That’s your opinion; we already know that. It doesn’t answer the questions you were asked tho.
As I indicated above: no; it doesn’t seem to be working nearly as well as it could, according to people who think about this for their livelihood. They have studies that they cite and research that’s been done that backs up what they are saying.
OK, well, at least through the kind of math that I think any non-impaired adult should be able to handle without Herculean effort (around Algebra II or so) this is basically what I believe. Obviously “moral worth” and “just tell them it’s important” are caricatures, but simply taking the time to signal that education is important and following through, e.g. by teaching kids to read and count at home instead of parking them in front of the TV until the first day of kindergarten, goes a very long way. It won’t make everyone “wunderkinds” necessarily but people given that much should be able to master the curriculum that we expect average students to take by the end of high school. Past that you need the right teachers as well, but whether schools will prioritize creating those classroom environments and parents will cooperate with the workload is also an indirect function of the family and culture.
I’m aware of the standard complaints here - how is a six-year-old supposed to worry about learning addition if she’s being abused, her single mom doesn’t get home from work until 10pm, she’s distracted by hunger, etc. That’s all well and good, but I’ve repeated that we should acknowledge that these factors (“the environment”) play a large role in educational outcomes and try to fix them instead of removing high educational achievement as a goal, and I also think that there are millions of people in the big middle between “can’t do math homework due to living in a war zone” and “has servants in her mansion turn the pages of the textbook for her” who are going unacknowledged by these kinds of objections.
OK, I just showed you the scores demonstrating that Virginia is doing well at getting students up to basic proficiency and at educating disadvantaged groups, as well as some facts about the opportunities available for students in one representative area. I’m glad other people are “thinking about and researching” why facts don’t matter; let’s hope they keep it to their heads, or at least to California, instead of infiltrating any more school boards in Virginia.
Do we have any evidence that it DOESN’T happen that way in Virginia? For example, do you have studies showing the relative performance of Virginia students in school districts that track in math beginning earlier and later? Showing that Virginia students do well in math is not at all the same as showing that Virginia students do as well as they could, which should be the goal anyway?
Per this 2012 report (PDF!) from the Thomas Fordham Institute, “State policies are more closely aligned with traditional teacher union interests in Virginia than they are in nearly every other state.” (p. 338) What specific changes have you seen in Virginia over the past decade to make you think differently?
Well, the people you’re upset with have those same scores and they have studies that say the scores could be better.
We already know all that. It doesn’t answer the questions you were asked.
This is the problem with denying the role of innate abilities. You end up looking for something else to blame - lazy students, lazy teachers, families that don’t value education, etc.
Slash2k worked his ass off and struggled, I found maths easy and went on to do a degree in it (which I certainly did have to work hard for). My sisters who were brought up in the same home by the same parents hated maths. It’s always puzzled me that people claim differences are solely due to environment or to hard work, when people brought up in similar situations get such different results.
That doesn’t mean the same applies to differences between groups, but we know they show up early, even before starting school, and teachers don’t seem able to eliminate them. I’m starting to think we are doing this the wrong way around, believing we can fix inequalities in society with education, when maybe we need to just go ahead and fix inequalities in society, and that will fix the disparities in education too.
It seems clear to me that yes, some people process more quickly or differently than other people. However, the problems with treating innate aptitude as destiny are:
“Innate differences” exist, but they don’t matter nearly as much as some of us were taught to think they do. My own mother–a super successful professional before she retired–confessed to me once 'I don’t think I am really that smart. I just work really, really hard". She was comparing herself to her sisters, I think, who were more academic. But Jesus, after 20 year or so of education and 30 years of conscious professional development at your career, a dedicated commitment to hard work sure starts to do a pretty good impression of “smart”.
I’ve seen it myself hundreds of times: take a mediocre math student who wants to be a “good” math student, get them to commit to spending a quarter to a half of each school day in math class, and by the end of high school they can be as ready as anyone to be successful in a college STEM program. Do I think every student should be forced to do such a thing? No, of course not. And most people don’t want to. My point is only that accelerated programs don’t just serve people with innate abilities, and it’s a mistake to frame the whole conversation as a “pearls before swine” sort of thing.
My impression is that innate differences and willingness to work matter. I’m thinking about some of the kids I’ve taught in the AIG class:
I 100% think that discounting work ethic is a thing that happens and an awful thing. Kids need to learn in their zone of proximal development, where they struggle successfully with the material. But discounting innate ability also happens, and I think it can prevent our understanding how students learn.
