8 ms·

All the remedial classes in one place

116 points by Plasmoid 2y ago

metalforever 2y ago
So, I read this article and have to disagree with this point that people in very remedial math classes have cognitive issues . I can think of so many exceptions to this that I have personally encountered. Its usually because of poverty or home schooling and often isnt the fault of the student. I know someone that is far more intelligent than I (I went to a top 3 cs school and have had a very successful career). This person can't do basic math because they were never given the opportunity to learn it. There are also people that are perfectly intelligent, but messed up really badly when they were younger. They should have the opportunity to turn things around.
- vundercind 2y ago
  I know a couple people who are much smarter than me in many ways, but who failed a whole bunch of college math classes because they checked out way back when nobody could tell them why the fuck they were spending so much time factoring or solving quadratic equations or any number of other hated-by-most-students and largely motivation-free chunks of our k-12 math curriculum. Hell I got a lot farther in math and for the most part I can’t tell them why we did a lot of that, either.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    for those in that industry, the answer is implementing LLMs
    - google234123 2y ago
      this is a bad take
  - trueismywork 2y ago
    In this particular narrow respect, math attracts and rewards people who like doing it without need for motivation. Same like people who like to play sports.
  - cool_dude85 2y ago
    People who ask this kind of question have a very narrow fixation on math specifically, I think. One learns to do these things to understand mathematical thinking, how to approach and solve math problems, etc. When, as an adult, have you used the knowledge contained in the book Frankenstein? But nobody says "why do I have to read Frankenstein?" because they understand that it's not the specific book that matters.
    - jncfhnb 2y ago
      You don’t learn much generalizable wisdom from drilling integral calculus rules though
      - cool_dude85 2y ago
        Indeed, nor do you learn much wisdom drilling vocab or the memorization that is done in every subject.
    - vundercind 2y ago
      > But nobody says "why do I have to read Frankenstein?" They really do. Secondary school students famously often don’t “get” good books and think they’re awful and pointless, much as people who’ve not been exposed to a given anything-but-totally-non-challenging musical genre will often think its masterpieces are boring and/or bad.
      - BeFlatXIII 2y ago
        IMO, that's also due to a lack of life experience. The students don't "get" it b/c it's too alien for them to relate to. They can be taught to echo the correct answers, but it's later life experience that will enrich their knowledge if it was drilled deeply enough that they remember.
- mapt 2y ago
  They should, but this is arguably social work rather than the sort of education we should charge [massive quantities of interest-bearing] money for. What I don't understand is how you can ethically accept someone for admission to a university knowing you will have to do extensive social work to bring them up to the standard of education you were supposed to test for at admission. Big chunks of that are affirmative action, sports scholarships, and functionally-for-profit admits (in my system, overseas admissions to a state university). Every student like this you accept for a normal course of undergrad work represents another student that you're going to reject for not meeting admissions criteria. We have historically used "Community Colleges" as a second tier system that assisted this sort of student for minimal debt with significant subsidy, and "Universities", especially "Research Universities", as a first tier system where both professors and students are expected to perform higher level work.
  - ahazred8ta 2y ago
    The higher level course load is not a myth: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/14x2oyp/yes_students_at_elite_schools_are_actually_taught/ https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/14x2oyp/yes...
- trueismywork 2y ago
  Maths is really a cumulative topic. Everytime someone gets left behind, they fall of the wagon.
- ahazred8ta 2y ago
  About half of middle class US public school students don't want to learn any math at all. There are many HS students who can't answer "What's half of 20?" or factor the number 15. https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/
  - mindcrime 2y ago
    There are many HS students who can't answer "What's half of 20?" or factor the number 15. Part of me sees that and immediately thinks "That can't possibly be true". Another part of me reminds the other part that I used to feel the same way about the statement "many working programmers can't write FizzBuzz". And then I was on the interview team for my employer a couple of jobs back, and we routinely asked candidates to write FizzBuzz. And many, including folks with 10, 15+ years of documented coding experience, and/or Masters or PhD degrees in C.S., could not do it. And that's even when they were given a laptop with an IDE open, with the skeleton of the program in place, with strategically located comments saying "your code goes here" and suchlike. I don't know what to think about humanity sometimes. The same race that put people on the moon, helicopters on Mars, Voyagers beyond the edge of the Solar System, invented the Internet, nanotech, lasers, etc. has people who can make it to (and through) high school, and still can't come up with "what's half of 20" or, apparently, write FizzBuzz???
    - jldugger 2y ago
      > I don't know what to think about humanity sometimes. If it's any solace, selection bias is a thing. Those applicants that can't Fizz Buzz? They rarely get hired, and are rarely kept on for long when they do get an offer. Spoolsky made the argument like 20 years ago that as a result they flood the zone, and produce a massively biased applicant stream.
    - ahazred8ta 2y ago
      Teachers: How do you come to terms with the low ability of our students? -- https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1cxcd2r/how_do_you_come_to_terms_with_the_low_ability_of/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1cxcd2r/how_do_yo...
- mindslight 2y ago
  The lack of understanding math is itself a cognitive issue. Especially when we're talking about signing up for loans.
tripdout 2y ago
> “I co ming offise to day AAAAaaaa?” --E-mail from a Vietnamese student. She got an A in my trigonometry class, dominating the other students despite not knowing much English. Yes, she did work in a nail salon, and no, she didn’t graduate the equivalent of high school in her native country. What does a nail salon have to do with your point?
- analog31 2y ago
  Probably that she was working a day job in order to pay for college, like my mom.
  - johnea 2y ago
    And she's Vietnamese. Which is an immigrant nationality associated in the US with working in nail salons.
    - devilbunny 2y ago
      Thanks to Tippi Hedren! When Vietnamese refugees arrived in the US after the fall of South Vietnam, Ms. Hedren (Melanie Griffith's mother) visited a camp outside Sacramento. The women of the camp expressed interest in her manicured nails, so she suggested that learning how to do nails would be an excellent career for them - relatively little English is required, so lack of fluency was a minimal barrier. She had her personal manicurist flown up to the camp to teach an initial class of 20 women, and after they had been trained, she helped them get licenses and jobs. And that's why so many nail salons in the US are Vietnamese-owned and -staffed.
- johnea 2y ago
  The point is that the student is an immigrant, working in addition to college, who barely speaks english, and who still Aced the course while the idiot muricans were busy using twerk tick and 1/2 failed. If after reading the article, this was your take away question, you'd probably fail the remedial class too...
  - 2y ago
sandspar 2y ago
[flagged]
- johnea 2y ago
  Racism much? You must live in a pretty small bubble if you've never met a black person who can understand math.
  - DopplerSmell 2y ago
    Kind of funny to see a comment that completely ignores the idea of distributions and outliers in a thread talking about math.
  - zdragnar 2y ago
