6 ms·

I mean, this all sounds like an red herring anyway if what you want is to improve maths education broadly: you need a willingness to abandon most of the student

I mean, this all sounds like an red herring anyway if what you want is to improve maths education broadly: you need a willingness to abandon most of the students (they have the best maths team and yet the school doesn't rank well on maths) in favour of concentrating all the most promising students into one small(ish) group. Over half (51%) of the student at this school have below satisfactory maths proficiency, and most of those (70%) are actually rated as Inadequate. If you are interested in raising the mathematical achievement of the roughly[1] 90% of students at Buchholz that don't get to take part in these ivory tower math classes, there is not much of use here. [1] Only 140 students out of 2200 went to the Church thing. Alternatively, only 10% of the students attain a rating of maths Mastery in US News ranking: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/florida/districts/alachua-county-public-schools/f-w-buchholz-high-school-4666 https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/florida/d...

bee_rider 4y ago
Also -- I'm willing to believe that the regular "boring honors stuff," as they put it, which they've apparently de-prioritized is not the best possible curriculum. But there's no reason to believe that the skills needed to solve math puzzles really quickly are either. Competitions are always artificial. This school is apparently pulling some really bright students now. Are they teaching them skills that will allow them to excel academically later in life, or are they teaching them how to execute the competitive meta strategy quickly?
- TheMagicHorsey 4y ago
  Math is not debate or a spelling B. Math problem solving is absolutely applicable, in that form, in a number of fields like engineering, finance, video games, etc. etc.
- M3L0NM4N 4y ago
  As someone who was on the team, the skills that allow you to excel academically in life are the competitive math skills. And to be honest, not only is the "honors stuff" and "common core" material deprioritized, it's not even taught explicitly. You just get to such a high level understanding of the subjects Frazer teaches that it becomes trivial.
- mlyle 4y ago
  > But there's no reason to believe that the skills needed to solve math puzzles really quickly are either. I disagree. I think that having a strong sense of mathematical properties and numbers is more useful than any specific rote drilled into students. I see a lot of students up in precalc doing rote and not understanding at all why things work and that have no chance when you throw a curveball. On the other hand, the competitive math students are asking questions like: * What's the graph of this function look like? * What's it for the trivial case n=4 before I think about n=100? * Does symmetry or any other pattern collapse this down? * What properties do I expect the answer to have? Why does this direction "feel right"? The kids who excel in math competition and on the normal math academic track get there by playing with it and understanding it.
mlyle 4y ago
> I mean, this all sounds like an red herring anyway if what you want is to improve maths education broadly That's the tricky bit here, right? Math competition gamifies math, and encourages a level of play and understanding that normal math classes don't deliver. But if you don't feel like you have some basic level of competence, being measured in this way is demotivating. We need to figure out ways to make it interesting and involve exploration and that game-like feel for a broad slice of students. I would rather a given student end their HS math journey in algebra I and have finished it with A) wonder, and B) a broad and solid understanding of the material that they can take into their adult lives... than to have ended it being able to do a big slice of AP Calc BC problems well, but without any kind of underlying fluency in math. True mastery is one thing missing from all these discussions of math levels, tracks, etc.
- SiempreViernes 4y ago
  > encourages a level of play and understanding that normal math classes don't deliver Yes, but this is largely by convention for much of it. With some effort you can incorporate more playful and open exercises in a normal class. However few teachers have the spare time to spend this effort. It is also risky because you're likely to have some students that cannot cope with the challenge and if they do poorly the new thing you tried is likely to attract blame. As an aside, a fundamental problem in any discussion about education is that it tends to happen with the various parties speaking about interventions aimed as only a section of the student population, but without this segmentation being explicitly acknowledged. It is always important to remember there is a huge range of abilities and home circumstances in the student population the schools have to educate, so in a very real sense there is not just one, but rather a whole society of underlying problems that lead the the educational outcomes that then get summarised as a unitary PISA ranking or similar.