6 ms·

It is a bit sad that things like: > The problem with mass-produced textbooks, Engelhaupt explained, was that they can cost $65 each and aren't aligned with Min

It is a bit sad that things like: > The problem with mass-produced textbooks, Engelhaupt explained, was that they can cost $65 each and aren't aligned with Minnesota's math tests so the district would be paying for whole chapters that are never used. and > She said most high school textbooks are written to the requirements of Texas and California, the two biggest markets for the book publishers. It means often a third of the books go unused in Minnesota, she said. appear to be the current state of things. Instead of targeting a good education in the subject, the norm today seems to be to teach k-12 students to pass the aptitude tests, not necessarily to learn the material itself.

pgeorgi 15y ago
I suppose (well, hope) that the point of these statements is that their curriculum differs in some aspects. Maths (like all topics in school) is too wide to teach everything, so they had to pick their battles. The 30% that aren't covered in the mass market books have to be provided by the teachers as additional material, while 30% of the books are not used in school. For $65, I'd expect more, too. On the upside: Assuming that the additional material isn't provided centrally, these teachers who wrote the book have more exposure to writing course work than their colleagues in Texas, who get optimized books.
derefr 15y ago
But isn't that... test-driven design? ;) I mean, if the tests have 100% coverage, there's no problem with the education only covering what's on the test, right? It just means kids have to sit through exams that are perhaps eight hours long. (Which is fine, really, if those exams get split up so that they're given one exam per unit, rather than one humongous state-wide test. And while they're at it, if those exams were also, say, given online, accessible at the student's whim, and able to be repeated indefinitely without penalty (because of some form of procedural question generation), they could even be used as gates to determine when the student was ready for the next level of material...)
- dwiel 15y ago
  This is kinda how Montessori schools do it - at least the one here where my partner teaches. They aren't online, but the student gets to chose to some degree what they are working on, however they can only move onto the next level of a subject once they've passed the 'works' that come before it. The grading of a work involves marking problems correct and incorrect. Note that this is 1st - 3rd grades
- X-Istence 15y ago
  What you are describing in your last paragraph sounds a lot like Khanacademy...
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  Agreed. If the kids are being taught the wrong things, you don't get pissed at the teachers- you change the standards/tests. Same as with any good software!
  - electromagnetic 15y ago
    I think the problem is that students should be taught to think, not to pass tests. I was taught to think, not so much by school but by a select few teachers and especially my father. I learnt metric growing up. When I started construction everything was done in millimetres and meters. I moved from the UK to Canada, where the construction trade is solely imperial (it's not like the UK where you can get legacy tape measures that have inces and meters, I have inches and feet) and I didn't struggle. It was about a month before my boss said "Doesn't the UK only use meters, are you coping with the change?" Of course I coped, I learnt to think. A foot is a generalised measurement so that multiple people can work to the same measurements. A meter is a generalised measurement so that multiple people can work to the same measurements. If someone calls out to me "cut at 1321mm" I cut at "1321" the same as if they'd just called "cut at 52 inch". I've seen guys, high school graduates (in the UK I only did high school until I was 16, and the newbies I get given did it until they were 18) and they're confused by the mere notion that an inch is divisible up to a 16th on a tape measure. I personally cannot comprehend how they don't understand. How lacking is your education that you can't find 9/16ths on a tape measure? How lacking is your education when you can't cut a 22.5 degree angle from a 16x16 square (measure up to the half way point and trace a line to the 0 point giving you the desired pattern)? My work doesn't even require a high school education to get hired and we've had some phenomenal employees who failed high school. The irony is we get bucket loads of retards who graduated high school. There's a big difference between learning and merely storing data. The problem is that we're creating a generation of databases. I'm sorry, but I have computers, and phones, and fuck a pocket book that can retain data for me. I don't need a million kids to do that. I need a kid that can read a tape and cut an angle so that I can train them. I don't know how I'm supposed to train someone who's passed high school that should so obviously have failed.
megablast 15y ago
Why is the material taught different? Surely all kids should need to learn the same information. Why is Minnesota cutting out so much of the math that California and Texas teaching? The students often end up going to the same colleges, where they will need to do the same work?
- blahedo 15y ago
  Off the top of my head: could be a breadth/depth thing, could be that the books are a union of California and Texas (in which case CA and TX also have the problem of unused chapters), or it could be that the time not spent on those chapters is spent on something that MN brings in with supplemental reading already or just teaches without a textbook. It almost certainly isn't just that MN is a simple subset of the CA/TX material, or else the Byron district's scores wouldn't have gone up from the new material.
- nobody3141592 15y ago
  Perhaps Texas only teaches addition, California only teach subtraction - they used to also include multiplication and division but the kids tested poorly on those and it was dragging the grades down.