    There's a higher correlation of being black and poverty than some other races in the US. That higher poverty rate combined with some other social issues leads to lower levels of academic preparedness overall. This is evident by the weights that universities used for affirmative action. Using white students as a basis for comparison, Asian students needed to get a higher SAT score, while black students had equal odds of admission with a lower score. See also the number of k-12 schools with literally zero students performing at grade level, which tend to be concentrated in areas of higher poverty. Assuming, as OP pointed out, that you want to bring in higher numbers of black students, there are two possibilities: for some reason, academically prepared students aren't going to college (less likely) and / or you need to lower the bar (more likely, and one I have personally witnessed).
  - Aunche 2y ago
    It sounds racist because they phrased it very bluntly, but that aren't saying that black people can't do math. One of the reasons why Americans are bad at math is because our expectations of math are abysmal. Raising these expectations will reveal just how far behind black students are in math, which will get you accused of racism, so schools are incentivized to keep them low. One can argue that this is actually a form of systemic racism because the schools that are failing to properly educate black students are shielded from scrutiny.
analog31 2y ago
I taught "College Algebra" at a Big Ten university for one semester, 25+ years ago, when I was in between jobs. The Freshmen took a math test during orientation and were slotted into either Remedial, College Algebra, or Calculus. It's my understanding that the curriculum of College Algebra is the bare minimum of topics that must be taught in order to offer the course for credit at an accredited college. This explains why the topics are seemingly drawn at random, with little flexibility. The lower level "remedial" courses were offered but did not come with credit. You still had to pass College Algebra in order to graduate. Or I think maybe Statistics. The education system has struggled to teach math since time immoral. Every generation tries some new method, and is ultimately declared a failure. I don't have a good answer. Most adults retain barely any of their high school or college math, including people in STEM occupations. I've heard "I'm not really a math person" from engineers. Parents remember how their math was taught, and complain when their kids aren't learning math the same way, but frankly the parents are terrible at math.
- MattGaiser 2y ago
  > Most adults retain barely any of their high school or college math, including people in STEM occupations. I've heard "I'm not really a math person" from engineers. I studied computer and electrical engineering, so we had tons of math heavy physics and math in there. But since university, I haven’t done anything beyond algebra and statistics. Not for an hour. And if I were say a product manager, would I have done any algebra since university? Adults don’t retain math as very few use it with any regularity, and certainly not without calculators. Same thing happens with literacy. Professions that don’t use reading/writing regularly see the skills of people employed in those roles atrophy. https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5873757 https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5873757
  - gonzo41 2y ago
    This comes as no shock at all. I stopped regularly running long distances and now i have to build up the skill again.
  - hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
    C. 1995, I aced the SAT-I math section (/800) cold with zero prep at a time when I was taking AP Calculus BC (5.0/5.0 on that too). BS CS/EE but stopped there because there wasn't really any benefit going on. If a gun were put to my head, I'd like to think I would be able to reteach myself how to derive the time-dependent hydrogen 1s PDF. I don't know the last time I used an integral or manipulated a PDE, but have had to use vectors and kernels now and then. I'm lazy, so I would probably use Mathematica or Giac if anything hurt my brain and couldn't be entered easily on an HP 48 (emulator). I'm kind of annoyed when people without degrees and with liberal arts majors are making $400k-$1M in the same job I'm in (when employed), and annoyed at myself for bothering pay the establishment years and $70k for nothing of value.
deleted 2y ago
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monero-xmr 2y ago
I have many academic friends. One woman is a professor at a lower-tier state school. They are keeping their enrollment consistent but fewer people apply every year, resulting in intellectually declining classes every year. There are simply too many colleges, and our public schools are by-and-large atrocious for the money we spend, so it’s not going to get any better. Certainly throwing more money at public schools is not the answer. In my opinion we need to take all the smart and ambitious kids and segregate them into good schools, while the rest can be glorified day care for kids on their phones.
- zbentley 2y ago
  > fewer people apply every year, resulting in intellectually declining classes every year Why/how does that follow?
  - monero-xmr 2y ago
    Anyone with a pulse being enrolled and put in remedial classes because they need to fill the classrooms and dorms
  - evilduck 2y ago
    They also mentioned that the school was maintaining enrollment numbers despite lower application rates. The only way that works in a low tier state school is that admissions officers are relaxing academic standards.
edtechdev 2y ago
Some research: Students learn and understand college math more when the classes are contextualized (usually engineering, biology, but you can also use everyday examples). See decades of research on situated learning and related approaches. https://careerladdersproject.org/docs/Contextual%20Approaches%20to%20Dev%20Math%20Full%20Report.pdf https://careerladdersproject.org/docs/Contextual%20Approache... Developmental courses can also be compressed https://blog.careertech.org/research-review-promising-practices-for-reducing-racial-disparities-in-academic-outcomes/ https://blog.careertech.org/research-review-promising-practi... Dual enrollment saves time and money and improves success. Let high school students take college math courses. Corequisite remediation is the current best practice. Let students take regular (not remedial) math courses, and improve advising and support. https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/easyblog/future-of-corequisite-remediation.html https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/easyblog/future-of-corequisite-... https://strongstart.org/resource/corequisite-mathematics-toolkit/ https://strongstart.org/resource/corequisite-mathematics-too...
- Fomite 2y ago
  Contextualization was hugely important for me grasping math. I think one of the most dangerous things we do is relying on people who believe math is beautiful/interesting for its own sake to teach math.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    This may also true for some (admittedly also-mathy) Computer Science topics.
  - Animats 2y ago
    There is that. One approach to calculus is to teach it alongside Newtonian mechanics, with lots of experimental work. Those go together. The problem is, it's too hard for high school teachers.[1] [1] https://www.compadre.org/portal/pssc/pssc.cfm https://www.compadre.org/portal/pssc/pssc.cfm
    - vlmutolo 2y ago
      My public high school offered a combined physics-math course (basically two different teachers and courses that coordinated with each other), and it was definitely an excellent way to learn calculus. We learned derivatives for mechanics around the same time as limits for calc. So everything in calc was properly motivated. I think we moved into E&M around the same time as we got into integrals in calc. We had done basic integrals in the mechanics portion of physics, but got into it formally in calculus and into trickier applications in E&M. IIRC, the class as a whole did very well on the AP exams. I’m often frustrated by courses that don’t offer similar motivation for math concepts. I think it makes the material far more interesting.
parpfish 2y ago
