As you can see, AP calculus is only offered in 12th grade . (They just call it “AP Calculus” without further distinction so doubtlessly it’s the less rigorous Calculus AB exam and Calculus BC isn’t offered at all).
The prerequisite for taking AP calculus in 12th grade is successful completion of honors precalculus in 11th grade.
If honors precalculus is no longer offered, then are they setting students up to fail in 12th grade AP? It was supposedly a necessary prerequisite after all. If it is, then logically they will have to stop offering the calculus class entirely.
This is aside from the fact that all the deranged arguments against the honors classes that amount to “no one should ever be smarter than anyone else, it’s racist” apply just as much to the AP classes and the magnet programs, and the people advancing them have already targeted the other accelerated programs in other areas. They are next on the chopping block for sure.
“I’m all for equality - until I hear my side has to reduce its privilege”
Since the kids will still be receiving “appropriate instruction for their aptitude level”, that’s clearly not the privilege that’s being cut. What’s being cut is the getting it away from all the smelly plebs…
Errm, what makes you think I’m a teacher?
“Oh, no, the evil leftists forced me to be a dick”
No-one bought that that obvious lie of an argument when Martin_Hyde made it, either, cowardly motherfucker.
Works in Finland, Germany, etc. Not the idiotic “unpaid teacher” caricature of DemonTree (I’ve raised before how it’s obvious some people only see education in transactional terms), but the Learning By Teaching methodology is an accepted part of the pedagogy toolset there (and even in some schools here in the Global South).
That is complete nonsense, and you should know it being involved in these discussions before.
The argument is not that it is racist to be smarter. The argument is that it is often racist to pull out all the “smart” kids starting in 6th or 7th grade, put them in their own class with the best teachers (because long-tenured teachers often get priority to teach honors courses), and leave everybody else behind with few if any options to ever move up.
But you know that, right?
And yes, I put “smart” in quotes on purpose. It is very clear to me that what is being measured when assessing these kids for placement isn’t intelligence (you would need to use an IQ test at a minimum for that) but familiarity with concepts and often behavior as well. Which are strongly linked to SES and race.
I think they will manage to work this out, since the school teachers and administrators aren’t brainless automatons. I’m not going to address the rest of your post, because it looks like bullshit to me.
That is interesting - I will have to read up on it. I don’t think I’ve seen it as part of our standard curriculum models, so when done in my district it’s not by educators trained in the right way to do it.
The only example I have seen first-hand were with my niece, who was left in tears for quite a bit of first grade because she was basically used as a Teacher’s Assistant, including in areas of discipline (i.e. “please tell me which kids are acting out”).
I will say my son in Kindergarten last year did a bit of “teaching” during class time, but it was in a group setting and led by a very experienced teacher that knew what she was doing. My son didn’t seem to mind it at all, and in fact quite enjoyed the respect he got from his peers for his abilities.
For my daughters, it’s about doing research and presenting it to the rest of the class. It’s a bit like project work, but only one student/grou[p works on a topic and teaches it to the class. And the teacher very much has to be present and involved for the whole thing to work.
He means it “works” for the goals that he considers important (equity). Humiliating an intelligent student and making them hate school is in the plus column there. That’s equity - we’ve reduced the excellent to the level of the mediocre and made them think twice about daring to stand out again.
It certainly doesn’t “work” for teaching capable math learners calculus, but he considers that a bad thing and it isn’t what is being measured by his concept of “working.”
Oh right, that sounds much more reasonable, then. It would be pretty much impossible in the UK with the way timetables are arranged. (Also, at my primary school there were only two classes, so there was already a mix of different ages in each.)
I think that’s kind of unfair on the teacher. It’s much, much easier to teach one ability level than to try to cater to many in the same class. The result is likely to be teachers working harder and producing a worse result, at least for the two ends of the ability scale. And for what benefit? So people can feel better because the ‘inequity’ is hidden?
Now this is a problem. In my A level maths class, there was one girl who had done the Intermediate rather than the Higher paper at GCSE*, and she had to do a bit of catching up on concepts she had missed out on, but it was possible to move to a higher level.
