private school to kick out kids who don't academically perform, which means you have a self selection effect. So pointing out that "private schools do X why can't everyone do X" is useless, because the schools have, by definition, selected those students that can do X and everyone else was dropped on the floor.
• panic 5y ago
  The way math is taught in primary school is a disaster. Paul Lockhart's "A Mathematician’s Lament" puts it better than I could, and is worth reading in full (it's hard to find just one quote to provide here): https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament..... Maybe one section that's relevant here is the one on "pseudo-mathematics": > The cultural problem is a self-perpetuating monster: students learn about math from their teachers, and teachers learn about it from their teachers, so this lack of understanding and appreciation for mathematics in our culture replicates itself indefinitely. Worse, the perpetuation of this “pseudo-mathematics,” this emphasis on the accurate yet mindless manipulation of symbols, creates its own culture and its own set of values. Those who have become adept at it derive a great deal of self-esteem from their success. The last thing they want to hear is that math is really about raw creativity and aesthetic sensitivity. Many a graduate student has come to grief when they discover, after a decade of being told they were “good at math,” that in fact they have no real mathematical talent and are just very good at following directions. Math is not about following directions, it’s about making new directions. Many people on this website did well at the pseudo-mathematics taught in schools and think of themselves as being improved by learning it. If this (pseudo-)math is what distinguishes the "smart kids" from the rest, our "smart kids" will be harmed by delaying it. But what if the pseudo-math and the concept of "smart kid" it creates is actually harmful, both to the practice of real math and to the kids' own sense of self-worth?
• kderbyma 5y ago
  This is extremely disappointing.... California is quickly becoming the worst place to grow up
• uejfiweun 5y ago
  Not from California, but I took algebra in 7th grade - it was the advanced math course in my public middle school. It was a much-welcomed safe haven from the other classes - the middle schoolers here were actually SMART. In that class I sat next to a guy who taught me how to program the TI-84. We would spend all class programming, making games, and just learning. Now, over a decade later, I am a professional software engineer. Sitting next to that guy in my 7th grade algebra class set my life on a course that turned out to be great. It makes me sad to know that future students won't be able to have such opportunities to be surrounded by similarly smart people. In the rest of my middle school classes the disrespect, distracting behavior, bullying, etc. were totally out of control - now I guess students won't know anything different. I think this is a TERRIBLE decision, pushed by radical leftists that are completely out of touch with regular people. I wonder how much farther California and its cities will fall before people wake up.
  • goboronshka 5y ago
    Doesn't sound like your smart classes ever taught you to read the article. The recommendations aren't mandatory and will likely be adopted by schools that are underfunded and struggling. If you're concerned about the gifted kids at those schools, consider that gifted kids aren't the center of the universe.
    • systemvoltage 5y ago
      Ad-hominem attack + condemning gifted kids seems like a pretty glib way to argue.
  • jart 5y ago
    The fact that you were successful because the guy who sat next to you in class knew how to unlock the programming mode of your calculator is incidental. Why didn't your teacher do it? Congratulations on escaping the system that disadvantaged you. The best thing about programming is that it defines a notation for doing mathematics that doesn't trigger people who went to public schools. Be careful about calling yourself a professional software engineer. In many places you can be sent to jail for claiming any two out of the three words in that title.
• zeruch 5y ago
  This is stupid. In the 80s it was not uncommon (at least in the Jesuit schools I attended) that Algebraic concepts would be introduced to students at early as 5th grade, but definitely by junior high (7th/8th) and while I hated math (especially at the time) it wasn't something I thought I needed to be older to grok...I needed less psychotic, rigid teaching from nuns with all the compassion of Stalin, and more guidance, which other students in similar schools got in spades and had no issue with.
• MattGaiser 5y ago
  What are you parents in California looking to do for education nowadays?
• varelse 5y ago
  One of the smartest guys I ever met, a professional magician by trade, learned calculus in the sixth grade. In an age where advanced applied math skills are the shortest path to six and potentially seven-figure salaries, by all means dumb down California further than it's already been dumbed down, but I have to ask questions about where all that 10 to 14% state income tax money is going besides those ridiculous six-figure pensions for retired state employees.
• xbpx 5y ago
  I'm going to be controversial and say this has a marginal impact on educational outcomes. Probably skewed towards better as I'm assuming they've done their homework. Look, kids who love math and nerd out in their spare time will still be tearing into calc in uni. Those who don't will still pick up enough to hit the trades or JOB. The kids who don't need advanced maths might actually get more out of what they do learn as it's delivered at a higher age. Ok who knows maybe it has marginally lower outcomes over all. No one knows and the people in this thread decrying the end of exceptionalism are deluding themselves into thinking life outcomes are extremely sensitive to high school educational content. I don't think that's verifiable. Getting people to school and keeping them from dropping out is likely a better first order optimization to overall outcomes. Kids are still going to get their calcs in uni and the universities will still be pumping out overly-educated overly-indebted young adults...
• globalise83 5y ago
  Why not stream the classes so that the intelligent fast learners learn algebra early and the slow learners pick it up towards the end of their time at school if at all? That way nobody is inconvenienced by disruption from those that don't get it, and those that don't get it don't get hurt feelings.