- ericflo 15y ago
  I went to school in Minnesota, and I think I know what they're talking about, at least when it comes to the math curriculum: we never had a trigonometry class. Sure we learned trigonometry, but it was never a dedicated class. Instead it was always a unit attached to what we were currently working on, whenever it made sense. End result: we learned the same material, just in a different order.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  Why is the material taught different? States are the ones responsible for picking what material to teach their children. This is why material can be different. There is so much that we could teach our children, there isn't a clearly defined set of "This is what is best to teach them", so different people will produce different sets of things to teach. This is why material is different.
apaitch 15y ago
I think it's great that these teachers are taking initiative to make up for the system's deficiency (i.e. expensive textbooks targeted towards the biggest markets). However, I agree with this - I would hope that the goal would be enhancing learning, understanding, and appreciation of the subjects as opposed to passing the standardized tests. Granted, the two are not exclusive, but I think focusing on the first is more likely to lead to the second than the other way around.
zem 15y ago
the root problem is that school funding and teacher's reviews are linked to the students' performance on standardised tests. another significant problem that this causes is that teachers who work with the kids who most needed it are harshly penalised by the way the metrics are structured (e.g. someone working with troubled kids from poor backgrounds, who manages to raise their standardised test scores from an F to a C, and, more importantly, taught them how to learn, will still be rated far worse than someone who has simply drilled a classroom full of bored upper middle class kids till they can do well on the tests (whether or not they have actually learnt anything)) this article, for example, is a good read on the subject: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/06/27/education-reform-in-the-wrong-direction-high-stake-consequences-for-new-york-state-teachers-and-their-students/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/06/27/ed...
- electromagnetic 15y ago
  I don't understand funding based on performance on standardised tests. I mean it's one thing if you double-blind it, but who wants to be the parents of the kid in the control group who get zero education to see how well the teachers actually improved their students abilities. The only reprieve I have for standardises testing in the UK was that a teachers opinion of you doesn't reflect on your ability to get grades. I was a d-average student in one of my classes. I never got marked well for my essays, etc. I took the exam expecting failure and received a B, comparing with friends I found I was only a few marks short of an A. The teacher never liked me, because he never liked my brother, because my brother was a cocky asshole. If I'd have been graded by him, I would have failed.
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  ...someone working with troubled kids from poor backgrounds, who manages to raise their standardised test scores from an F to a C... Such a teacher will receive a very high score according to most modern Value Added Modelling assessments (such as the one the article complains about). In fact, it's the teachers of upper middle class kids who are hurt the most by VAM. If the VAM predictor says your student average should be 95/100, it's hard for your students to beat that by a significant margin.
kenjackson 15y ago
I'm curious what is so different in Texas and California math where a full 1/3 of the curriculum is different? Is it manifest in the difference when these students get to colleges?
- spc476 15y ago
  I'm not sure, but it could be that the math text books are just plain bad. I did a rant about this a few years ago when a friend was homeschooling her kids: http://boston.conman.org/2004/01/21.1 http://boston.conman.org/2004/01/21.1
  - HilbertSpace 15y ago
    Beautiful! Great Feynman quotes!
- nekojima 15y ago
  Its the third that's bible-based maths. :-/
zarify 15y ago
Well at some point you are always teaching to a test of some sort. If I teach my students about X I will test them on X (either through extended pieces of work or through tests and exams) and not Y. The trouble with many texts is that they aren't tailored to any particular course (mainly I imagine because courses vary so greatly even within countries). This is why it's really great to see lots of resources like Khan Acadamy out there where things are more focused on concepts rather than courses and you can pick and choose what you need to learn about. One of the problems with teaching that I've seen since I started is that many people produce their own sets of resources, but there's very little sharing going on when you consider the total population. Considering the networks of really knowledgable people out there, we really don't need textbooks; we just need smart people willing to collaborate more and the technology to make that accessible. Edit: With some afterthought, some of this is probably a systemic problem with the bureauracy which has large scale contracts with publishers and so on, and thus little interest in using the resource they already have (ie their teachers). When implementing some new courses here in Westeran Australia the department of education implemented groups of teachers to produce sample material, but it wasn't particularly well funded or promoted nearly well enough to make it very successful, and it was only accessible to other government schools and not independent and religious schools (Catholic, Anglican systems etc). It would have been nice (and completely surprising) for the systems to work together or set up an independent body to manage something like this.