Ideally students would be reassessed each year and moved up or down as appropriate. That does mean the different streams can’t be allowed to get too far apart from each other, however.
* Exams taken by 16 years olds in England. It pretends to be all one exam, but in practice it is split into several papers, because idealism aside, it would be just be impractical to assess the full range of abilities in one paper.
From my experience, I’d say the long tenured teachers were often the worst, just marking time until retirement. It was the new, young ones who were still keen enough to make an effort.
Yet schemes that do use a test, like those used to select entrants to exam schools, are being specifically targeted, because they are also not producing the desired equitable results.
Yes, that’s the argument for paint-huffers on Mars. Here on Earth, the longest-tenured teachers who have priority often avoid teaching the upper-level classes because it’s more work and they are insecure about the fact that the kids may be smart than them. The best teachers often end up leaving the school system because they see how low a priority cultivating achievement is.
Why do the people who choose not to take the honors path have no “options to move up?” Shouldn’t they just take the classes and/or work harder? What race do you believe people in the average classes in Vancouver to be?
And I wondered where he gets the spin he spews, as in discussions before he seems to like to cut and paste the stupid spin the right-wingers out there push. One example/source (He may not had originated it, but the copy paste game that the right wing “social” media uses is clear):
“Nice” blog on evolution there, I saw that source cited in many scientific racist discussions in the past (not for the better), seems that the author has kept a lot of his right wing readers entertained with ponderings about education. As Science writer Peter Hadfield would say, why it is so hard for some to notice that an expert on an issue is not an expert on everything?
One of the arguments for advanced placement classes was that by moving the advanced kids out of regular class, the teachers in the regular classes could spend more time with the kids who need help the most.
Also, smart kids who aren’t challenged can become bored and create discipline problems in the class, and they can make the less advanced students feel dumb by always finishing first, getting the best marks, etc.
But that was in ancient times, Like, a year or two ago. In this brave new progressive world where we smash institutions and ignore decades of actual teaching experience in favor of the latest progressive fad, We’re just going to erase decades of educational progress and throw all the kids back into one big class again.
Perhaps the smart kids should be forced to wear headsets that screetch a tone in their ears to slow their thinking down. For equity.
If your real attitude towards education resembles your online persona in any way, then the chance that people raised in your household are part of the group of “excellent students” I’m discussing is extremely low.
As it was shown in precious discussions, this is chicken little talk. Already in this thread, others pointed that the focus the OP uses is misguided and incomplete.
Trying to hunt through the usual word soup from Captain Gibberish for some morsels of argument here - you are saying that:
*this random blog, that nobody but you in this thread has ever heard of and that you introduced into this discussion, is covering this story
*despite the fact that the story’s coverage in two mainstream newspapers was linked earlier in the thread, this somehow implies that the story isn’t really happening, and was fabricated by this source, which again is exclusively the source for your post and no one else has referenced
*additionally, this source is “scientifically racist” in some way that is so obvious that it apparently doesn’t require any further explanation or linking to support and we should all just intuitively be aware of
*which makes anyone relying on this source for this story, which again is a group consisting only of you, suspect in some way
I may be giving you too much credit by assuming you are making an extremely poor and illogical argument, since usually your posts can’t be deciphered to have any meaning at all.
You know perfectly well I never had the privilege of attending a single honours or advanced class, and in fact suffered though exactly the sort of mediocre education you are advocating for. And I absolutely believe it harmed me. But we all know how much progressives value ‘lived experience’ when it contradicts what they want to believe.
I’m all for equality, if it means helping disadvantaged groups. Not when it moves into Harrison Bergeron territory of holding back those who are doing well. I blame the language of ‘privilege’ for this. If you say some groups are suffering disadvantages, then the solution is to remove the disadvantage and make everyone better off. But when you reverse this and describe ‘not suffering a disadvantage’ as a privilege, then the solution is to remove the ‘privilege’, hurting some and helping nobody. A harmful and damaging way of thinking.
Well, thanks for showing all how you remain an incompetent at reading comprehension, that was shown only as an example of how bad arguments or OPs like yours pop up in forums like this one.
