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cac1040
Trad climber
Humboldt County, CA
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Jul 25, 2014 - 12:24am PT
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i never understood algebra or anything aside from basic multiplication/ division very well until i took a calculus class recently. the teacher put everything into the perspective of speed, velocity and acceleration and it made much more sense. the physical contacts really helped to understand rates and functions. i think teachers focus too much on graphs and what they look like, when the real business is what they're visually representing
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nah000
climber
canuckistan
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Jul 25, 2014 - 01:00am PT
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for me, one of the difficulties in learning higher level math was overcoming the idea that math is somehow self-evident.
in other words, a person might beat themselves up while trying to learn another language because it is difficult or it is a slow process, but in general i don't think people blame themselves for not immediately understanding a tongue that they didn't grow up with.
otoh, i think many who understand and teach math [including a generalized "society"] forget that math is as constructed as say the spanish language. the implication that math is "self-evident" can create for some of those trying to learn, including me personally, the idea that their not having immediate understanding is a personal failure rather than a natural part of learning any new language.
once i accepted that math had to be worked at like another language, and quit beating myself up for not immediately understanding or being able to apply new concepts, i was able to overcome a hump that presented itself as i tried to continue my mathematical education.
regardless of what the ultimate reasons for math difficulties are, it would behoove us as a society to more effectively teach math [especially at higher abstract levels] not because it necessarily has an immediate application but rather because it can foster particularly rigorous and deeply creative ways of thinking...
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Jingy
climber
Somewhere out there
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Jul 25, 2014 - 01:22am PT
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uhm.... it's Maths...isn't it, really?
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deuce4
climber
Hobart, Australia
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Jul 25, 2014 - 03:26am PT
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My pet peeve in this regard in when i hear other teachers say, "i'm not good at math", sometimes even to their students. They would not dream of saying "i''m not good at reading" or "i'm not good at writing".
I like the foreign language analogy above. Nice thread.
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Karen
Trad climber
So Cal urban sprawl Hell
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Jul 25, 2014 - 07:52am PT
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I didn't read the entire thread but wanted to share my own experience. Way back in the day, (60's) someone in their infinite wisdom came up with, "New Math", I cannot tell you what the Hell it was but it was not successful. I was horrid at math, tried as I could just did not succeed. As well as the so called new math the teachers did little to help us struggling students.
When I began college I tested so poorly in math I was put in, "dummy math", thank goodness 'cause it helped me to finally grasp the basic simple facts. The only way I was able to succeed in algebra and statics was using a tutor and I must say he was WAY more accomplished that the college prof. in explaining the concepts for me.
Because of all of the above, I swore my kids would not get left behind or struggle as I did. To prevent this, I spent extensive time with them, going over and over the basics (memorizing time tables, working out complex multiplication problems, ect.), this was a tremendous help for them and resultingly they did not fail like I did.
Teachers just do not have the time to go above and beyond to help their students, it is up to us parents.
However, the bottom line in my case is I do not have a math/science thinking mind, give me English any day!!!!! Far rather compose a poem than try to scratch out a damn equation.
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
mammoth lakes ca
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Jul 25, 2014 - 08:02am PT
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Same
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Jul 25, 2014 - 08:13am PT
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How rotten is your product, if you can't give it away for free?
Chaz is right. They've NO PROBLEMS giving it away in Africa or Asia.
Hell, they even get away with charging for it over there. And kids will
walk miles to school, like some of us did. But we had to walk through
blizzards.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Jul 25, 2014 - 08:14am PT
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Even value added creates measurement issues, particularly if the student is not proficient in English. Nonetheless, for all the measurement issues, it surprises me to hear opponents of "high stakes testing" contend that other options are better, without telling us how they measure outcomes.
i don't know many competent folks who are entirely opposed to testing or assessment-- teaching involves constant evaluation of student performance, formal and informal.
folks oppose the expansion of standardized (typically multiple-choice) testing out of fields of study fro which it is appropriate and into fields where it isn't.
the basic problem is that competent assessment, like competent teaching, requires a high level of skill. someone who isn't competent in calculus can't design his or her own quiz or test, much less grade the results. standardized exams seem to work well enough in limited applications in basic math.
but they're close to useless for history, writing, and lab science.
the idea that you could end lab science, or hire teachers with no math competence, and then show improvement in outcomes by applying a standardized regime of constant tests in which you train kids for testing, is simply hopeless as pedagogy.
i don't know of a single, highly-ranked private school k-12 that follows that practice-- it's been roundly rejected by the free market. affluent americans spend lots of money sending their kids to schools that don't follow industrial practice.