• primitivesuave 5y ago
  Like many other things California (and SF in particular) is doing, this is cruelty disguised as compassion. Let's take away the opportunities to get ahead early, because it may disrupt some egalitarian principles that are totally absent in the real world. As someone who majored in mathematics and was involved in educating K-12 students for many years, I find this to be completely ignorant of the reality behind school districts like those in the Bay Area, where affluent kids take Russian math after school to compensate for the inadequacies in their school's mathematics curriculum. This is basically what we're dealing with here in California: https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11... "The framework for deconstructing racism in mathematics offers essential characteristics of antiracist math educators and critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by making visible the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture with respect to math." On page 8, the authors claim that one way white supremacy manifests itself is when "students are required to show their work in standardized, prescribed ways". This is literally the definition of mathematical notation, and the use of standardized notation is fundamental to being able to communicate with other mathematicians.
• moksly 5y ago
  I’m Danish and not at all interested in the politics of it, but there can be a case for teaching algebra late. We do it in Denmark, because it’s the subject children have the hardest time learning, and having too many of them fail too early kills their interest in math. We still teach algebra in grade 7-9, but we’ve gone through the social experiments of teaching it at different ages, and have lost entire generations because it was taught too soon. I don’t think social justice or equality should play a part of the argument, but it’s always hard to tell where the legislation ends and the propaganda begins these days, and I’m honestly no interested enough to read the 800 page document this article is about. I will say, however, that I think we’re going to have problems teaching math until we reform the school system to be suited for the modern world instead of the early 1900’s “assembly line” society. It makes no sense to place children in classes based on their age, and certainly not for all subjects. The result is always going to be that both slow and brilliant students get fucked over, in a myriad of ways, especially if they are a mix of good and bad at different subjects. Why exactly is it that you aren’t taught courses like math, or history or language according to your ability instead of your age?
  • spurgu 5y ago
    I would say practical reasons. How would you structure those lessons? You'd need a lot more resources to be able to tailor everyone's path like that. It would be great though. I loved going to school for the first 4 years when we were ~30 people in the whole school (spread over 1-4th graders) - the teachers were able to address individual needs. Then I went to fifth grade where were were 35 people in the class. It just went downhill from there.
    • mixmastamyk 5y ago
      Middle and high school already have separated classes, no? I once took a computer-repair class at a local school district adult school. It was self paced, and despite being bored as hell during high school, I crushed the repair course at like 4x the normal speed. Because I could. There was literally no one to stop me.
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• saboot 5y ago
  Why is this the title, it isn't contained in the article. School districts are 100% allowed to not even read these recommendations. Also, Who in this comment section actually read the article?
• amichal 5y ago
  > Most American high schools teach algebra I in ninth grade, geometry in 10th grade and algebra II in 11th grade – something Boaler calls “the geometry sandwich. It’s an exceedingly dumb setup. In my highschool it was optional in grade 9 and like another commenter said only 2 years of ANY math was required. Despite passing a placement test in 6th grade they made we wait till 8th grade to join the 9th grade “advanced” math class which taught algebra. My school did not even offer calculus for any grade which made it more or less impossible to even apply for any of the top us universities Quote source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2020/02/28/math-scores-high-school-lessons-freakonomics-pisa-algebra-geometry/4835742002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2020/02/28/mat...
• bargle0 5y ago
  How many of the people responsible for this decision send their kids/grandkids to private school?
• bobthechef 5y ago
  Maybe instead they should try Saxon math or Singapore math curricula? You obviously have to build up mathematical skill and intuition the right way, but there is an age-appropriate way to do this. NOT doing it seems rather backward.
• ironman1478 5y ago
  These efforts feel misguided. Black and Latino people aren't bad at math because of the language used in math education (most of the language seems neutral from what I remembered), it's because they are largely poor, due to structural racism or they are first generation immigrants who didn't come to work in tech or something. They're just poor and unfortunately it's hard to really do anything when you're poor in America. My parents immigrated from Romania and were part of the Florida Romanian community. Many were poor, didn't really have a great support system, and didnt really get America. Many of the kids in that community just dropped out or didn't do well in school and that's largely because of a poor home life and just not having access to anything. All the countries that have great education systems also have great support systems for families. Algebra isn't hard (though it is time consuming imo), you can pass all the tests with memorization since it's applying a few patterns over and over again. Delaying it isn't going to make people better at it.
  • wyager 5y ago
    The PC model that unequal outcomes would disappear if you simply addressed poverty, fought putative structural discrimination via affirmative action, etc. has been repeatedly applied and disproven at massive scale dozens of times since the 60s. It's a nice story but it doesn't seem to reflect reality at all. I don't think the model of "it's because the way math is phrased is racist" is a better model - in fact, it's strictly worse - but it's the obvious next step in tacking more epicycles onto the progression of theories that have been palatable to post-WW2 progressives (who mostly dominate things like school policy).
    • zozbot234 5y ago
      The 'PC model' has actually done very little to address poverty. If anything, it has actively perpetuated detrimental attitudes.
    • ironman1478 5y ago
      Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that fighting poverty would solve all issues by itself. However, its unclear to me how reducing poverty wouldn't help? I know its not related to the specific topic, but for example many people of color drop out of college because they cannot afford to stay in or feel obligated to help their families in time of need. https://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/indicator/2014/06/childhood-poverty https://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/indicator/2014/06/child... It seems like alleviating poverty will help? It also just feels... obvious?
• mixmastamyk 5y ago
  It just boggles that these people, when confronted with poor math scores think, "we need more instruction about pronouns, etc…" Talk about non-sequiturs. This is the left-wing version of discouraging the teaching of evolution. Unfortunately in California these irrational folks have a big influence. From my own experience, I would have been more enthusiastic with less homework, less rote problem solving (of dozens per night) and more visualization. Unfortunately animation/video wasn't really a thing until recently, but might help in the future.