a long-time peeve of mine is that people who frequently talk about the value of a 'well rounded (liberal arts) education' almost always have an implicit exclusion of math. they think it's great to have some basic knowledge in a wide variety of subjects -- history, literature, music, etc. But when it comes to math, they'll just shrug and gleefully say "i'm not really a math person!"
- zeteo 2y ago
  Math is un-democratic.
  - genter 2y ago
    Pretty sure this is the stupidest thing I've ever read. Edit: OP deleted it now, and I wish I saved it, but he originally posted a long spiel on how math is undemocratic because anyone can prove anyone else wrong.
    - ahazred8ta 2y ago
      Never try to disagree with the 2+2=22 crowd (short film Alternative Math (2017): https://www.boredteachers.com/post/short-film-shows-sad-reality-teachers-actually-have-to-deal-with https://www.boredteachers.com/post/short-film-shows-sad-real...
- rayiner 2y ago
  > But when it comes to math, they'll just shrug and gleefully say "i'm not really a math person!" I’m always shocked that people aren’t embarrassed to say that in public.
  - Turing_Machine 2y ago
    Indeed. People are embarrassed to admit that they're illiterate, but somehow it's different when it comes to math.
  - IOT_Apprentice 2y ago
smelendez 2y ago
> “The Civil War was inevitable, but it didn’t have to be that way.” ---quote from a student history paper. A month before the paper was written, the history professor ranted extensively to the rest of the faculty how annoying it was that he had to stop his lecture, and spend time defining the word ‘inevitable’ to his class. This sounds like it could have been an interesting discussion about what historians mean when they call something inevitable. "Inevitable literally means unavoidable, and in practice historians use it to mean a situation where... Scholars often say the war became inevitable after..."
- jandrese 2y ago
  If it had been prefaced with "By 1850" that would have been a reasonable title.
  - evilduck 2y ago
    I still think it’s a bit harsh to judge it as contradictory without the rest of the paper. Another valid interpretation: “The Civil War was inevitable [given the sequence of historical events], but it didn’t have to be that way [if we hypothetically could change a couple small pivotal scenarios].” The rest of the paper would need to support that title of course, but a catchy title that causes someone to rage-read your paper is the literary equivalent of clickbait and a time honored tradition of aspiring writers.
penteract 2y ago
I've never completely understood why most American universities insist on a broad range of subjects (by comparison, in the UK it's common to begin to specialise aged 16, after which you might never need to academically write an essay/solve a maths problem - this isn't perfect either). While I believe everyone should love mathematics and keep learning it as long as possible, forcing adults to study it is counter-productive. Lack of inclination to study maths also shouldn't stop people from attending university - something like creative writing really doesn't depend on it, although I sometimes wish there more stringent requirements for mathematical qualifications of journalists.
- bigthymer 2y ago
  > While I believe everyone should love mathematics and keep learning it as long as possible, forcing adults to study it is counter-productive. Lack of inclination to study maths also shouldn't stop people from attending university The writer mentions that allowing students to slip by without math limits them to mostly economically unproductive majors. If they are going to limit themselves to only these majors, are they getting value from attending college at all compared to the debt they will be saddled with?
  - friend_and_foe 2y ago
    The idea that it's the purpose of college to prepare someone for a career is misled. I say this as someone who loathes institutionalized education, didn't go to college, and won't send my kids. It's your job to prepare yourself for a career. It's college's job to teach you what you pay them to teach you. If they're going to college and getting a degree that isn't going to pay off, that's the fault of the schooling they've had up until that point, for not teaching them a damn thing about cost and benefit, and for pumping it into their heads that college is a ticket to an easy life, that you'll be a burger flipper til 65 without it and that sort of thing. I agree with the author that helping people take out loans to learn something they should've learned in 8th grade and pretending it's higher education is extremely unethical, but if someone's going to college when they can't afford it and don't need it, the blame lies with the people that educated them about the world up until the point they made that decision, not with the college. Doubly so since those people were responsible for teaching them I'm the 8th grade.
jameshart 2y ago
Seems that a significant cause of college students struggling to pass remedial compulsory math classes is that colleges are often woefully bad at teaching. Are they really offering a 'class', or is it just a vaguely enumerated syllabus, delivered with the patronizing assumption that if prodded, students will remember the stuff they were supposed to learn in high school?
- mjevans 2y ago
  I vaguely recall trying to test out of the Calc (first class in the series) course in college; the test covered topics that not only AP Calc in High School didn't, but that we didn't even get to by the END of the calc classes as part of the program I was in at that college.
- nearbuy 2y ago
  I don't think that's an excuse these days, especially for algebra. My first semester at university, we had an elderly professor for Linear Algebra and ODEs who mumbled largely incomprehensibly and seemed to be losing his memory. I had no idea what was going on, and never went back to class after the first or second. But there are so many amazing, free resources online. Khan Academy didn't exist yet (or at least we hadn't heard of it) but we had Paul's Notes, which has all the standard high school and college math courses. IMO, the online math resources are better than even an excellent teacher in a class of 50 students.
  - jameshart 2y ago
    Absolutely. This is why college admissions are so hard. Colleges want to only let in students who either already know the material, or are motivated enough to teach it themselves. That way the fact that they are providing precious little actual tuition doesn’t matter so long as they continue to provide reasonably good assessment. This is a common complaint with computer science 101 ‘weed out’ classes where the claim is that they are weeding out people who lack the innate capability to program, but in actuality they are weeding out the people who couldn’t program before they got to college.
photochemsyn 2y ago
I had a very interesting work-study job in my first year in college, teaching dyslexic students who were struggling with basic algebra - essentially, walking through their homework assignments with them. Success meant figuring out some way of presenting the problem that worked for them, typically with some kind of physical example. I remember one student in particular could simply not grasp the notion that feeding x into a function f(x) would generate a point y on a two-dimensional graph, not even for a simple straight line, let alone an exponential or sine curve. Eventually a machine analogy worked: here's a vegetable slicer, you throw a number into it, it spits out another number - reproducibly. To describe this machine, we write an algebraic equation. However, this would have been absolutely impossible in a large class - these students needed individually tailored one-on-one attention for at least an hour each to get the ideas across to them. Some parents can afford to hire such private tutors, some can't. Also, people seem to have natural affinities for different areas of mathematics, just like people naturally take to different sports. I have no idea of whether genetics plays a role, although clearly in physical sports body types matter - the long-distance runner is unlikely to also be a champion weightlifter, etc. I've also noticed that some people who claim to be 'bad at math' often have good mathematical skills that they don't even think of as math, e.g. combinatorics as applied to playing games like cards or Scrabble. In the end, mathematics is a hard subject and students who want to master any aspect of it will need at least three hours of study on their own (or assisted) for each hour spent in class listening to an instructor. It's not for everyone, and that's okay.