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    > Yes, but this is largely by convention for much of it. With some effort you can incorporate more playful and open exercises in a normal class. However few teachers have the spare time to spend this effort. It is also risky because you're likely to have some students that cannot cope with the challenge and if they do poorly the new thing you tried is likely to attract blame. That's the big thing that has to be figured out. It needs to be fun. You need some randomness and handicapping. Effort and ability needs to affect outcome in gamified lessons but you need to feel like you have a fighting chance even if you're at the bottom. I feel like good PE teachers know better how to do this than most in education. Their curriculum is intrinsically gamified and they need to manage to get effort and development from those with obviously different levels of ability. > As an aside, a fundamental problem in any discussion about education is that it tends to happen with the various parties speaking about interventions aimed as only a section of the student population, but without this segmentation being explicitly acknowledged. A bigger fundamental problem is that we don't get rigorous data on anything. We flit from trend to trend to trend, without measuring any of them well. I'm data driven, and I read all the educational research, and I have very little rigorous guidance that I can believe. It falls to personal judgment, then, which is notoriously easy to fool. > It is always important to remember there is a huge range of abilities and home circumstances in the student population the schools have to educate, so in a very real sense there is not just one, but rather a whole society of underlying problems that lead the the educational outcomes that then get summarised as a unitary PISA ranking or similar. Yes, but it's similarly a mistake to think we're at some kind of global optimum and that there's not a set of different practices and curriculum that would result in a drastically better distribution of outcomes. In particular, I feel like we really, really screw up how math is taught. I did recovery with a couple of students up in precalc levels that were struggling. They were missing some fundamental things. When they fell behind, it's everyone's (parents, teachers, tutors, etc) immediate intervention to help them with the problems they're struggling with, and drill them with rote. But if the real problem is that you don't have a good understanding of the associative property of multiplication, you end up memorizing a million special cases and getting yourself confused. So when can you rearrange terms, and when can you not? It's time to play with it and find out...
nine_k 4y ago
I think what it shows that mathematical aptitude is somehow unevenly distributed, but most of all, the motivation to develop it is highly unevenly distributed among students. Because of that, you can pick a school where most students (70%) can't be bothered to learn the basics, and pick a few who are motivated to climb to the top. This is completely unsurprising: in every sport, the proportion of those who do not care enough to those highly motivated is even more stark.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  A talented teacher can inspire and motivate almost any student.
  - SiempreViernes 4y ago
    That doesn't really help, because it simply shifts the problem to creating "talented teachers" out of the average teachers that are actually on hand.
    - corrral 4y ago
      Reality is you'd need to at least double teacher pay to get a pool of teachers for whom the approach from one of these "amazing teacher does amazing thing" stories might—might—generalize well enough to be useful.
      - pmoriarty 4y ago
        It's not just about pay. It's also about workload, safety, respect, and a curriculum that doesn't try to force them to only teach to pass tests. Teachers also need collaboration from parents who all too often see school as a free babysitting service or just a road to a job.
        corrral 4y ago
        Right, absolutely. The conditions are also damn stressful, unless you're lucky enough to be at a school with amazing admin and co-workers and parents. That almost never happens. Then the ones who are good but getting stressed out eventually start looking around and realize they could match their current comp assistant-managing a gas station, and that some of the extra things they've taken on give them experience that lets them gun for non-education jobs with way higher pay... and it's only a matter of time before they leave.
rob74 4y ago
Plus I suspect that there are at least some kids with a math talent who were explicitly sent to this specific school - so if you had programs like this in every school, you would probably have significantly fewer eligible candidates.
- chrchang523 4y ago
  That's a contributor to how the math team continues to be successful today, but the more interesting question is how they initially became world-class ~15 years ago. Frazer is clearly responsible for the latter.
  - SiempreViernes 4y ago
    It's outlined in the following paragraph: """ Mr. Frazer’s insight was to connect four levels of education: The kids he scouts in elementary school develop in middle school, compete in high school and take specialized classes from college professors that he brings to Buchholz’s campus. As soon as the system was in place, the team started winning and never stopped. """ Notice how the first step is collecting kids that are already good. The recipe is then broadly: collect the best kids you can get your hands on, train and coach them for years, watch them win. There might be some details of wider interest, but essentially this is a good old elitist project.
- SiempreViernes 4y ago
  Yeah, the article mentions that professors at the nearby university explicitly court the teacher to get their kids into these classes.