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Jul 25, 2014 - 08:35am PT
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Many parents and teachers are seeing common core as just some newfangled way of teaching developed by academics who have no clue who teaching really occurs in the field.
That's an accurate description of what it is.
The problem with the federal intrusion isn't the establishment of minimum standards, it's all the bureaucracy that goes along with it and the unstoppable tendency for it to grow.
I've seen the local school districts headquarters staff explode to 5-10 times the level it was in the 80's for the same enrolment levels.
All of those people just shuffle state and federally required paperwork. they don't educate anyone.
Can anyone show that federal involvement has improved outcomes anywhere?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 25, 2014 - 09:15am PT
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Most public school students in L.A. won't graduate high school.
you should look it up... probably a bullshit statistic... I'll do it later but you could also read this:
Public School Graduates and Dropouts from the Common Core of Data: School Year 2009–10
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013309rev.pdf
• Across the United States, a total of 3,128,022 public school students received a high school diploma in 2009–10, resulting in a calculated Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate (AFGR) of 78.2 percent (table 1). This rate ranged from 57.8 percent in Nevada and 59.9 percent in the District of Columbia to 91.1 in Wisconsin and 91.4 percent in Vermont. The median state AFGR was 78.6 percent.
• Across the United States, the AFGR was highest for Asian/Pacific Islander students (93.5 percent) (table 2). The rates for other groups were 83.0 percent for White students, 71.4 percent for Hispanic students,
69.1 percent for American Indian/Alaska Native students,
3 and 66.1 percent for Black students.
• A comparison of data from 2009–10 to data from the prior school year, 2008–09, shows a percentage point or greater increase in the AFGR for 38 states (table 3). The AFGR decreased by a percentage point or more for only the District of Columbia during that same time period.
• Across the United States, a total of 514,238 public school students dropped out of grades 9–12, resulting in a calculated overall event dropout rate of 3.4 percent in 2009–10 (table 4). New Hampshire and Idaho had the lowest event dropout rates at 1.2 and 1.4 percent, respectively, while Mississippi and Arizona had the highest at 7.4 and 7.8 percent, respectively. The median state dropout rate was 3.4 percent.
• Across the United States, the calculated dropout rates increased as grade-level increased (table 5). This pattern was also true for 24 states. The lowest dropout rate was for grade 9 (2.6 percent) while the highest grade-level dropout rate was for grade 12 (5.1 percent).
• Across the United States, the calculated dropout rate was the lowest for Asian/Pacific Islander students at 1.9 percent and White students at 2.3 percent (table 6). The dropout rates for American Indian/Alaska Native, Black, and Hispanic students were 6.7, 5.5, and 5.0 percent respectively.
• Comparisons between high school dropout rates in the 2008–09 and 2009–10 school years showed a decrease of a percentage point or more in Delaware, Illinois and Louisiana (table 7). An increase by the same margin or greater was also found in three states; Mississippi, New Mexico, and Wyoming.4
• Across the United States the dropout rate was higher for males than for females at 3.8 percent and 2.9 percent, respectively (table 8). The dropout rate was higher among males in every state. The male- female gap ranged from lows of 0.2 percentage points in Idaho to highs of 1.7 in Connecticut and Rhode Island.
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rgold
Trad climber
Poughkeepsie, NY
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Jul 25, 2014 - 09:29am PT
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So were you able to help your daughter's friends with their math homework?
Yes.
If you were the only one who could help, did the daily process of learning math for these children now involve regular trips to the college professor's house to get help on their elementary school problems?