• Demonsult 5y ago
  People who absolutely hate math are driving these bad ideas, thinly veiled as justice or some other high-minded nonsense. Many of them carefully plotted their way through college, doing as much as they can to avoid math. Of course the kids are bored when it's taught with this attitude.
• abeppu 5y ago
  So much of the discussion is around how to pace/sequence the same traditional list of topics (geometry, trig, precalc, calc) but maybe we should be considering that these might not be the most important concepts anymore? More people should know stats, and this doesn't need to be strictly sequenced with those other concepts. Yes, integrals show up with continuous distributions, but we don't need to really care that much. But if we had a population that understood confidence intervals, (in)dependence, correlation etc at a conceptual level, would we fall for fewer dubious claims? Discrete math, like enough combinatorics to understand why some families of things that sound simple are huge? Or enough to communicate the idea of a homomorphism? What if our concept of "woke" math introduced posets, and the idea that things can be literally incomparable?
  • Der_Einzige 5y ago
    Not sure why you're being downvotes. Stats and discrete math are sorely underrepresented in high school math education. The harm of this continuing will be extremely high going forward.
  • YeBanKo 5y ago
    Statistics is based on probability and probability is based on set theory and a concept of measure. Discrete probability may do away without calculus. But it needs some basic understanding of algebra. Concept of probability, imo, is very hard to understand. And then you have conditional probability, which fooled even high ranking mathematicians. Allegedly Paul Erdos didn’t get it until a computer simulation was presented to him [0]. I think venturing into statistics may be left for later. I would agree though that combinatorics can be taught earlier and give a good understanding or discrete probability. I don’t see thought how it can be successfully without algebra and calculus. [0] https://www.wired.com/2014/11/monty-hall-erdos-limited-minds/ https://www.wired.com/2014/11/monty-hall-erdos-limited-minds...
• Daneel_ 5y ago
  9th grade? This seems ludicrously late to me. I had algebra introduced in third grade (8-9 years old) and had a far easier time throughout school as a result. I've since gone on to have an interest in mathematics in my adult life. What reason could there possibly be for delaying its introduction until so late in one's school life?
• SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
  The article talks about changing "Algebra 1" to the 9th grade, so, as an outsider I have to ask: Is "Algebra 1" the codename for an intermediate or advanced algebra class (and before that basic algebra is just taught in a general "Math" class)? Or is "Algebra 1" literally the first time the students are presented with the concepts of algebra? I was curious and followed some of the links in the article, some of the PDFs seem to imply that the first concepts of algebra are in fact introduced in grade 6 (which wouldn't be too bad). But I couldn't find a definitive answer (I got bored by too many policy documents and couldn't find an actual curriculum document).
  • mixmastamyk 5y ago
    On that schedule, traditionally it would be arithmetic to grade 6, Pre-Algebra in grades 7 and 8, then Algebra I in 9th.
• syspec 5y ago
  What’s going to happen is that poor kids will not get a good math education, and rich kids parents will get them outside tutoring. It’s going to have the complete opposite effect that they’re going for
• micromacrofoot 5y ago
  They should certainly correct, but it’s weird to stop entirely. It seems like a failure on the part of administration to create a more equitable program. I grew up in a diverse city where all the advanced schools and classes were filled with white kids, and it was incredibly obvious that it was due to socioeconomic factors. Kids in my classes were going to expensive tutors and had parents in high paying jobs that could be around to help them. My neighbor on the other hand was an immigrant taking care of younger siblings after school and eventually working to help his mom when he was old enough. No time or money for tutoring, or even homework for that matter. I was in the same boat for a long time but was fortunate enough to not need to study as much as my peers, some who had enormous amounts of help. As an adult I still can’t afford the amount of tutoring they were getting, some even paid someone to write college admission essays. It’s 20 years later and it’s all the same, if not worse, and I still get mad about it.
• pengaru 5y ago
  By "promoting equity" they're just compelling more of the able parents to send their kids to private schools.
• tzs 5y ago
  Most commonly "algebra 1" is a 9th grade class in the US, but there are elements of algebra taught in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade. Are they talking about moving those 6-8th grade parts to 9th grade?
• lr1970 5y ago
  In Soviet Union algebra and geometry were taught from 5th to 11th grade to every kid in the country. And 10th & 11th grade algebra text-book was edited by Kolmogorov himself [0]. No surprise that _Russian School of Mathematics_ [1] after-school program is becoming very popular in the USA. [0] Search for "algebra" in https://www.kolmogorov.com/Books.html https://www.kolmogorov.com/Books.html [1] https://www.russianschool.com/ https://www.russianschool.com/
• hardsoftnfloppy 5y ago
  No child left behind... every child is an equal amount of retarded.
• danity 5y ago
  There are more white children living in poverty than black children: https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/44-children-in-poverty-by-race-and-ethnicity https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/44-children-in-... If we want to help the most children we can, we should remove race from the equation.
• nobody0 5y ago
  Ugh, maybe teach abstract algebra first like France did?