xnyan 2y ago
I took remedial math at UNC Chapel Hill. My parents decided to homeschool me my entire childhood, but their math ability ended at about the 8th grade, everything else I had to figure out on my own. I always thought I was bad at math, but it turns out having a teacher who is not your parent with a tenuous grasp on algebra helps a lot. That remedial math course changed my life forever and let me work in a career I love. I am eternally grateful to the kind graduate student who led that course - John, wherever you are, thank you.
fdye 2y ago
So as someone who took many of those remedial math classes this article rubbed me a bit the wrong way. Not necessarily that any of his descriptions are wrong about the students or the type of things it covers. Instead there seemed to be this underlying theme in the article about it being a waste of time and of little value to society. I strongly feel any time us as humans sit in a classroom and try to better ourselves even when we ultimately fail, it benefits society overall. Personally, I was in the basic math in High school, like long division/multiplication freshmen/sophomore year. When I first went to community college around the age of 16-19 I got farther, taking Algebra I and then II. However, once I reached Calculus I crashed and burned, although I did great in my CS and other science classes. I eventually entered the work force (programming/tech) and over the next half dozen years tried and failed at least 3 times to restart at community college usually failing at Calculus I or college level english. Finally, at 30 it seemed to take, I eventually passed Calc I, Discrete, Linear, got my degree. A blend of community college and state school so I didn't break the bank. I have friends from other sides of the world that have told me this would only really be possible in the US. In many places their is no equivalent of community/junior colleges or an attempt at adult remedial education. Instead you place in your teens, and if you score well enough you get to go to college. Otherwise, its trade school or similar and much more difficult to escape your socio-economic class. The author and others seem to be advocating for something similar here under the guise of it being unethical to waste resources or give hope to the dumb dumbs. I can't say I agree...
- jnwatson 2y ago
  There's a huge difference between failing Calculus and failing Algebra. Calculus is not required for most degrees. Algebra is required for almost all.
- nearbuy 2y ago
  He's talking about taking students who can't do grade 7-9 math and charging them $200,000 and several years of their life for the promise of a career they almost never get. These students are getting screwed over hard. Most of them don't want to be taking the class.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
huitzitziltzin 2y ago
This is an accurate description of what my large R1 research university did after Covid to maintain enrollment. It’s a heavily tuition driven place without the tens of billions of endowment dollars an Ivy has. They “opened the floodgates” to students to maintain enrollment, in the words of a colleague. People who would have been denied without a second thought pre-COVID were admitted. The acceptance rate went from 40%-50% to 80%+. (Numbers are approximate.) Accepting these students required adding two levels (at least!) of remedial math below what used to be the absolute last resort, “should you really be in college?” remedial math class we had pre covid. These new classes basically taught middle school level material or lower. Nearly all of the students taking those classes don’t belong in college bc they are totally unqualified to do college level work. It’s irresponsible to admit them, charge them $200,000, then graduate them as heavily indebted but basically high school educated adults. They have no skills. I can’t make up for their failure to learn math in (as this author correctly says) 5th - 12th grade. I make this comment to note that the situation hasn’t changed. Also: to the extent that anyone is looking for villains on student debt (overall the “crisis” is overblown but there absolutely are students who get screwed), blame the universities which admit unqualified students and also the high schools and middle schools which utterly failed them. Also blame our failure to pay math teachers more than PE teachers. There are a lot of villains. The system is horrible.
- IOT_Apprentice 2y ago
  I find it ironic that an elite mathematician such as yourself has zero ability to teach basic mathematics to anyone. Or is it that you choose not to, because you consider them inferior? Your commentary reads like that, but perhaps I’m misreading your tone & choice of words.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - shoo 2y ago
    math is a subject that stacks abstraction on abstraction on abstraction, year after year. if a student didn't understand a fundamental math concept in an early year (perhaps for no fault of their own -- perhaps an undiagnosed issue impeding learning, or a teacher who didn't know the material well enough to teach it, or too many moves between too many classes and teachers), and the education system passed this student from math class to math class year after year without fixing the knowledge gap, so each year the student fails to absorb the year's new math concepts as they still haven't achieved fluency/mastery with the basics, then after some point it is no longer possible to compensate this with a brief remedial math course designed to plug a 1-3 year gap. maybe for some folks you'd need to bridge a 5-10 year gap in math education, which could be achieved with customised tutoring perhaps, for 5-10 years. but a remedial course trying to teach a batch of students at once needs to assume some basic level of ability as a pre-req.
deleted 2y ago
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Balgair 2y ago
Great read! I wish there were an update from 2013 to the post-covid landscape too, but sadly the anonymous professor died of cancer sometime in early 2020. Fuck Cancer. I was absolutely shocked to hear that his institution was even offering the pre-pre-remedial math at all (back in 2013). "There’s a huge issue of integrity in the pre-sub-remedial course. If you’re teaching 3rd grade material to an adult, you consider that adult to have the cognitive skills of an 8 year old at best. There’s nothing wrong with trying to improve education and learning, but at some point, someone should think “This student didn’t learn this in 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade. Maybe he doesn’t want to learn this and we shouldn’t loan him money to learn it.” Failing that, admissions should think “Maybe loaning this person money that goes right to us would be taking advantage of someone with a mental disability and it would be not be acting with integrity to do that.” So far, these possibilities have never been raised at any meeting concerning remediation, and administration continues to sell these courses to anyone willing to go into debt to take them." He's not wrong at all here. To me, giving that person a obviously impossible to pay back loan is immoral. Since it's been about 11 years and a pandemic later, I'd assume that the fed either patched this up and it's not able to be done this badly now, or that straight up illiterate people are getting in now too.
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  https://obits.theadvocate.com/us/obituaries/theadvocate/name/richard-moscatello-obituary https://obits.theadvocate.com/us/obituaries/theadvocate/name...
  - Balgair 2y ago
    Oh man, it returns a 404 for me. Somehow that's even more depressing. Like, my obit could be online for the world to see, but subject to linkrot like everything else. The link that works for me is: https://obits.theadvocate.com/us/obituaries/theadvocate/name/richard-moscatello-obituary?id=13583699 https://obits.theadvocate.com/us/obituaries/theadvocate/name... The obit asks for trees to be planted in his honor here: https://sympathy.legacy.com/en-us/funeral-flowers/productdetails/?type=obituary&p=195456689&pn=richard-moscatello&affiliateId=1382&sku=tre-tim&pm=240 https://sympathy.legacy.com/en-us/funeral-flowers/productdet...
selimthegrim 2y ago
The guy also wrote an article called “Satisfied with poverty: an argument for ending welfare” with a libertarian business professor, so make of that what you will