I don't think I was even close to "the only one who could help," and my daughter's friends consulted me intermittently, not continually.
Here's how common core is actually working in practice: Kids come home with their homework, do what they can, ask mom and dad for help, mom and dad don't understand either, mom and dad start calling parents of other students to collaborate (or even call the teacher if they can), eventually they might find someone who gets whatever unusual approach the particular question is using.
I'm not saying the common core implementations are any good; it is clear that there is a tremendous amount of variation. I was reflecting on the fact that parents unable to do kids homework is not a priori a sign of the fact that there is something the matter with the homework, especially if the homework is supposed to repair educational defects the parents themselves may have suffered from.
All the while the kid sits at the table staring at the paper wondering how they will ever learn math if the parents can't do it either.
What the kids make of this is conditioned by how the parents treat the experience. I surpassed my father's knowledge of mathematics in high school; he used to say "you know more than I do now, I can't help you with any of this." But he said it with evident pride that his son was surpassing him, and that made me proud and excited too. It never occurred to me that his difficulties with the material might be mine.
The problem with my engineering friends is that they had a dysfunctional model for what it means to "do math" in spite of the fact that they used mathematics regularly. We might think of an experienced regular commuter who understands little or nothing about how their car works and is at a loss if anything goes wrong. The algebra topics my friends' children were dealing with were from an old-fashioned standard curriculum from before the days of reform. Their inability to explain things in a way the kids could understand was based on what I would call flaws their own (quite substantial) educations and not on any "defect" in the school curriculum, although nowadays the people in the same situation might well be tempted to blame the common core for their struggles.
My own secondary education was deeply influenced by what was then called "the new math." It had a profound effect on many in our class, which now includes a bunch of Ph.D. scientists and mathematicians, because it showed us that the rote nonsense of our elementary school experience could, in fact, be understood, and that collections of apparently arbitrary disparate rules and procedures could be traced to a few common principles that could then be easily extended to new situations. The sense of intellectual power and scope was heady and obviously shaped quite a few futures. I mention this because the "new math" is regularly cited as the first and primary example of a failed educational reform. Parents couldn't do their kids homework. Tom Lehrer, who is a mathematician, wrote a hilarious parody song about it. But it trained the generation that responded to Sputnik and leapfrogged the U.S. into a position of primacy in science that is only now starting to erode.
Obviously, I was blessed with teachers who understood that the "new math" was, in fact, just "math," and were able to convey it to us. I suspect that the new math failed because too many teachers weren't up to the task, not because there was anything intrinsically wrong with it. But nowadays the extreme pressures of the current situation, the polarization and politicization of the "stakeholders," the pervasive dysfunction in governmental decision-making, the abandonment of reasonable compromise and the embrace of simplistic solutions, all of this amounts to an atmosphere for teachers and students that is a far cry from my days in high school.
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kev
climber
A pile of dirt.
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Jul 25, 2014 - 10:13am PT
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How rotten is your product, if you can't give it away for free?
But it can still be free and very successful - consider that Singaporian students are consistantly, year after year, in the top 5 in the world wrt mathematics for K-8.
The first question to ask is what's the difference and how can/do we replicate their success.
After solving the above then we should ideally improve on it.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 25, 2014 - 10:47am PT
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But I still find myself stumped by the "methods" being taught to ten-year-olds.
perhaps because you don't have the mental development of a 10-year-old anymore...
you certainly have the ability to think about problems in quite different ways, binary arithmetic operations, as you point out... and you most likely look at division very differently than what is taught... does that mean that the way it is taught is incorrect for a 10-year-old?
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Jul 25, 2014 - 10:50am PT
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klk, there is a very vocal group of teachers in Fresno who oppose "high stakes testing" in any form, and who get an inordinate amount of publicity about it here. They never propose an alternative, though, so I doubt many pay much attention to them, despite the attempt of certain local media to stir the pot.