• abeppu 5y ago
  So much dialogue is around how to pace and sequence the traditional math curriculum (geometry, trig, precalc, calc). Are those still the most important things to teach? And do they need to be taught and tested through working through the same calculations framed in the same narrow scenarios? When's the last time you solved a quadratic equation or did integration by parts in the real world? The concepts may be important, but is chugging through trigonometric identities really helping kids? I use the concept of a derivative often, and I'm glad it enriches my understanding of the world even if I calculate derivatives almost never. But there are so many other useful math concepts which might be better to communicate than just doing exercises around techniques (e.g. can you apply the quotient rule correctly). Concepts I wish we emphasized instead: - stats: uncertainty, confidence intervals. (In)dependence of variables. Correlation. - discrete math: enough to communicate the concept of structure being preserved. Enough combinatorics to understand why some families of structures might be huge. Basic concepts around graphs. These ideas don't necessarily need to be sequenced. You can deal with plenty of integrals while learning stats, but you don't have to. What if our concept of woke math involved introducing posets and relations and cases where comparison isn't possible? What if we stopped talking about high school math as a single ladder and consider it more as a landscape to explore? By desequentualizing topics, maybe upper class hs students can actually catch up by taking more than one math class at a time?
  • legerdemain 5y ago
    Show me an American university that doesn't spend the first two years of a STEM major's life on the three-semester calculus sequence, linear algebra, and ordinary differential equations, and I will then come up with a secondary school math curriculum targeting admission to such a program.
    • abeppu 5y ago
      Actually, the "S" is pretty broad and I'm guessing there are multiple majors at reputable universities that don't require all that.
      • legerdemain 5y ago
• newbie789 5y ago
  This largely upon skimming seems pretty boring ideas like “it’s possible to teach math better in high school.” It’s a trip that it’s couched in language that apparently is pissing a lot of people off (and bringing up some resentment about race in a direction that I find somewhat surprising.) A lot of folks seem to be posting that if kids have to wait a little longer, it’ll somehow negatively impact all of the super smart 13 year olds’ ability to learn at maximum speed and adversely affect the talented and bright students that just want to learn math due to the fact that the school is somehow withholding knowledge from these poor kids! I was a VERY gifted young student that was on to trig in 8th grade, pretty much entirely self taught with what I could find online (in the mid 2000s). It turns out that the fact that something wasn’t taught at school didn’t “hold me down” or “delay my education.” The anger around this seems… weird. The insistence that this is actually harming 8th graders sounds like somebody who hasn’t actually asked an 8th grader if they give a shit, while pearl clutching about the status quo not being exactly maintained.
• hintymad 5y ago
  As I repeated said, doing away "advanced maths" will make you left people feel better and will hurt a lot of socially-economically challenged families. Those who can afford RSM or AOPS will learn algebra, if they can, as young as 3rd or 4th grade, while the kids' parents don't need to lift a finger. Those who solely rely on the public school to push their kids? They will be screwed. I have all the means to support my kids, including sending them to private schools. Yet I'm still angry because so many kids will not be able to get the education that they deserve. So much for the equity and inclusiveness.
  • derekjdanserl 5y ago
    These people are not politically “left” in any way, shape, or form. They are just decadent. The political left is responsible for my father’s retirement pension, his father’s freedom to spend his evenings to complete a correspondence electrician’s certification while working the mines, the 40 hour work week more broadly, fire exits in burning factory buildings, etc. so I think we should be careful who we are calling the “left.” We need a political left and these people are nothing of the sort. They are an absolute joke.
    • mixmastamyk 5y ago
      They have just gone too far with ideology, due to being in an echo chamber of like minds. History in a nutshell.
  • ravedave5 5y ago
    It's still being taught just later. As a parent of an advanced and behind child I support this move. It would help both.
    • sethammons 5y ago
      Can you expand on how you feel it helps both?
• clircle 5y ago
  This is just going to make racial differences in math achievement worse because wealthier parents are now more incentivized to put their children in private school.
• kolbe 5y ago
  I bet the same people who make these rules are the same ones who will lambast “the rich” for having the resources to actually educate their children
• gofin 5y ago
  I can't help but think that the majority of students algebra problems in high school come from the fact algebra is taught extremely poorly at the college level. Which is where their teachers learned how to teach. In an Ivy League PhD physics class more than half of the students thought that equality was something between a mechanical operation, e.g. 1 + 3 = 4 means you add 1 + 3 and the result is 4, or assignment, e.g. x = 3 means that for everything that follows you can replace x by 3. The idea that it's a binary predicate was something that only people who had done logic or something adjacent at undergrad even understood. Viz. the type of = is (* x *) -> Bool, or in words an equality just returns true if there exists a way to transform one input of the equality to the other and false otherwise. The confusing part is that for an equation like x + 2 = 3 you're given the predicate for the of set/tuple defined by abstraction using that predicate, e.g. the set {x | x + 2 = 3 and x in R} or the tuple (x | x^2 = 0) if we care about repeated answers. Something that is not at all obvious from just being given x + 2 = 3, which without a lot of implicit context is a well formed sentence of algebra with no intrinsic meaning. If all algebra problems were reduced to something like "List all members of the set {x | x^2 - 3 = 9 and x is real}" then we have solved a huge part of the problem.
• TedShiller 5y ago
  I was discussing this with a group of friends from opposing political backgrounds, and the results were surprising. The liberals were 100% for the change, and said it will achieve more equity, inclusion, etc. The conservatives were equally supportive of the change, but for an entirely different (and probably selfish, though equally valid) reason. They argued that this would actually give their kids a leg up over the general population, because they were going to continue to take advanced math and advanced placement tests, it'll just be in a more private, exclusive, concentrated setting than before, with other highly motivated, self-selected kids, which they took as having a positive effect on their own kids. By making something that was widely available more exclusive, it's actually a net-benefit to them. I thought it was an interesting take.
• DreamWalker1 5y ago
  Kinds say "I don't have a math brain". That might be simply true. The implication should be I NEED TO WORK MORE. Not lets lower the level.