116 points by Plasmoid 2y ago

So, I read this article and have to disagree with this point that people in very remedial math classes have cognitive issues . I can think of so many exceptions to this that I have personally encountered. Its usually because of poverty or home schooling and often isnt the fault of the student. I know someone that is far more intelligent than I (I went to a top 3 cs school and have had a very successful career). This person can't do basic math because they were never given the opportunity to learn it. There are also people that are perfectly intelligent, but messed up really badly when they were younger. They should have the opportunity to turn things around.

vundercind 2y ago
I know a couple people who are much smarter than me in many ways, but who failed a whole bunch of college math classes because they checked out way back when nobody could tell them why the fuck they were spending so much time factoring or solving quadratic equations or any number of other hated-by-most-students and largely motivation-free chunks of our k-12 math curriculum. Hell I got a lot farther in math and for the most part I can’t tell them why we did a lot of that, either.
- fragmede 2y ago
  for those in that industry, the answer is implementing LLMs
  - google234123 2y ago
    this is a bad take
- trueismywork 2y ago
  In this particular narrow respect, math attracts and rewards people who like doing it without need for motivation. Same like people who like to play sports.
- cool_dude85 2y ago
  People who ask this kind of question have a very narrow fixation on math specifically, I think. One learns to do these things to understand mathematical thinking, how to approach and solve math problems, etc. When, as an adult, have you used the knowledge contained in the book Frankenstein? But nobody says "why do I have to read Frankenstein?" because they understand that it's not the specific book that matters.
  - jncfhnb 2y ago
    You don’t learn much generalizable wisdom from drilling integral calculus rules though
    - cool_dude85 2y ago
      Indeed, nor do you learn much wisdom drilling vocab or the memorization that is done in every subject.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    > But nobody says "why do I have to read Frankenstein?" They really do. Secondary school students famously often don’t “get” good books and think they’re awful and pointless, much as people who’ve not been exposed to a given anything-but-totally-non-challenging musical genre will often think its masterpieces are boring and/or bad.
    - BeFlatXIII 2y ago
      IMO, that's also due to a lack of life experience. The students don't "get" it b/c it's too alien for them to relate to. They can be taught to echo the correct answers, but it's later life experience that will enrich their knowledge if it was drilled deeply enough that they remember.
mapt 2y ago
They should, but this is arguably social work rather than the sort of education we should charge [massive quantities of interest-bearing] money for. What I don't understand is how you can ethically accept someone for admission to a university knowing you will have to do extensive social work to bring them up to the standard of education you were supposed to test for at admission. Big chunks of that are affirmative action, sports scholarships, and functionally-for-profit admits (in my system, overseas admissions to a state university). Every student like this you accept for a normal course of undergrad work represents another student that you're going to reject for not meeting admissions criteria. We have historically used "Community Colleges" as a second tier system that assisted this sort of student for minimal debt with significant subsidy, and "Universities", especially "Research Universities", as a first tier system where both professors and students are expected to perform higher level work.
- ahazred8ta 2y ago
  The higher level course load is not a myth: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/14x2oyp/yes_students_at_elite_schools_are_actually_taught/ https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/14x2oyp/yes...
trueismywork 2y ago
Maths is really a cumulative topic. Everytime someone gets left behind, they fall of the wagon.
ahazred8ta 2y ago
About half of middle class US public school students don't want to learn any math at all. There are many HS students who can't answer "What's half of 20?" or factor the number 15. https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/
- mindcrime 2y ago
  There are many HS students who can't answer "What's half of 20?" or factor the number 15. Part of me sees that and immediately thinks "That can't possibly be true". Another part of me reminds the other part that I used to feel the same way about the statement "many working programmers can't write FizzBuzz". And then I was on the interview team for my employer a couple of jobs back, and we routinely asked candidates to write FizzBuzz. And many, including folks with 10, 15+ years of documented coding experience, and/or Masters or PhD degrees in C.S., could not do it. And that's even when they were given a laptop with an IDE open, with the skeleton of the program in place, with strategically located comments saying "your code goes here" and suchlike. I don't know what to think about humanity sometimes. The same race that put people on the moon, helicopters on Mars, Voyagers beyond the edge of the Solar System, invented the Internet, nanotech, lasers, etc. has people who can make it to (and through) high school, and still can't come up with "what's half of 20" or, apparently, write FizzBuzz???
  - jldugger 2y ago
    > I don't know what to think about humanity sometimes. If it's any solace, selection bias is a thing. Those applicants that can't Fizz Buzz? They rarely get hired, and are rarely kept on for long when they do get an offer. Spoolsky made the argument like 20 years ago that as a result they flood the zone, and produce a massively biased applicant stream.
  - ahazred8ta 2y ago
    Teachers: How do you come to terms with the low ability of our students? -- https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1cxcd2r/how_do_you_come_to_terms_with_the_low_ability_of/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1cxcd2r/how_do_yo...
mindslight 2y ago
The lack of understanding math is itself a cognitive issue. Especially when we're talking about signing up for loans.

tripdout 2y ago

> “I co ming offise to day AAAAaaaa?” --E-mail from a Vietnamese student. She got an A in my trigonometry class, dominating the other students despite not knowing much English. Yes, she did work in a nail salon, and no, she didn’t graduate the equivalent of high school in her native country. What does a nail salon have to do with your point?

analog31 2y ago
Probably that she was working a day job in order to pay for college, like my mom.
- johnea 2y ago
  And she's Vietnamese. Which is an immigrant nationality associated in the US with working in nail salons.
  - devilbunny 2y ago
    Thanks to Tippi Hedren! When Vietnamese refugees arrived in the US after the fall of South Vietnam, Ms. Hedren (Melanie Griffith's mother) visited a camp outside Sacramento. The women of the camp expressed interest in her manicured nails, so she suggested that learning how to do nails would be an excellent career for them - relatively little English is required, so lack of fluency was a minimal barrier. She had her personal manicurist flown up to the camp to teach an initial class of 20 women, and after they had been trained, she helped them get licenses and jobs. And that's why so many nail salons in the US are Vietnamese-owned and -staffed.
johnea 2y ago
The point is that the student is an immigrant, working in addition to college, who barely speaks english, and who still Aced the course while the idiot muricans were busy using twerk tick and 1/2 failed. If after reading the article, this was your take away question, you'd probably fail the remedial class too...
- 2y ago

sandspar 2y ago

[flagged]

