In the Name of Equity, California Will Discourage Students Gifted at Math
reason.comAt the end of the day I'd like to see the data.
Somewhat related: There was a recent episode in This American Life that showed how struggling minority students actually became above average or near the top in subjects like calculus when forced to sit in classes for "advanced" students as opposed to "remedial" classes.
A number of universities (including some well known ones) have tried this - some for many years - so the data is out there. At least those universities showed that pushing struggling students even more than what you have in a typical course led to better outcomes than the remedial courses.
Different scenario than this submission, but it highlights the need to throw intuition away and focus on whether there is any data to support this.
I'm just waiting for AI to get good enough at tutoring that we can get one-on-one education. Bloom's two sigma problem[1] has already shown us that most students are nowhere near their potential, and tutoring is too expensive to give every student their own tutor so we're stuck with this inferior education system.
I’m currently reading “Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman”, and this reminds me of his experience in high school where the teacher thought he talked too much and was too noisy because he was bored - so he gave him a copy of “Advanced calculus” by Woods to work through during class time and told him he wasn’t allowed to speak in class until he was done with it. He clearly found that a valuable experience.
Sacramento is awesome at generating reasons to home school your children. It's been a bit of a challenge, but absolutely the best thing my wife and I have done for our daughter. And by that I mean mostly what my wife has done.
Don’t the kids miss being with other children, how did you handle that?
Also, did you look into the various online schools or did you just manage the entire curriculum yourself? If so, how do you manage/track that?
Homeschool communities have all sorts of extra curriculars, the parents I know that homeschool have better socialized kids than the ones that do public school, anecdotally
Home schooling is not lockdown schooling. My daughter in fact has even more friends than when she was in public school. We outsource part of her education to private instructional centers, we participate in a homeschool co-op where parents teach each others kids in areas in which they are competent, homeschooler activity groups for park day/beach day, game night, dances and Girl Scouts. There is various overlap of kids across that spectrum. IMO the “socialization” narrative about home schooling is utterly false and what I would characterize as “Homeschool Hatred”.
Thanks for the reply. To clarify I’m not a homeschool hater, rather I have started thinking about it for kid and am in the early research phase. Part of the research is evaluating between the online schools and homeschooling.
Normally I may not have thought about it, but post pandemic I’m thinking why not.
My apology, I did not intend to label you that way; I had a feeling it may be received that way but I felt I was clear that the narrative was the subject of that sentence.
My suggestion, search for homeschool activity groups in your locality. Contact someone in one of the groups and have a conversation. Good luck.
No worries, I had not taken your comment to be directed at me - still just wanted to clarify.
It's all good and thanks for the info, appreciate it!!
Broadly speaking, this entails making math as easy and un-math-like as possible. Math is really about language and culture and social justice, and no one is naturally better at it than anyone else, according to the framework.
Framework also seems to be expanding what "math" means.
i was about to post the same quote, since when is math concerned with social justice? Also, in my experience some people are born with mathematical ability far beyond others, it is very easy to distinguish
I was going to post this:
[ X ] is really about language and culture and social justice, and no one is naturally better at it than anyone else...
Where X = singing,football,hockey,physics,running,weight-lifting,chemistry,painting,sculpting,composing,writing,design ( oh and programming ) :)
Just to show how ridiculous the statement is.
It would seem to be written by someone from the Dunning/Krueger case files.
That sounds great to me. The existing definition of "math" sucks.
Practically all of the math that I use on a daily basis I got before 6th grade. Everything after that was tracked towards a calculus that I don't use even as a software developer. At best it was a kind of sideways lesson in how to reason, such as geometric proofs. But I could have been taught the same lessons more pragmatically in the context of, say, interpreting statistics or basic accounting. (Debugging a general ledger error is a great exercise in reasoning, using nothing more than addition and subtraction.)
Math is about language and culture. The most important math lessons should be "How do you formulate this real-world question as a math problem?" The quality of word problems that I got in school were godawful. And to judge from the homework I saw copypasted into Quora, they haven't gotten better. (I hated watching students copypaste their homework but I hated the questions even more. They were practically begging students to think of math as a pointless exercise.)
As for social justice -- well, I'd like to think that social justice is something we can all agree to be in favor of. And math is a tool for helping figure out what social justice is. That doesn't mean we'll all agree on it, but most Internet discussions of it that I've seen appear to be less about legitimate disagreements and more about how to lie with math. I'd love to see students taught how cherry-picking works and how to build good models. We won't still agree, but at least we'll know what the legitimate differences are -- and then commence the hard but genuine problem of finding accommodations for each other.
> the framework concludes that calculus is overvalued, even for gifted students.
I was never taught calculus when I was in high school, when my mind was perhaps a bit more pliable, and I really wish I was. I've mostly gotten by alright without it but it's something that bothers me as a kind of "missed opportunity" to learn.
I do think school's approach to teaching math tends to be quite dry. I think I would have appreciated more of a "discovery" based approach rather than simply solving a bunch of textbook examples. YouTube content creators have really helped open my eyes as to how some of the things I was taught about in school are actually REALLY interesting when you stop and think about it.
Calculus is overvalued. I learned it well, 4 out of 5 on the AP math test, but there are other subjects like statistics, discrete math and logic I wish I’d had instead.
Lots of things are highly useful. I’m not saying drop calculus entirely, but if you have only one year of high school to go beyond trigonometry, calculus shouldn’t be the sole choice.
I’ve always said, No child left behind means No child gets/moves ahead. This, if true, just proves that.
The "Mathematics Framework" in question is at https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/
Having looked at that, I am skeptical of the Reason article.
"My 'reason' domain name has a lot of people asking questions already answered by my domain name"
As a neurodivergent individual, this trend worries me. The path to equity does not include a Handicapper General. Equity should always be done by boosting, never handicapping.
What's stopping HS students from just enrolling in community college? I know that was an option when I lived in Oregon. Once you're in CC you can sign up for all the advanced classes you like.
Gifted students will always have AOPS, which my daughter has been doing since 5th grade. Legislating math deceleration is an attempt to fix the symptom (math inequity) but not the cause (likely cultural attitudes and societal expectations).
Legislators should watch the movie "Stand and Deliver".
So wokists want everybody to be as stupid as they are...?
this is pretty stupid but at the same time impossible to enforce. anyone can get a gifted-level math education by using the internet
in-person contact to peers with similar interests is quite valuable though. And finding that outside schools is even more reliant on parents organizing it etc.
What are the odds that anyone on the Reason staff understands averages, let alone calculus?