• Animats 5y ago
  Beginning algebra is more of a language learning exercise. There's not much content; it's more about notation and manipulation, which will be used later. Looked at that way, it's helpful to get that done reasonably early. Calculus? I wonder how that's taught today. I had way too much stuff about summing infinite series, which you don't really do very often. I think calculus should be taught in conjunction with Newtonian physics, so you see how it predicts what happens in simple physical situations. This provides motivation.
• Buttons840 5y ago
  > it pushes Algebra 1 back to 9th grade, de-emphasizes calculus > San Francisco Unified School District touted the effort as a success, asserting that algebra failure rates fell and the number of students taking advanced math rose as a result of the change > "There’s a huge problem with math instruction right now. The way things are set up, it’s not giving everybody a chance to learn math at the highest levels" This really feels like they lowered the bar and are now excited that more people are able to jump over it. Also, that last quote is infuriating. Nobody will have a chance to learn math at the highest level now, at least not in high school. Rather than lift those who struggle, let's drag down those doing well, or so it seems.
• cashsterling 5y ago
  I lived in the Bay Area until 2019 and my kids went to school in Piedmont, which is one of the top funded school districts per capita in California. The math curriculum at Piedmont junior high-school was a joke. The math book was electronic-only on a crappy chrome book and the book had no lessons, only problems. The book seriously tried to introduce the concept of exponents, and so many others, into problems without explanation. Teaching my kids math became a 10 hour a week job for me and my wife. Piedmont HS lost their physics teacher to another school that paid better and didn't replace the teacher for the entire year; a whole year of HS students, some of them seniors, whose opportunity to take a good physics course was blown. My family moved to Colorado recently... partly because of the CA education system. Back when I was in junior high and high-school in the late 80's and early 90's... math classes had hard-bound printed math books that actually had lessons and clear examples so that it was possible to learn math concepts, on your own, even if the teacher didn't know what they were doing. Whatever happened to good books?... it is not like the subject matter has changed in the past 20-30 years. I thought it is proven that students learn better from quality printed material, with appropriate use of color, over e-screens (correct me if I'm wrong) and yet all education is going to screens. I had great teachers in HS; both my physics teacher and math teacher had masters degrees in their respective fields. Today, there is no good financial reason to be a teacher with a Physics, Math, or Engineering degree in most CA school districts and that is, I think, a big part of the problem. If you don't have good teachers who can present a topic well and engage a class-room then students aren't going to learn the topic and progression through mathematical curricula is going to fall. Another factor is probably demographic. This is anecdotal but I switched high schools after my freshman year from a HS in a lower middle class area in Sacramento to a pretty wealthy, upper middle-class area in Southern California and the level of the average student was quite a bit higher. The teachers were probably better overall in the SoCal HS but I don't think the teachers were that much better. But there was huge cultural difference in the student body of the two schools. At the Sacramento HS, I took geometry as a freshman and there were a lot of juniors and seniors in the class. None of them were dumb people... it is just that doing well in math and the going to a good college was not something on the average student's mind in a poor community. At the SoCal HS, most students were very interested in doing well in school, took math and science semi-seriously, and looked towards going to best college they could get into. Almost every student at the SoCal HS at least took Trig/Pre-Calculus. Bring this all to the topic at hand... this does feel like some Kurt Vonnegut stuff and I am really disappointed. Holding back math education in mainstream public schools is going to push more parents, who can afford the time/money [read: the more affluent], to put their kids in charter schools, private schools, or supplemental education for math [e.g. Kumon]. This going to limit opportunity for the less affluent and probably increase the gap in math education across economic dividing lines. This may also pull money away from public schools over time.
• userbinator 5y ago
  I'm perpetually perplexed at why some people seem to think that lowering the standards is going to help anyone. Do they not realise the source of all scientific and technical advancement is really the result of a minority of high achievers, and that by trying to "flatten" this inequality and effectively make everyone equally stupid, they are also going to be affected negatively? applies social justice principles to math lessons The inmates aren't running the asylum anymore; they're running the government. All I hope is that this cancerous ideology (I'll resist the prop65 joke...) doesn't grow any further than it already has. The decline is certainly sad to see and already rather visible.
  • LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    You have to understand, this is no trap. It goes as planned, the masses will rap. Mad to the max, under the thunderdome. Their new home, erected by truly democratic means. Who are you to insist that someone intervenes? Bow to your new transqueer queens!
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • gumby 5y ago
    What if you invert your thesis. Sooner doesn’t necessarily imply “higher standard”: 1 - American school teach the alphabet before grade 1, and push kids to read early. German schools don’t even teach the alphabet until grade 1' yet by the end of that year the reading level of the kids is the same as US kids at the end of grade 1, or better. German Pädagogin justify this by saying there is some neural development issue — I think that is likely bull. But what I do recognize is that instead of being pushed to read before the kids are ready, the kids instead learn other valuable life skills. I happened to learn to read at age 5 (not in Germany nor USA) but that didn’t make me “better” than other kids; they did other things. 2 - kids who have parents who can afford tutors and such can push the kids through the prescribed steps sooner. Kids whose parents each have two jobs to get food on the table, well, they simply can’t. So the former define “higher standards” because they chose their parents well? 3 - To combine the two: if we can open up opportunities for all the kids aren’t we likely to end up with a larger pool of well educated people who will end up being the inventors, leaders, poets etc of the future? How many ramanujans are we leaving behind? I’m not saying “throw out all the standards” but rather quite the opposite. I think your unidimensional absolutism is narrow and inadequate.