johnea 2y ago
Racism much? You must live in a pretty small bubble if you've never met a black person who can understand math.
- DopplerSmell 2y ago
  Kind of funny to see a comment that completely ignores the idea of distributions and outliers in a thread talking about math.
- zdragnar 2y ago
  There's a higher correlation of being black and poverty than some other races in the US. That higher poverty rate combined with some other social issues leads to lower levels of academic preparedness overall. This is evident by the weights that universities used for affirmative action. Using white students as a basis for comparison, Asian students needed to get a higher SAT score, while black students had equal odds of admission with a lower score. See also the number of k-12 schools with literally zero students performing at grade level, which tend to be concentrated in areas of higher poverty. Assuming, as OP pointed out, that you want to bring in higher numbers of black students, there are two possibilities: for some reason, academically prepared students aren't going to college (less likely) and / or you need to lower the bar (more likely, and one I have personally witnessed).
- Aunche 2y ago
  It sounds racist because they phrased it very bluntly, but that aren't saying that black people can't do math. One of the reasons why Americans are bad at math is because our expectations of math are abysmal. Raising these expectations will reveal just how far behind black students are in math, which will get you accused of racism, so schools are incentivized to keep them low. One can argue that this is actually a form of systemic racism because the schools that are failing to properly educate black students are shielded from scrutiny.

analog31 2y ago

I taught "College Algebra" at a Big Ten university for one semester, 25+ years ago, when I was in between jobs. The Freshmen took a math test during orientation and were slotted into either Remedial, College Algebra, or Calculus. It's my understanding that the curriculum of College Algebra is the bare minimum of topics that must be taught in order to offer the course for credit at an accredited college. This explains why the topics are seemingly drawn at random, with little flexibility. The lower level "remedial" courses were offered but did not come with credit. You still had to pass College Algebra in order to graduate. Or I think maybe Statistics. The education system has struggled to teach math since time immoral. Every generation tries some new method, and is ultimately declared a failure. I don't have a good answer. Most adults retain barely any of their high school or college math, including people in STEM occupations. I've heard "I'm not really a math person" from engineers. Parents remember how their math was taught, and complain when their kids aren't learning math the same way, but frankly the parents are terrible at math.

MattGaiser 2y ago
> Most adults retain barely any of their high school or college math, including people in STEM occupations. I've heard "I'm not really a math person" from engineers. I studied computer and electrical engineering, so we had tons of math heavy physics and math in there. But since university, I haven’t done anything beyond algebra and statistics. Not for an hour. And if I were say a product manager, would I have done any algebra since university? Adults don’t retain math as very few use it with any regularity, and certainly not without calculators. Same thing happens with literacy. Professions that don’t use reading/writing regularly see the skills of people employed in those roles atrophy. https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5873757 https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5873757
- gonzo41 2y ago
  This comes as no shock at all. I stopped regularly running long distances and now i have to build up the skill again.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
  C. 1995, I aced the SAT-I math section (/800) cold with zero prep at a time when I was taking AP Calculus BC (5.0/5.0 on that too). BS CS/EE but stopped there because there wasn't really any benefit going on. If a gun were put to my head, I'd like to think I would be able to reteach myself how to derive the time-dependent hydrogen 1s PDF. I don't know the last time I used an integral or manipulated a PDE, but have had to use vectors and kernels now and then. I'm lazy, so I would probably use Mathematica or Giac if anything hurt my brain and couldn't be entered easily on an HP 48 (emulator). I'm kind of annoyed when people without degrees and with liberal arts majors are making $400k-$1M in the same job I'm in (when employed), and annoyed at myself for bothering pay the establishment years and $70k for nothing of value.

deleted 2y ago

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monero-xmr 2y ago

I have many academic friends. One woman is a professor at a lower-tier state school. They are keeping their enrollment consistent but fewer people apply every year, resulting in intellectually declining classes every year. There are simply too many colleges, and our public schools are by-and-large atrocious for the money we spend, so it’s not going to get any better. Certainly throwing more money at public schools is not the answer. In my opinion we need to take all the smart and ambitious kids and segregate them into good schools, while the rest can be glorified day care for kids on their phones.

zbentley 2y ago
> fewer people apply every year, resulting in intellectually declining classes every year Why/how does that follow?
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  Anyone with a pulse being enrolled and put in remedial classes because they need to fill the classrooms and dorms
- evilduck 2y ago
  They also mentioned that the school was maintaining enrollment numbers despite lower application rates. The only way that works in a low tier state school is that admissions officers are relaxing academic standards.

edtechdev 2y ago

Some research: Students learn and understand college math more when the classes are contextualized (usually engineering, biology, but you can also use everyday examples). See decades of research on situated learning and related approaches. https://careerladdersproject.org/docs/Contextual%20Approaches%20to%20Dev%20Math%20Full%20Report.pdf https://careerladdersproject.org/docs/Contextual%20Approache... Developmental courses can also be compressed https://blog.careertech.org/research-review-promising-practices-for-reducing-racial-disparities-in-academic-outcomes/ https://blog.careertech.org/research-review-promising-practi... Dual enrollment saves time and money and improves success. Let high school students take college math courses. Corequisite remediation is the current best practice. Let students take regular (not remedial) math courses, and improve advising and support. https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/easyblog/future-of-corequisite-remediation.html https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/easyblog/future-of-corequisite-... https://strongstart.org/resource/corequisite-mathematics-toolkit/ https://strongstart.org/resource/corequisite-mathematics-too...

Fomite 2y ago
Contextualization was hugely important for me grasping math. I think one of the most dangerous things we do is relying on people who believe math is beautiful/interesting for its own sake to teach math.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  This may also true for some (admittedly also-mathy) Computer Science topics.
- Animats 2y ago
  There is that. One approach to calculus is to teach it alongside Newtonian mechanics, with lots of experimental work. Those go together. The problem is, it's too hard for high school teachers.[1] [1] https://www.compadre.org/portal/pssc/pssc.cfm https://www.compadre.org/portal/pssc/pssc.cfm
  - vlmutolo 2y ago
    My public high school offered a combined physics-math course (basically two different teachers and courses that coordinated with each other), and it was definitely an excellent way to learn calculus. We learned derivatives for mechanics around the same time as limits for calc. So everything in calc was properly motivated. I think we moved into E&M around the same time as we got into integrals in calc. We had done basic integrals in the mechanics portion of physics, but got into it formally in calculus and into trickier applications in E&M. IIRC, the class as a whole did very well on the AP exams. I’m often frustrated by courses that don’t offer similar motivation for math concepts. I think it makes the material far more interesting.

parpfish 2y ago

a long-time peeve of mine is that people who frequently talk about the value of a 'well rounded (liberal arts) education' almost always have an implicit exclusion of math. they think it's great to have some basic knowledge in a wide variety of subjects -- history, literature, music, etc. But when it comes to math, they'll just shrug and gleefully say "i'm not really a math person!"

