In our global economy and democratic society, limiting math education to select students is unacceptable. A recent ACT study provides evidence that college and the workforce require the same levels of readiness in mathematics. One implication: All students require a greater level of “cognitive demand” in mathematics than once was considered appropriate. In other words, high school students need learning experiences in algebra, geometry, data representation, and statistics whether they are planning to enter college or workforce training programs.4
source:
AERA Research Points bulletin (pdf file)
Learning experiences in algebra, geometry, data representation, and statistics.
Oh yeah, that'll do it.
update from Lynn G
Well, this explains why my 9th grader has spent hours and hours drawing, then cutting, glueing, and pasting together a model home of his own design for high school geometry class.
You might expect that he was taught foundational skills for this project (how to use an architectural scale, for example). You might expect that simple architectural and engineering concepts might come up (you know, like load bearing walls, span, stuff like that). You would be wrong.
No, this is an imaginary home, a real world project, that is completely divorced from reality.
But it consumes a tremendous effort, it also consumes instructional time when kids could learn how to do a proof or do geometry.
The amount of geometry used to make the model is on the level of a 4th grader.
But he's getting "learning experiences."
I'm so relieved.
C. (grade 7) had to stay in over lunch this week to finish coloring his math project.
Well, this explains why my 9th grader has spent hours and hours drawing, then cutting, glueing, and pasting together a model home of his own design for high school geometry class.
ReplyDeleteYou might expect that he was taught foundational skills for this project (how to use an architectural scale, for example). You might expect that simple architectural and engineering concepts might come up (you know, like load bearing walls, span, stuff like that). You would be wrong.
No, this is an imaginary home, a real world project, that is completely divorced from reality.
But it consumes a tremendous effort, it also consumes instructional time when kids could learn how to do a proof or do geometry.
The amount of geometry used to make the model is on the level of a 4th grader.
But he's getting "learning experiences."
I'm so relieved.
why my 9th grader has spent hours and hours drawing, then cutting, glueing, and pasting together a model home of his own design for high school geometry class
ReplyDeleteThis is horrifying.
We've decided he can't stay at this school. He will not return next year.
ReplyDeleteNow I question whether it was wise to let him finish the year. Maybe we should have pulled him out mid-semester.
This is a public high school, right?
ReplyDeleteIs this the magnet school you mentioned?
This is extremely disturbing.
ReplyDeleteI'm coming to the conclusion that the worst problems is actually in the high schools, not K-5.
My sister-in-law, the teacher says so. She has a son now in high school, and the shirking that goes on there is extraordinary. She says her view is that the K-5 teachers "have it together"; the high school teachers don't.
(I don't know what she'd say about middle school per se, but I don't think she sees the middle school as worse than the high school.)
High schools are far too protected from parents & public. Teens, by that age, want a great deal of independence (it seems) and because they're old enough to assume a fair amount of "responsibility for their own learning" the school can just heap it on -- or not, as the case may be.
What concerns me is that by high school your ability to remediate the school is probably down to nil.
In the high school years a student should be learning from people who possess far more knowledge, in the aggregate, than parents do.
One more point: the math teacher dad I always mention told me that the parents he knows -- these are highly educated parents -- stop being able to reteach math at night around 5th grade.
ReplyDelete"That's when I get the call," he said.
How many parents can homeschool or afterschool their kids through a high school mathematics curriculum???
I know VERY few parents who can preteach or reteach the middle school math curriculum -- at least, not when it's taught as poorly as it is here. Even if you did well in math when you were in school, you've forgotten a lot of it and you don't have pedagogical content knowledge.
If you know math inside-out you can probably make do without pedagogical content knowledge.
It's not ideal; people who know math inside-out can have a terrible time "disaggregating" the topic and figuring out why it is the student is or is not getting it. But at least you've got a fighting chance.
But the rest of us are out of luck.
If I hadn't been doing what I'm doing, which is reteaching myself K-12 math, I don't think C. would have been able to stay in Phase 4 unless Ed had stepped in and handled it.
Ed probably would have stepped in (and he could have stepped in - he taught algebra to GED students in Newark). So we would have had a back-up system.
But I don't think Ed would have developed the necessary sense of urgency in time to keep him on course. We needed to be in "emergency mode" from the instant C. hit middle school, and Ed didn't get there until ..... later on. (Can't remember -- maybe in the second semester of 6th grade? Over the summer? Not sure.)
For quite awhile Ed still saw Christopher as very young, immature, just a kid.
Of course he was right, but that wasn't how the school was treating him.
I've veered OT a bit.
ReplyDeleteMy point is: no matter what the problem (way too little content in Lynn's case or way too much content in our case) parents don't have a lot of ability to remediate by the time a kid is in high school.