The problem I see with claiming math just requires a lot of hard work is that people see all the people who are “good at math” not working all that hard compared with the “bad at math” people who try and try but fail.
It seems to me that the time/work issue is not generally at the current level the “bad” math student is on, but something further back, something they didn’t fully learn before they were forced to move on by the system. So it seems to me that the real issue is lack of individualized teaching.
I know, of course, that teachers don’t have time to give that level of individualized attention. But I thought we had that problem licked back in my sixth grade year. That year, our computer labs had math programs that allowed us to work at our own pace. Even as a kid, I was sure that was going to be the future of math education.
It was also what I has been used to in elementary school, as, from Kindergarten to fourth grade, I attended a Montessori school (where my mom worked and got me a deal). And those schools had individualized instruction, having two teachers per 25 student classroom, with each student taught lessons individually. At that school, I had maxed out their math curriculum (which involved, of all things, doing square roots on paper).
It just seems to me that math is the type of thing that is well taught in an online environment, with students being able to get as much or as little help as they need. Sure, teacher still need to be around to grade stuff. Computers can be programmed to check all valid answers, but math grading involves checking the work. Plus actually typing in the answers can be a pain.) And sometimes you may need a personal touch, rather than just watching various videos by various instructors.
But I see no reason that augmenting math instruction with computers to allow individualized lessons is not the standard.
Unfortunately, too many people don’t understand that the biggest problem many kids have with Algebra isn’t Algebra, it is an understanding of the basic arithmetical principles that govern the number manipulations. Kids who do not understand the rules governing integers, or the distributive and associative principles, or any number of basic building blocks cannot be successful in Algebra no matter how hard their parents think they can work. Rather than throwing kids into the center of the pool to drown, it is far more preferable to tutor them in the building blocks necessary in order to build a platform for success.
I find it interesting how you’re using STEM and associating it with math. There’s a lot of careers in the “T” part of STEM that I would not consider particularly math intensive. I define “not particularly math intensive” as “no more math than a semester or two of college calculus and a semester of statistics”–note that this is about the standard amount of math a business major takes in college (a degree field not usually considered STEM.) A large percentage of computer programmers do not use calculus level mathematics with any regularity. Because this is the SDMB I expect a lot of people to point out that some programmers do–let me repeat the key part “large percentage” that doesn’t mean NO computer programmers use calculus or higher level math. There’s also a lot of T related jobs in IT Security, Networking, database administration and such that probably use even less math.
Additionally there’s a lot of degree programs that get you to these jobs that don’t include heavy math. The very generic, “standard” Computer Science program that is offered through an Engineering school (while less common, there are colleges where CS is offered as a liberal arts degree), does require a couple courses beyond the first two units of calculus because they treat the CS degree as a quasi-engineering degree. However there are computer science BA programs that do not do this. There are also other degrees in fields like Information Systems that usually aren’t as math intensive.
Also the “M” part of STEM is not particularly math intensive, or at least does not have to be. Medical schools in the United States do not require a “STEM” degree for admissions. A great many students following a “pre-med” course do get B.S. in a science like Chemistry or Biology for the obvious reason, but this is not, actually, a requirement for medical school admission. Johns Hopkins Medical School lists its admission requirements as being a specific number of course hours in a specific list of subjects, for math it is 6-8 semester hours in “Calculus and Statistics” which is less math than even a business degree undergrad usually takes. PharmD programs appear to require a semester of Calculus and a semester of statistics as a baseline.
Now please don’t infer I’m saying math isn’t important in a STEM field. I’m just pointing out that I think there’s probably a lot of people who would benefit from knowing at least two of the letters in the STEM acronym can get jobs and have successful careers needing only to pass College Calculus I and Statistics, which at most colleges means you need to be able to do basic, derivative calculus. If you want to be a “real engineer” with an engineering degree, you’re going to need to take and understand a lot of math to get through the program, but not every STEM job is engineering. If you want to get a job in the “hard sciences” the S part of STEM, those likewise will all require more math than what I mentioned for technology and medical jobs.
A lot of what that “hard work” is, is going back and learning those skills in the context of the algebra. It’s not just staring at the algebra problems for hours.