bee_rider 4y ago

Also -- I'm willing to believe that the regular "boring honors stuff," as they put it, which they've apparently de-prioritized is not the best possible curriculum. But there's no reason to believe that the skills needed to solve math puzzles really quickly are either. Competitions are always artificial. This school is apparently pulling some really bright students now. Are they teaching them skills that will allow them to excel academically later in life, or are they teaching them how to execute the competitive meta strategy quickly?

TheMagicHorsey 4y ago
Math is not debate or a spelling B. Math problem solving is absolutely applicable, in that form, in a number of fields like engineering, finance, video games, etc. etc.
M3L0NM4N 4y ago
As someone who was on the team, the skills that allow you to excel academically in life are the competitive math skills. And to be honest, not only is the "honors stuff" and "common core" material deprioritized, it's not even taught explicitly. You just get to such a high level understanding of the subjects Frazer teaches that it becomes trivial.
mlyle 4y ago
> But there's no reason to believe that the skills needed to solve math puzzles really quickly are either. I disagree. I think that having a strong sense of mathematical properties and numbers is more useful than any specific rote drilled into students. I see a lot of students up in precalc doing rote and not understanding at all why things work and that have no chance when you throw a curveball. On the other hand, the competitive math students are asking questions like: * What's the graph of this function look like? * What's it for the trivial case n=4 before I think about n=100? * Does symmetry or any other pattern collapse this down? * What properties do I expect the answer to have? Why does this direction "feel right"? The kids who excel in math competition and on the normal math academic track get there by playing with it and understanding it.

mlyle 4y ago

> I mean, this all sounds like an red herring anyway if what you want is to improve maths education broadly That's the tricky bit here, right? Math competition gamifies math, and encourages a level of play and understanding that normal math classes don't deliver. But if you don't feel like you have some basic level of competence, being measured in this way is demotivating. We need to figure out ways to make it interesting and involve exploration and that game-like feel for a broad slice of students. I would rather a given student end their HS math journey in algebra I and have finished it with A) wonder, and B) a broad and solid understanding of the material that they can take into their adult lives... than to have ended it being able to do a big slice of AP Calc BC problems well, but without any kind of underlying fluency in math. True mastery is one thing missing from all these discussions of math levels, tracks, etc.