zeteo 2y ago
Math is un-democratic.
- genter 2y ago
  Pretty sure this is the stupidest thing I've ever read. Edit: OP deleted it now, and I wish I saved it, but he originally posted a long spiel on how math is undemocratic because anyone can prove anyone else wrong.
  - ahazred8ta 2y ago
    Never try to disagree with the 2+2=22 crowd (short film Alternative Math (2017): https://www.boredteachers.com/post/short-film-shows-sad-reality-teachers-actually-have-to-deal-with https://www.boredteachers.com/post/short-film-shows-sad-real...
rayiner 2y ago
> But when it comes to math, they'll just shrug and gleefully say "i'm not really a math person!" I’m always shocked that people aren’t embarrassed to say that in public.
- Turing_Machine 2y ago
  Indeed. People are embarrassed to admit that they're illiterate, but somehow it's different when it comes to math.
- IOT_Apprentice 2y ago

smelendez 2y ago

> “The Civil War was inevitable, but it didn’t have to be that way.” ---quote from a student history paper. A month before the paper was written, the history professor ranted extensively to the rest of the faculty how annoying it was that he had to stop his lecture, and spend time defining the word ‘inevitable’ to his class. This sounds like it could have been an interesting discussion about what historians mean when they call something inevitable. "Inevitable literally means unavoidable, and in practice historians use it to mean a situation where... Scholars often say the war became inevitable after..."

jandrese 2y ago
If it had been prefaced with "By 1850" that would have been a reasonable title.
- evilduck 2y ago
  I still think it’s a bit harsh to judge it as contradictory without the rest of the paper. Another valid interpretation: “The Civil War was inevitable [given the sequence of historical events], but it didn’t have to be that way [if we hypothetically could change a couple small pivotal scenarios].” The rest of the paper would need to support that title of course, but a catchy title that causes someone to rage-read your paper is the literary equivalent of clickbait and a time honored tradition of aspiring writers.

penteract 2y ago

I've never completely understood why most American universities insist on a broad range of subjects (by comparison, in the UK it's common to begin to specialise aged 16, after which you might never need to academically write an essay/solve a maths problem - this isn't perfect either). While I believe everyone should love mathematics and keep learning it as long as possible, forcing adults to study it is counter-productive. Lack of inclination to study maths also shouldn't stop people from attending university - something like creative writing really doesn't depend on it, although I sometimes wish there more stringent requirements for mathematical qualifications of journalists.

bigthymer 2y ago
> While I believe everyone should love mathematics and keep learning it as long as possible, forcing adults to study it is counter-productive. Lack of inclination to study maths also shouldn't stop people from attending university The writer mentions that allowing students to slip by without math limits them to mostly economically unproductive majors. If they are going to limit themselves to only these majors, are they getting value from attending college at all compared to the debt they will be saddled with?
- friend_and_foe 2y ago
  The idea that it's the purpose of college to prepare someone for a career is misled. I say this as someone who loathes institutionalized education, didn't go to college, and won't send my kids. It's your job to prepare yourself for a career. It's college's job to teach you what you pay them to teach you. If they're going to college and getting a degree that isn't going to pay off, that's the fault of the schooling they've had up until that point, for not teaching them a damn thing about cost and benefit, and for pumping it into their heads that college is a ticket to an easy life, that you'll be a burger flipper til 65 without it and that sort of thing. I agree with the author that helping people take out loans to learn something they should've learned in 8th grade and pretending it's higher education is extremely unethical, but if someone's going to college when they can't afford it and don't need it, the blame lies with the people that educated them about the world up until the point they made that decision, not with the college. Doubly so since those people were responsible for teaching them I'm the 8th grade.

jameshart 2y ago

Seems that a significant cause of college students struggling to pass remedial compulsory math classes is that colleges are often woefully bad at teaching. Are they really offering a 'class', or is it just a vaguely enumerated syllabus, delivered with the patronizing assumption that if prodded, students will remember the stuff they were supposed to learn in high school?

mjevans 2y ago
I vaguely recall trying to test out of the Calc (first class in the series) course in college; the test covered topics that not only AP Calc in High School didn't, but that we didn't even get to by the END of the calc classes as part of the program I was in at that college.
nearbuy 2y ago
I don't think that's an excuse these days, especially for algebra. My first semester at university, we had an elderly professor for Linear Algebra and ODEs who mumbled largely incomprehensibly and seemed to be losing his memory. I had no idea what was going on, and never went back to class after the first or second. But there are so many amazing, free resources online. Khan Academy didn't exist yet (or at least we hadn't heard of it) but we had Paul's Notes, which has all the standard high school and college math courses. IMO, the online math resources are better than even an excellent teacher in a class of 50 students.
- jameshart 2y ago
  Absolutely. This is why college admissions are so hard. Colleges want to only let in students who either already know the material, or are motivated enough to teach it themselves. That way the fact that they are providing precious little actual tuition doesn’t matter so long as they continue to provide reasonably good assessment. This is a common complaint with computer science 101 ‘weed out’ classes where the claim is that they are weeding out people who lack the innate capability to program, but in actuality they are weeding out the people who couldn’t program before they got to college.

photochemsyn 2y ago

I had a very interesting work-study job in my first year in college, teaching dyslexic students who were struggling with basic algebra - essentially, walking through their homework assignments with them. Success meant figuring out some way of presenting the problem that worked for them, typically with some kind of physical example. I remember one student in particular could simply not grasp the notion that feeding x into a function f(x) would generate a point y on a two-dimensional graph, not even for a simple straight line, let alone an exponential or sine curve. Eventually a machine analogy worked: here's a vegetable slicer, you throw a number into it, it spits out another number - reproducibly. To describe this machine, we write an algebraic equation. However, this would have been absolutely impossible in a large class - these students needed individually tailored one-on-one attention for at least an hour each to get the ideas across to them. Some parents can afford to hire such private tutors, some can't. Also, people seem to have natural affinities for different areas of mathematics, just like people naturally take to different sports. I have no idea of whether genetics plays a role, although clearly in physical sports body types matter - the long-distance runner is unlikely to also be a champion weightlifter, etc. I've also noticed that some people who claim to be 'bad at math' often have good mathematical skills that they don't even think of as math, e.g. combinatorics as applied to playing games like cards or Scrabble. In the end, mathematics is a hard subject and students who want to master any aspect of it will need at least three hours of study on their own (or assisted) for each hour spent in class listening to an instructor. It's not for everyone, and that's okay.