To some degree, it is. I love Khan Academy, have fond contempt for Prodigy Math (an ounce of learning, a pound of sugar), am deeply unconvinced by IXL.
But the thing is, online math instruction demonstrably doesn’t work for a lot of kids, and I’ve honestly never seen it get through to a kid unless they’re already oriented psychologically toward wanting to learn math. It’s certainly been tried ever since I started teaching fifteen years ago, with a metric buttload of companies trying to be the breakout star of online learning. But making it work is far more difficult than it first may seem.
There’s just not an AI yet who can realize that a student is misunderstanding right angles because he thinks they’re the opposite of left angles, or who can realize that a student thinks that x as a variable must have the same value across three unrelated equations and can stop the lesson for a brief detour into how variables differ from numerals.
We might reach that point one day, but today, we’re just lucky if the online math program doesn’t freeze up when the student clicks the “next” button.
The “M” stands for math, in most formulations.
And for a lot of kids, “being ready to go into Calc immediately after high school and be successful” IS the standard schools are striving for.
In any case, at my school, our kids go to college about 40% Engineering/40% CS/20% other (mostly pre-Med). They sometimes change, but when they are with us, that’s the goal. And they are ready for that.
Maybe you are seeing the other end of a pendulum swing that hasn’t made its way up to secondary. I’m still seeing a lot more “but my kid was a top 1% on the ITBS in 4th grade. So I know he “tests well”. I don’t understand why, after blowing off his classes and doing C work for the last 5 years, he’s only testing in the top 15%.” And too many GT kids and parents (and sometimes teachers! ) who see the mere hardworkers as cheating, somehow.
Yeah, none of those are good messages to send. I think we need to acknowledge innate aptitude exists, because tbh every child in a classroom can quite clearly see that it does, and pretending it doesn’t is cruel to those who struggle through no fault of their own, but we should also emphasise the importance of hard work. Aptitude really isn’t destiny. And maybe we also need to emphasise the importance and usefulness of learning maths and other subjects, even if you are never going to be Einstein and are not planning on using it in your career.
It’s unfortunate that as a society we often conflate being smarter with being better, when if we thought about it our ideas of a good person would probably be much different than merely intelligence. Stupid people are one of the few groups it is still socially acceptable to mock and belittle, and it really bothers me.
Also: even “hard working” is often phrased as a matter of inherent character, rather than a sober decision about opportunity costs. It’s not about “all kids could do all things if they just worked hard, so let’s make them all work hard at everything”. It’s more “if a person chooses to really specialize, they can likely get a lot better at that thing than you might expect, so let’s give them the resources”.
Like I said, we are a STEM magnet and we have an Algebra 2 class that meets for 90 minutes a day, all year. It’s a slower approach to Alg 2 than the slowest remedial math class in the district, at the STEM magnet. Because we’ve scoured the district and found the kids who don’t quite have the chips but are willing to do the work.
Yes, this. I did a course in maths education and the lecturer said much the same thing. I think it’s true that a lot of misunderstanding in maths is caused by not having properly understood, or having forgotten earlier concepts that are necessary building blocks.
But from experience I’m convinced that being taught by a real live in person human being is far superior to watching videos, or computer learning, or those wretched workbooks with the answers in the back. Unfortunately it’s also a lot more expensive.
I guess I really feel like it’s not “hard-work” or “aptitude” that I think we need to stress, but agency. A sense that you can decide you want something, go after it, and get it. Make a plan and have it work out. We hate that message. We bombard kids with “Don’t expect to be a X, it’s a very competitive field”. We say it the loudest about things like “pro-athlete” or “rock star”, but we send a similar message about all sorts of careers: anything creative (despite tons of commercial creative jobs out there), anything challenging.
It’s true that you can’t have everything you want in life. But in many, many cases you can have any one thing you want, if you are willing to double down on that one thing–even if you don’t start with stand-out aptitude. But all too often that gets dismissed as sentimental thinking.
I hadn’t thought about it exactly like that, but it makes sense. We do seem to spend a lot of time telling kids what they can’t expect to do. I remember when I was a teenager my dad told me that all jobs are boring, and it was incredibly demotivating for me - believing that I was doomed to go from sitting bored in a classroom to sitting bored in an office somewhere, and there was no other option no matter what I did.
Or (what is not exactly the same, but similar) having a “growth mindset” as opposed to a “fixed mindset”?