I, too, am wary of multiple-choice, standardized tests, although I was always very good at them. I was almost alone among the economics instructors at Fresno City College in avoiding the scan-tron, even though it automated test grading. I wanted my students to demonstrate that they could convey their reasoning verbally.
Multiple-choice tests, of course, have limited usefulness in areas where answers can differ, such as much of law. The California State Bar Exam has a mulstiple-choice portion, called the Multi-state Exam, but it cannot provide comprehensive coverage of legal understanding because the answer to so many legal issues depends on the choice of law. For example, in contracts, it tests almost exclusively on the Uniform Commercial Code (largely the same in 49 states), rather than on common law contractual issues, because so many of the latter have differing outcomes depending on each states's common law. Then there's Louisiana, with its civil law foundation. . .
I did note a pretty good correlation between the SAT II U.S. History exam and the AP U.S. History exam when I was in high school in the 1960's, though. My class was the second to take an AP test. On the AP U.S. History exam that year, another student and I were the only ones in our school to score 5's in spring of our junior year, and we also had the two highest grades in the school (795 and 789) on the SAT II U.S. History exam the next fall. The two exams could not have been more different, however. The AP exam allowed us to demonstrate our understanding of how one's perspective affects interpretaion of historical events. How do you design a multiple-choice exam to do that?
Interestingly, my daughters both got 5's on AP U.S. History their junior years, but only scored in the 600's on the SAT II version their senior years. They had crammed (with lots of help from me) for the AP exam, and forgotten much of what they learned over the summer. The difference between their AP and SAT U.S. Hisotry results validated (to my mind) my observations -- and, much more importantly, preserved my now limited bragging rights with them.
John
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 25, 2014 - 10:56am PT
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you can find the graduation rates from California districts here:
http://www.cpec.ca.gov/StudentData/HSGradReport.ASP
this one for Los Angeles
since 1989 the average graduation rate has been 61%
which is greater than 50% thus, chaz's claim that:
"Most public school students in L.A. won't graduate high school. '
is demonstrably false... chaz, you do understand fractions and percents, right? where'd you learn that first?
over that same period only 49% of black males, and 46% of hispanic males graduated. Asian women had the highest graduation rate over that same period 97%
these statistics don't include movement into or out of the districts, it is calculated by the number of students graduating to the number of freshmen enrolled 4 years earlier.
So were did you get your statistics, chaz?
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Jul 25, 2014 - 10:59am PT
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you certainly have the ability to think about problems in quite different ways, binary arithmetic operations, as you point out... and you most likely look at division very differently than what is taught... does that mean that the way it is taught is incorrect for a 10-year-old?
Ed and Dave, I think much of the criticism of Common Core has little to do with the meat of Common Core -- namely the standards of what the students should learn -- but the methods of getting there. Too often, I've encountered mandates about how a teacher must teach a subject. One thing that always interests mathematiciams is proving the existence and uniqueness of various concepts. I am unaware of the existence, much less the uniqueness, of the "proper" way to teach a ten-year-old.
I know that in law, we argue our points in many different ways, because we never know which one the judge or jury will find convincing. I think teachers need that same flexibility, because students' methods of learning differ.
John
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Jul 25, 2014 - 11:13am PT
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since 1989 the average graduation rate has been 61%
Ed, the state changed methodology a few years ago, in a way that they now can track student movement. According to the new methodology, almost 2/3 of LA Unified students graduate on time.
http://www.dailynews.com/general-news/20130409/lausd-graduation-rate-increases-to-66
I am aware of criticism of the new methodology. Some contend that the data start too late in the students' lives, so we already miss some dropouts, but I am unaware of any good statistics on this. The big thing is that data from more than about three years ago form a different time series from the most recent data.
John
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 25, 2014 - 11:19am PT
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good questions, John, you're saying that no data is relevant?
the link I provided is the way the state is presenting the data... and the table is calculated with the definition I provided above... from 1989 to the present for various groups of students by gender and by diversity category...
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Jul 25, 2014 - 11:21am PT
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Ed, I'm actually saying that the new data sets show, if anything, that the graduation rate is higher than what we thought before.
John
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