• nimos 5y ago
  Just move to Nevada. The differences in taxes makes private school basically free.
• bern4444 5y ago
  I remember in 2nd or 3rd grade sitting with my classmates on the floor and the teacher wrote something like 4 + ? = 7 on the board. Without even mentioning the word variable, algebra, or any other terms, they began teaching us about these concepts. They started with a problem where the answer is so easy everyone can get it. No formalization to start with, just, here's a simple example that you can immediately relate to. Only after doing this do you need to learn and understand the formalization and theory of the concepts. I find the same is true in programming. Often to learn something new, it's better to copy and run a code snippet that does the new thing. Only after running it, seeing the result, seeing it work is the formalization and theory needed. Then you just rinse and repeat to get better and better at it. As an aside: I think had the teacher asked us for a name as well instead of using the ?, we could have even started learning about using variables earlier. By our own laziness as kids, someone would likely have gotten tired of writing out "my number that I'm trying to find" + 3 = 7 and thought about shortening it by some degree. It would have felt empowering to have that insight come from a class mate, and if not, the teacher could always introduce it on their own. ETA I also had a college professor who started each new unit by explicitly motivating why we were going to learn, what we were going to learn, and how it related to what we just learned. That context was a huge help in learning the material. It's the principle of experiential learning. Pushing back such a basic concept of math would only disadvantage society.
• rayiner 5y ago
  My cousin who lives in California told me the other day that her son was a couple of years behind in math compared to where she was in high school back in Bangladesh in the 1990s. This is a nice suburb of Sacramento.
• treeman79 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron An old short story about enforced equality. Intelligent people had noise makers on ears to keep them from concentrating. Beautiful people were made to look like clowns. No one could stand out, no one could excel.
• yumraj 5y ago
  This is bullshit. Not everyone has to be better in math, just like not everyone is better in music or language or biology. In fact for English learners they should spend first few years in just getting them to level in English. Fix the fundamentals and rest will follow. This is the opposite. Delaying is not going to do thing for kids who are not into math, but will screw others who are into it. Just imagine if Ramanujam has to wait till 9th grade to learn math.
• pgcj_poster 5y ago
  The reasoning given in the framework seems sensible enough: > Even for the highest-achieving students, pressures to use mathematics courses as social capital for advancement can often undercut efforts to promote learning with understanding. This often results in what some deem a “rush to calculus,” which has not helped students. Bressoud (2017) studied the mathematics pathways of students moving from calculus to college. He found that out of the 800,000 students who take calculus in high school, roughly 250,000 or 31.25 percent of students move ‘backwards’ and take precalculus, college algebra, or remedial mathematics. Roughly 150,000 students take other courses such as Business Calculus, Statistics, or no mathematics course at all. Another 250,000, retake Calculus 1 and of these students about 60 percent of them earn an A or B and 40 percent earn a C or lower. Only 150,000 or 19 percent of students go on to Calculus II. This signals that the approach that is so prevalent in schools––of rushing students to calculus, without depth of understanding––is not helping their long term mathematics preparation. This basically lines up with my experience. I was in accelerated math and took AP Calc AB in High School. I got an A, but only by memorizing the symbol manipulation rules: I could't have explained why they worked. I don't think I could have even explained what calculus was for—and I was too busy trying to maximize my grades in 5 other AP classes to bother finding out. I got into my first choice of college and was sufficiently dissatisfied with math that I didn't take any classes in it until I was required to do so after I declared a major in Computer Science. I took Calc II and Linear algebra and got Cs in both.
• todd8 5y ago
  Like many readers of HN, I've taken a lot of math over the years--at least 25 semester long courses at the university level. So I have well informed opinions about what works and what doesn't work for me; schools, on the other hand, have to educate everyone. This, perhaps, accounts for the wide range of opinions being expressed here. I think that we can agree that the whatever they are doing in the United States isn't working very well. According to the scores on the PSIA math test given internationally to 15 year olds, the US ranks behind 21 other nations [1], well below the international average. Why not pick, say, the top four countries, (recently South Korea, Japan, Switzerland, and the Netherlands) and adopt their methods that are working? Instead of dreaming up new approaches that have no quality research justification, just teach math in a manner that is already known to be significantly better. [1] https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/highschool-08.html https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/highschool-08.html
  • Const-me 5y ago
    > Why not pick, say, the top four countries, (recently South Korea, Japan, Switzerland, and the Netherlands) and adopt their methods that are working? The critically important part of their method is funding of schools being independent from wealth of the kids’ parents. I’m not sure US can adopt that; American voters view that method as communism.
    • mrep 5y ago
      If you are referencing property taxes funding schools, you should know that it actually only funds about half of total school funding. The other half comes from federal and state governments and the way they give out funding is to selectively counteract that misallocation such that 47 states actually allocate more per-student funding to poor areas than to wealthier ones and according to this article [0], it has been this way since at least 1995. [0]: https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-get-fair-share/ https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-...
      • ejstronge 5y ago
        Just to be clear, the state-level effects don’t seem to counteract the local effects based on your link
• rich_sasha 5y ago
  It seems to me, there are 2 different things going on. The “equitable math” is clearly a crime against children. But another thing is, basic maths is a life skill. Schools aim for an ambitious curriculum, but many people leave school and can’t add, or don’t understand fractions (i don’t know about the US but certainly true in the UK and Poland). These are all people who passed through many years of maths teaching, algebra and all, and can’t add 1/2 to 1/3. At some level, we have to do something about this. People make life decisions based on their [lack of] understanding of maths, and it’s rarely algebra and calculus we’re talking about.