SiempreViernes 4y ago
> encourages a level of play and understanding that normal math classes don't deliver Yes, but this is largely by convention for much of it. With some effort you can incorporate more playful and open exercises in a normal class. However few teachers have the spare time to spend this effort. It is also risky because you're likely to have some students that cannot cope with the challenge and if they do poorly the new thing you tried is likely to attract blame. As an aside, a fundamental problem in any discussion about education is that it tends to happen with the various parties speaking about interventions aimed as only a section of the student population, but without this segmentation being explicitly acknowledged. It is always important to remember there is a huge range of abilities and home circumstances in the student population the schools have to educate, so in a very real sense there is not just one, but rather a whole society of underlying problems that lead the the educational outcomes that then get summarised as a unitary PISA ranking or similar.
- mlyle 4y ago
  > Yes, but this is largely by convention for much of it. With some effort you can incorporate more playful and open exercises in a normal class. However few teachers have the spare time to spend this effort. It is also risky because you're likely to have some students that cannot cope with the challenge and if they do poorly the new thing you tried is likely to attract blame. That's the big thing that has to be figured out. It needs to be fun. You need some randomness and handicapping. Effort and ability needs to affect outcome in gamified lessons but you need to feel like you have a fighting chance even if you're at the bottom. I feel like good PE teachers know better how to do this than most in education. Their curriculum is intrinsically gamified and they need to manage to get effort and development from those with obviously different levels of ability. > As an aside, a fundamental problem in any discussion about education is that it tends to happen with the various parties speaking about interventions aimed as only a section of the student population, but without this segmentation being explicitly acknowledged. A bigger fundamental problem is that we don't get rigorous data on anything. We flit from trend to trend to trend, without measuring any of them well. I'm data driven, and I read all the educational research, and I have very little rigorous guidance that I can believe. It falls to personal judgment, then, which is notoriously easy to fool. > It is always important to remember there is a huge range of abilities and home circumstances in the student population the schools have to educate, so in a very real sense there is not just one, but rather a whole society of underlying problems that lead the the educational outcomes that then get summarised as a unitary PISA ranking or similar. Yes, but it's similarly a mistake to think we're at some kind of global optimum and that there's not a set of different practices and curriculum that would result in a drastically better distribution of outcomes. In particular, I feel like we really, really screw up how math is taught. I did recovery with a couple of students up in precalc levels that were struggling. They were missing some fundamental things. When they fell behind, it's everyone's (parents, teachers, tutors, etc) immediate intervention to help them with the problems they're struggling with, and drill them with rote. But if the real problem is that you don't have a good understanding of the associative property of multiplication, you end up memorizing a million special cases and getting yourself confused. So when can you rearrange terms, and when can you not? It's time to play with it and find out...

nine_k 4y ago

I think what it shows that mathematical aptitude is somehow unevenly distributed, but most of all, the motivation to develop it is highly unevenly distributed among students. Because of that, you can pick a school where most students (70%) can't be bothered to learn the basics, and pick a few who are motivated to climb to the top. This is completely unsurprising: in every sport, the proportion of those who do not care enough to those highly motivated is even more stark.

pmoriarty 4y ago
A talented teacher can inspire and motivate almost any student.
- SiempreViernes 4y ago
  That doesn't really help, because it simply shifts the problem to creating "talented teachers" out of the average teachers that are actually on hand.
  - corrral 4y ago
    Reality is you'd need to at least double teacher pay to get a pool of teachers for whom the approach from one of these "amazing teacher does amazing thing" stories might—might—generalize well enough to be useful.
    - pmoriarty 4y ago
      It's not just about pay. It's also about workload, safety, respect, and a curriculum that doesn't try to force them to only teach to pass tests. Teachers also need collaboration from parents who all too often see school as a free babysitting service or just a road to a job.
      - corrral 4y ago
        Right, absolutely. The conditions are also damn stressful, unless you're lucky enough to be at a school with amazing admin and co-workers and parents. That almost never happens. Then the ones who are good but getting stressed out eventually start looking around and realize they could match their current comp assistant-managing a gas station, and that some of the extra things they've taken on give them experience that lets them gun for non-education jobs with way higher pay... and it's only a matter of time before they leave.

rob74 4y ago

Plus I suspect that there are at least some kids with a math talent who were explicitly sent to this specific school - so if you had programs like this in every school, you would probably have significantly fewer eligible candidates.

chrchang523 4y ago
That's a contributor to how the math team continues to be successful today, but the more interesting question is how they initially became world-class ~15 years ago. Frazer is clearly responsible for the latter.
- SiempreViernes 4y ago
  It's outlined in the following paragraph: """ Mr. Frazer’s insight was to connect four levels of education: The kids he scouts in elementary school develop in middle school, compete in high school and take specialized classes from college professors that he brings to Buchholz’s campus. As soon as the system was in place, the team started winning and never stopped. """ Notice how the first step is collecting kids that are already good. The recipe is then broadly: collect the best kids you can get your hands on, train and coach them for years, watch them win. There might be some details of wider interest, but essentially this is a good old elitist project.
SiempreViernes 4y ago
Yeah, the article mentions that professors at the nearby university explicitly court the teacher to get their kids into these classes.