pgeorgi 15y ago

I suppose (well, hope) that the point of these statements is that their curriculum differs in some aspects. Maths (like all topics in school) is too wide to teach everything, so they had to pick their battles. The 30% that aren't covered in the mass market books have to be provided by the teachers as additional material, while 30% of the books are not used in school. For $65, I'd expect more, too. On the upside: Assuming that the additional material isn't provided centrally, these teachers who wrote the book have more exposure to writing course work than their colleagues in Texas, who get optimized books.

derefr 15y ago

But isn't that... test-driven design? ;) I mean, if the tests have 100% coverage, there's no problem with the education only covering what's on the test, right? It just means kids have to sit through exams that are perhaps eight hours long. (Which is fine, really, if those exams get split up so that they're given one exam per unit, rather than one humongous state-wide test. And while they're at it, if those exams were also, say, given online, accessible at the student's whim, and able to be repeated indefinitely without penalty (because of some form of procedural question generation), they could even be used as gates to determine when the student was ready for the next level of material...)

dwiel 15y ago
This is kinda how Montessori schools do it - at least the one here where my partner teaches. They aren't online, but the student gets to chose to some degree what they are working on, however they can only move onto the next level of a subject once they've passed the 'works' that come before it. The grading of a work involves marking problems correct and incorrect. Note that this is 1st - 3rd grades
X-Istence 15y ago
What you are describing in your last paragraph sounds a lot like Khanacademy...
sliverstorm 15y ago
Agreed. If the kids are being taught the wrong things, you don't get pissed at the teachers- you change the standards/tests. Same as with any good software!
- electromagnetic 15y ago
  I think the problem is that students should be taught to think, not to pass tests. I was taught to think, not so much by school but by a select few teachers and especially my father. I learnt metric growing up. When I started construction everything was done in millimetres and meters. I moved from the UK to Canada, where the construction trade is solely imperial (it's not like the UK where you can get legacy tape measures that have inces and meters, I have inches and feet) and I didn't struggle. It was about a month before my boss said "Doesn't the UK only use meters, are you coping with the change?" Of course I coped, I learnt to think. A foot is a generalised measurement so that multiple people can work to the same measurements. A meter is a generalised measurement so that multiple people can work to the same measurements. If someone calls out to me "cut at 1321mm" I cut at "1321" the same as if they'd just called "cut at 52 inch". I've seen guys, high school graduates (in the UK I only did high school until I was 16, and the newbies I get given did it until they were 18) and they're confused by the mere notion that an inch is divisible up to a 16th on a tape measure. I personally cannot comprehend how they don't understand. How lacking is your education that you can't find 9/16ths on a tape measure? How lacking is your education when you can't cut a 22.5 degree angle from a 16x16 square (measure up to the half way point and trace a line to the 0 point giving you the desired pattern)? My work doesn't even require a high school education to get hired and we've had some phenomenal employees who failed high school. The irony is we get bucket loads of retards who graduated high school. There's a big difference between learning and merely storing data. The problem is that we're creating a generation of databases. I'm sorry, but I have computers, and phones, and fuck a pocket book that can retain data for me. I don't need a million kids to do that. I need a kid that can read a tape and cut an angle so that I can train them. I don't know how I'm supposed to train someone who's passed high school that should so obviously have failed.

megablast 15y ago

Why is the material taught different? Surely all kids should need to learn the same information. Why is Minnesota cutting out so much of the math that California and Texas teaching? The students often end up going to the same colleges, where they will need to do the same work?

blahedo 15y ago
Off the top of my head: could be a breadth/depth thing, could be that the books are a union of California and Texas (in which case CA and TX also have the problem of unused chapters), or it could be that the time not spent on those chapters is spent on something that MN brings in with supplemental reading already or just teaches without a textbook. It almost certainly isn't just that MN is a simple subset of the CA/TX material, or else the Byron district's scores wouldn't have gone up from the new material.
nobody3141592 15y ago
Perhaps Texas only teaches addition, California only teach subtraction - they used to also include multiplication and division but the kids tested poorly on those and it was dragging the grades down.
ericflo 15y ago
I went to school in Minnesota, and I think I know what they're talking about, at least when it comes to the math curriculum: we never had a trigonometry class. Sure we learned trigonometry, but it was never a dedicated class. Instead it was always a unit attached to what we were currently working on, whenever it made sense. End result: we learned the same material, just in a different order.
sliverstorm 15y ago
Why is the material taught different? States are the ones responsible for picking what material to teach their children. This is why material can be different. There is so much that we could teach our children, there isn't a clearly defined set of "This is what is best to teach them", so different people will produce different sets of things to teach. This is why material is different.