• lkjfklajsdfpsdf 5y ago
  I have some concerns. What are the psychological effects of daily reminders of inequality, equity, and systems of white supremacy. Could this grow resentment, hostility, and/or entitlement? How is delaying mathematics equitable? How does this represent equity in a global economy? How does equity and social justice in education respond to individual talent, aptitude, mental health, physical health, and/or socioeconomic status?
• thenewnormal 5y ago
  Only those who would benefit from systematic injustice, could possibly oppose this proposal. /s, or is it??
• btheshoe 5y ago
  The problem isn't the changing in curricular standards. It's the existence of curricular standards.
• xyzzy21 5y ago
  California has a state average IQ of 95.5. That presumably means any kind of complex education will have problems. And adjusting to the bottom half of the distribution means that smarter or even average people suffer from this focus on the "least common denominator"! People are NOT all the same and interchangeable so the best education strategy is to tune the process to fit individuals instead. Glad I'm gone from California. It's sad but I've written off all emotional attachments to the state and accepted that California's best times are a good 50 years ago. Back when I was a kid, I was in the California state "Gifted Child" program and it was instrumental in getting me into technology as a career. That can't happen now to anyone like who I was back then. And that demographic that is defining this change in education focus will never achieve anything like I have in my career because this is aligned to the state IQ of 95.5!
• beebeepka 5y ago
  Normally I wouldn't share my opinion on internal matters that don't concern me in any way but wow. If that's not a plan to fuck over the future generation of poor people over there, I don't what it is. No other reason to sabotage your own populace like this
• samuelizdat 5y ago
  I remember when Bush started all this and it was called "No child left behind" and all my teachers were calling it "No child left intact". Weird how that changed. Why is that?
• bluewhale9 5y ago
  Could it be because less men are becoming teachers? I'm from the UK and the only woke people I've met are middle aged women.
  • fxtentacle 5y ago
    I predict you'll get flagged for this, even though it is a theory that should be investigated. I also share your impression in general that technical topics are getting less interest in school now that most teachers are female.
• xvilka 5y ago
  With the modern science growing every year, if anything we should expand our school program, not contract. For example, teaching basics of abstract algebra, quaternions, octonions, and sedenions, statistics, maybe basic category theory. Quantum field theory in physics, etc.
  • bollu 5y ago
    Do you have a textbook in mind to teach high schoolers QFT? I'm dubious one could write such a textbook, but I'd love to be proven wrong. I ask since I have taken a course on QFT lite. We had to spend three weeks just doing tensors, and this was after everyone was comfortable with linear algebra and calculus and so forth.
    • xvilka 5y ago
      Something like this [1] or this[2]. [1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/08/20/qft/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/08/20/qft/ [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MmG2ah5Df4g https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MmG2ah5Df4g
• foxhop 5y ago
  We have observed that physical distancing children hurt a lot of children. It was a sacrifical experiment to try to save the elderly and weak. When the virus leaked from the Wuhan laboratory and spread across the globe in a matter of months, we knew even then that children are not really at risk of dying from sars-cov-2. Seems like the correct course of action for the times is to take education out of the hands of government. I do not believe children should be left behind, but the dumbing down of society isn't going to work. Seems like a segment ripe for complete market disruption. My 5th grader is learning algebra and we support him at home. Naturally we will continue to look for resources for him outside of public indoctrination. Perhaps we will see countless real schools being formed across the nation. I learned almost all I know from the Internet over my 36 years. If more injection mandates occur, especially for children in my region, I will pull my children out of government school. In 2020 we did distance learning and my children thrived while so many another's back tracked regarding test scores. Our children thrived because my wife and I work from home. They thrived because life at home, while not structured like school, is an on going homeschool-like experience. I'm so grateful to have been able to see my children thrive in these times. We have had a lot of set backs as a society but we will continue to rebuild, repair, and grow!
  • dls2016 5y ago
    Sounds like your child would have been fine in any system.
    • foxhop 5y ago
      I have 3 children and they all come with very different personalities and skills, just like all people. My oldest is a freshman in high-school and he is very happy to be back in school, even with a mask all day and 6 feet apart in class and lunch, if it means seeing his friends and not being isolated (teachers treated the final wave of children doing distance learning last year horribly). I think he is relieved from being discriminated. Sounds like prison to me, but he wakes himself up and gets ready, and goes. Over all he appears happier. <3 My 5th grader wants to be homeschooled after going back.