xnyan 2y ago

I took remedial math at UNC Chapel Hill. My parents decided to homeschool me my entire childhood, but their math ability ended at about the 8th grade, everything else I had to figure out on my own. I always thought I was bad at math, but it turns out having a teacher who is not your parent with a tenuous grasp on algebra helps a lot. That remedial math course changed my life forever and let me work in a career I love. I am eternally grateful to the kind graduate student who led that course - John, wherever you are, thank you.

fdye 2y ago

So as someone who took many of those remedial math classes this article rubbed me a bit the wrong way. Not necessarily that any of his descriptions are wrong about the students or the type of things it covers. Instead there seemed to be this underlying theme in the article about it being a waste of time and of little value to society. I strongly feel any time us as humans sit in a classroom and try to better ourselves even when we ultimately fail, it benefits society overall. Personally, I was in the basic math in High school, like long division/multiplication freshmen/sophomore year. When I first went to community college around the age of 16-19 I got farther, taking Algebra I and then II. However, once I reached Calculus I crashed and burned, although I did great in my CS and other science classes. I eventually entered the work force (programming/tech) and over the next half dozen years tried and failed at least 3 times to restart at community college usually failing at Calculus I or college level english. Finally, at 30 it seemed to take, I eventually passed Calc I, Discrete, Linear, got my degree. A blend of community college and state school so I didn't break the bank. I have friends from other sides of the world that have told me this would only really be possible in the US. In many places their is no equivalent of community/junior colleges or an attempt at adult remedial education. Instead you place in your teens, and if you score well enough you get to go to college. Otherwise, its trade school or similar and much more difficult to escape your socio-economic class. The author and others seem to be advocating for something similar here under the guise of it being unethical to waste resources or give hope to the dumb dumbs. I can't say I agree...

jnwatson 2y ago
There's a huge difference between failing Calculus and failing Algebra. Calculus is not required for most degrees. Algebra is required for almost all.
nearbuy 2y ago
He's talking about taking students who can't do grade 7-9 math and charging them $200,000 and several years of their life for the promise of a career they almost never get. These students are getting screwed over hard. Most of them don't want to be taking the class.
deleted 2y ago
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huitzitziltzin 2y ago

This is an accurate description of what my large R1 research university did after Covid to maintain enrollment. It’s a heavily tuition driven place without the tens of billions of endowment dollars an Ivy has. They “opened the floodgates” to students to maintain enrollment, in the words of a colleague. People who would have been denied without a second thought pre-COVID were admitted. The acceptance rate went from 40%-50% to 80%+. (Numbers are approximate.) Accepting these students required adding two levels (at least!) of remedial math below what used to be the absolute last resort, “should you really be in college?” remedial math class we had pre covid. These new classes basically taught middle school level material or lower. Nearly all of the students taking those classes don’t belong in college bc they are totally unqualified to do college level work. It’s irresponsible to admit them, charge them $200,000, then graduate them as heavily indebted but basically high school educated adults. They have no skills. I can’t make up for their failure to learn math in (as this author correctly says) 5th - 12th grade. I make this comment to note that the situation hasn’t changed. Also: to the extent that anyone is looking for villains on student debt (overall the “crisis” is overblown but there absolutely are students who get screwed), blame the universities which admit unqualified students and also the high schools and middle schools which utterly failed them. Also blame our failure to pay math teachers more than PE teachers. There are a lot of villains. The system is horrible.

IOT_Apprentice 2y ago
I find it ironic that an elite mathematician such as yourself has zero ability to teach basic mathematics to anyone. Or is it that you choose not to, because you consider them inferior? Your commentary reads like that, but perhaps I’m misreading your tone & choice of words.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- shoo 2y ago
  math is a subject that stacks abstraction on abstraction on abstraction, year after year. if a student didn't understand a fundamental math concept in an early year (perhaps for no fault of their own -- perhaps an undiagnosed issue impeding learning, or a teacher who didn't know the material well enough to teach it, or too many moves between too many classes and teachers), and the education system passed this student from math class to math class year after year without fixing the knowledge gap, so each year the student fails to absorb the year's new math concepts as they still haven't achieved fluency/mastery with the basics, then after some point it is no longer possible to compensate this with a brief remedial math course designed to plug a 1-3 year gap. maybe for some folks you'd need to bridge a 5-10 year gap in math education, which could be achieved with customised tutoring perhaps, for 5-10 years. but a remedial course trying to teach a batch of students at once needs to assume some basic level of ability as a pre-req.

deleted 2y ago

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Balgair 2y ago

Great read! I wish there were an update from 2013 to the post-covid landscape too, but sadly the anonymous professor died of cancer sometime in early 2020. Fuck Cancer. I was absolutely shocked to hear that his institution was even offering the pre-pre-remedial math at all (back in 2013). "There’s a huge issue of integrity in the pre-sub-remedial course. If you’re teaching 3rd grade material to an adult, you consider that adult to have the cognitive skills of an 8 year old at best. There’s nothing wrong with trying to improve education and learning, but at some point, someone should think “This student didn’t learn this in 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade. Maybe he doesn’t want to learn this and we shouldn’t loan him money to learn it.” Failing that, admissions should think “Maybe loaning this person money that goes right to us would be taking advantage of someone with a mental disability and it would be not be acting with integrity to do that.” So far, these possibilities have never been raised at any meeting concerning remediation, and administration continues to sell these courses to anyone willing to go into debt to take them." He's not wrong at all here. To me, giving that person a obviously impossible to pay back loan is immoral. Since it's been about 11 years and a pandemic later, I'd assume that the fed either patched this up and it's not able to be done this badly now, or that straight up illiterate people are getting in now too.

selimthegrim 2y ago
https://obits.theadvocate.com/us/obituaries/theadvocate/name/richard-moscatello-obituary https://obits.theadvocate.com/us/obituaries/theadvocate/name...
- Balgair 2y ago
  Oh man, it returns a 404 for me. Somehow that's even more depressing. Like, my obit could be online for the world to see, but subject to linkrot like everything else. The link that works for me is: https://obits.theadvocate.com/us/obituaries/theadvocate/name/richard-moscatello-obituary?id=13583699 https://obits.theadvocate.com/us/obituaries/theadvocate/name... The obit asks for trees to be planted in his honor here: https://sympathy.legacy.com/en-us/funeral-flowers/productdetails/?type=obituary&p=195456689&pn=richard-moscatello&affiliateId=1382&sku=tre-tim&pm=240 https://sympathy.legacy.com/en-us/funeral-flowers/productdet...

selimthegrim 2y ago

The guy also wrote an article called “Satisfied with poverty: an argument for ending welfare” with a libertarian business professor, so make of that what you will