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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 Californ

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.
aik 15y ago
Because no one actually knows exactly what the best things to learn are for human beings. Plus, it's constantly changing. Secondly, different teachers have different experiences and teach differently. We're human! How could it be the same? The only way I see is to remove as many human elements as possible (teachers most notably). Are we headed that way?

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.

aik 15y ago

Because no one actually knows exactly what the best things to learn are for human beings. Plus, it's constantly changing. Secondly, different teachers have different experiences and teach differently. We're human! How could it be the same? The only way I see is to remove as many human elements as possible (teachers most notably). Are we headed that way?