  • vanusa 5y ago
• avs733 5y ago
  It is worth reading the FAQs... https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/mathfwfaqs.asp https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/mathfwfaqs.asp A few examples...(highlights mine) >Does the draft Mathematics Framework eliminate middle school mathematics acceleration programs? >No. The draft Mathematics Framework does not eliminate middle school mathematics acceleration programs (including programs that offer Integrated Math 1 or Algebra 1 courses to grade eight students). The draft Mathematics Framework emphasizes the importance of following the sequenced progression of topics laid out in the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) and considers the latest research on the impact of skipping grades or undermining the sequences progression. Additionally, the CA CCSSM are significantly more rigorous than those from previous grade eight content standards. They address the foundations of algebra and geometry by including content that was previously part of the Algebra I course, including but not limited to a more in-depth study of linear relationships and equations, a more formal treatment of functions, and the exploration of irrational numbers. >Does the draft Mathematics Framework remove high school calculus? >No. The draft Mathematics Framework includes calculus in the possible high school pathways, while also presenting research that the “rush to calculus” without the depth of understanding is not helpful to students’ long-term mathematics preparation. Data shows that about one-half of all high school students who take calculus repeat the course in college or take pre-calculus in college. In summary: everyone is looking counting how many math courses students manage to get through and presuming that taking a course = mastery which it does not. The basis of this, frankly, is similar to the common core argument - different assumptions about evidence. Parents want to see their kids taking algebra and calculus because that is (to be frank) the best evidence they have of their learning while educational researchers (not teachers, researchers) are looking at meaningful assessment data. I teach college course to engineering students at a highly ranked research university in the US. Frankly, the majority of my students have taken more math classes by the time they get to me in their junior year than I did by the end of my masters degree. The problem is they understand very little of it. Sure, sometimes, they can execute procedures. But they do not have mastery, they do not have teh ability to apply math to meaningful situations, and they absolutely do not have the ability to use math to evaluate technical problems. They are calculators not users of math - that is the problem this seeks to address
• oxymoran 5y ago
  In other words, bye bye to Calculus until college.
• elif 5y ago
  From what I gather.. their performance analysis showed that 10th graders taught algebra performed better than 9th graders taught algebra... This is obviously not a reasonable metric due to many factors such as age, brain development, maturity and additional adjacent curriculum. I don't get it though.. algebra is just variables right? Aren't we teaching programming to elementary schoolers? I know I'd written my first MMO bot by 9th grade... Perhaps programming is a more 'tangible' way for children to experience algebra, rather than paper abstractions?
• dav_Oz 5y ago
  These superficial debates are in my eyes futile since they presuppose: "We ought to have a strict curriculum for a certain narrow age group." After what we have learned the last 30-50 years from cognitive sciences one has to wonder what schools are actually for, nowadays. There are most certainly not optimized for "learning" by any means. Imho to put it blatantly schools are reduced to be a effective stronghold for indoctrination. They justify their power by using "science, technology, art, literature, history, social community, cultural exchange ...". Of course sheer by its power and scope we certainly "learn" something there. And you also happen to find great teachers in that system but its certainly not its main purpose. Going back historically, schools still remain inherently (and shockingly so) medieval institutions. Interestingly "school" originally stems from the greek word of σχολή (/skʰo.lɛ̌ː/) which simply means "free time, leisure" which got hijacked by the church with "monastic schools" and today "school" means quite the opposite. Throughout its (western) history with changing society they were succesful adaptions made (Prussian system, Humboldt's Ideal, Montessori pedagogy) skyrocketing literacy, expolding number of scientists etc. But today the educational system is massively outpaced by the societal changes and by failing simply regresses to its medieval core of indoctrination ("preparation for the labor market"). No scientific literacy (aka critical thinking, controversial debates), no "learning" grounded on cognitive sciences, no hearing and tending to the needs of our young which they can perfectly articulate.
  • kilbuz 5y ago
    For the majority of parents, schools are "free daycare".
    • hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
      For some, paid daycare. Still, this daycare needs to meet certain expectations, that is to prepare the kids for exams. As for actual education - that is, pursuing your passion by exploring the subject in depth - I believe this is happening mostly outside of school for obvious reasons.
  • naasking 5y ago
    > There are most certainly not optimized for "learning" by any means. They're daycare so their parents can be productive members of society. Learning is incidental.
• rsj_hn 5y ago
  FYI, this was already done in San Francisco. There is a twitter thread where someone FOIAed SF unified school district stats to confirm their claims that this change would be beneficial if extended to the state as a whole. Here is what they found: 1. Enrollment in AP Calculus decreased and enrollment in AP stats increased: AP Calc BC -27% AP Calc AB -12% AP Stats +30% The number of african americans taking AP calculus declined by 54%. 2. The percentage of students who met CAASPP standards dropped from 53% to 49% https://twitter.com/SteveMillerOC/status/1400948830397341698 https://twitter.com/SteveMillerOC/status/1400948830397341698
• bennysomething 5y ago
  Mixing social justice with maths classes makes no sense. Might as well mix religion into it too.
• ne38 5y ago
  they should teach them Grothendieck's Dessins d'Enfants!
• panaffa 5y ago
  So monumentally stupid. I am a California kid and taking algebra in 7th grade was honestly a pivotal experience in my academic life. I got ny butt kicked for the first few exams and after getting a C- I was devastated. I cried a bit to my parents and teacher and resolved myself to grind super hard on the next test. I pretty much learned all the study habits I have now from that one exam and it was frankly a great learning experience. I definitely was capable of doing algebra at 7th grade and I think we should be accelerating student's learning in public school frankly I felt I wasted a few good years of my potential stuck in school.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• joshspankit 5y ago
  Counter argument: Teach children what variables are as soon as you can.
• macinjosh 5y ago
  This makes sense to me since education is a secondary or tertiary goal of government schools. The goal for parents is childcare and for teachers it is to socially indoctrinate kids into what ever point of view they believe (e.g. CRT, Creationism, etc.)
• macinjosh 5y ago
  So now the rich kids will just get these classes elsewhere and the poor kids now have no options because “equality”.
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• stjohnswarts 5y ago
  This isn't the problem. The problem is the lack of algebra in 8th grade. It's parents who are too unconcerned about their kid's education and obsessed with sports, after school activities, working 60 hours a week to buy "stuff". It's also schools that won't look at far more successful schools in Europe and Asia and how they reach higher standards. The "invented here" education ideas are stupid. If you want to succeed the look at successful programs.