apaitch 15y ago

I think it's great that these teachers are taking initiative to make up for the system's deficiency (i.e. expensive textbooks targeted towards the biggest markets). However, I agree with this - I would hope that the goal would be enhancing learning, understanding, and appreciation of the subjects as opposed to passing the standardized tests. Granted, the two are not exclusive, but I think focusing on the first is more likely to lead to the second than the other way around.

zem 15y ago

the root problem is that school funding and teacher's reviews are linked to the students' performance on standardised tests. another significant problem that this causes is that teachers who work with the kids who most needed it are harshly penalised by the way the metrics are structured (e.g. someone working with troubled kids from poor backgrounds, who manages to raise their standardised test scores from an F to a C, and, more importantly, taught them how to learn, will still be rated far worse than someone who has simply drilled a classroom full of bored upper middle class kids till they can do well on the tests (whether or not they have actually learnt anything)) this article, for example, is a good read on the subject: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/06/27/education-reform-in-the-wrong-direction-high-stake-consequences-for-new-york-state-teachers-and-their-students/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/06/27/ed...

electromagnetic 15y ago
I don't understand funding based on performance on standardised tests. I mean it's one thing if you double-blind it, but who wants to be the parents of the kid in the control group who get zero education to see how well the teachers actually improved their students abilities. The only reprieve I have for standardises testing in the UK was that a teachers opinion of you doesn't reflect on your ability to get grades. I was a d-average student in one of my classes. I never got marked well for my essays, etc. I took the exam expecting failure and received a B, comparing with friends I found I was only a few marks short of an A. The teacher never liked me, because he never liked my brother, because my brother was a cocky asshole. If I'd have been graded by him, I would have failed.
yummyfajitas 15y ago
...someone working with troubled kids from poor backgrounds, who manages to raise their standardised test scores from an F to a C... Such a teacher will receive a very high score according to most modern Value Added Modelling assessments (such as the one the article complains about). In fact, it's the teachers of upper middle class kids who are hurt the most by VAM. If the VAM predictor says your student average should be 95/100, it's hard for your students to beat that by a significant margin.

kenjackson 15y ago

I'm curious what is so different in Texas and California math where a full 1/3 of the curriculum is different? Is it manifest in the difference when these students get to colleges?

spc476 15y ago
I'm not sure, but it could be that the math text books are just plain bad. I did a rant about this a few years ago when a friend was homeschooling her kids: http://boston.conman.org/2004/01/21.1 http://boston.conman.org/2004/01/21.1
- HilbertSpace 15y ago
  Beautiful! Great Feynman quotes!
nekojima 15y ago
Its the third that's bible-based maths. :-/

zarify 15y ago

Well at some point you are always teaching to a test of some sort. If I teach my students about X I will test them on X (either through extended pieces of work or through tests and exams) and not Y. The trouble with many texts is that they aren't tailored to any particular course (mainly I imagine because courses vary so greatly even within countries). This is why it's really great to see lots of resources like Khan Acadamy out there where things are more focused on concepts rather than courses and you can pick and choose what you need to learn about. One of the problems with teaching that I've seen since I started is that many people produce their own sets of resources, but there's very little sharing going on when you consider the total population. Considering the networks of really knowledgable people out there, we really don't need textbooks; we just need smart people willing to collaborate more and the technology to make that accessible. Edit: With some afterthought, some of this is probably a systemic problem with the bureauracy which has large scale contracts with publishers and so on, and thus little interest in using the resource they already have (ie their teachers). When implementing some new courses here in Westeran Australia the department of education implemented groups of teachers to produce sample material, but it wasn't particularly well funded or promoted nearly well enough to make it very successful, and it was only accessible to other government schools and not independent and religious schools (Catholic, Anglican systems etc). It would have been nice (and completely surprising) for the systems to work together or set up an independent body to manage something like this.