end brain-based education now

Paula V sparked my interest in reader Comments on the algebra-in-8th story.

Here we go again:

Here's the thing. According to Piaget, the formal operational stage doesn't even begin to develop until students are of high school age or even older for some. Oh, and formal operational means that a person can think abstractly. And the ability to think abstractly is important if you are going to learn algebra because algebra is all about abstraction. So what are we really teaching? If a child is not yet ready to think abstractly, are we really teaching anything or are we doing harm? We are asking students to learn things they are not ready to learn. How can that be good? Oh, and here's another thing, not everyone ever enters or completes the formal operational stage of development. So how much algebra will that person ever learn?
6/5/2008 6:22:50 PM

Its amazing that people are able to make statements like these without reference to actual living, breathing, math-learning (or not), flesh and blood children.

Supposing Piaget did say 8th graders can't learn algebra.....(did he?)....shouldn't we ask ourselves how it is exactly that 8th graders everywhere else on the planet are able to learn algebra while American kids are not?

How long ago was Piaget debunked, anyway?

News travels slow in the edu-world.

The belief that children of particular ages cannot learn certain content because they are "too young" or "not ready" has consistently been shown to be false.
National Math Panel Fact Sheet

this one's fun:

Welcome to America....where people are actually having a serious discussion about whether teaching kids advanced math as soon as possible is a bad thing. Is it any wonder our country lags behind in math/science?

and this one:

It's surprising to me that it pushing to take Algebra I in the 8th grade is thought of as acceleration and that some parents in Montgomery county are resisting it. My dad went to an inner city black school in a southern city in the 60's and he took algebra in the 8th grade and took calculus before he graduated high school. Yet, Algebra I wasn't available to me in the 8th grade in a rural school many years after integration, and I ended up having to double Algebra II and Geometry my sophomore year in high school in order to take Calculus. Somewhere along the line we slid backwards. None of this stuff is advanced math. Just the basics American students will need to be competitive on the world scale in Engineering and Science.

here we go, "freakshow stage parents" -- good one!

This all seems analogous to the freakshow stage parents who pressure their kids to succeed in spelling bees and beauty pageants so they can brag on their kids to their friends. Seriously, do any of you out there remember anything past Algebra II who aren't currently in an engineering field. I use high-end statistics daily and got very limited exposure to it until grad school. My thought, pipe down a bit on the rush to calculus...there is plenty of time for that in college; rather focus on stats since it seems like analyzing data has permeated into lots more fields than in the past. Performance indicators and measurement are the next trend in management and should receive more attention than calculus in my opinion. Many old school managers rarely used math to make decisions whereas now managers are responsible for developing systems and metrics which can quantitatively track progress toward stated goals and objectives.

reading right along.... another Piaget comment from a physics teacher, no less. I'm not cutting and pasting any more from JP.

sigh

Piaget has a lot to answer for.

from France:

I went to a French boarding school through 10th grade (troisieme in their parlance). Upon returning to the United States I spent two years reading French novels in the back of the class, raising my hand and going to the blackboard only when others couldn't solve problems being discussed in class. I didn't do any homework either, and graduated only because the teacher who announced a week before the end of my senior year that he was going to grade us 50% on the year's homework got called to a conference, and ended up grading us only on tests.

I can't see that allowing students to take more demanding courses is a bad thing.

Here's the one Paula quoted:

So Prince William county is slowing their kids to a crawl with Investigations while the neighboring counties are moving their kids ahead at a faster pace.
We really need a national math curriculum.

Slowed to a crawl. Yup.

The help-with-homework issue rears its ugly head:

Many decades ago, I minored in math. I can still use the stuff, too. But I work with lots of people educated in social science and humanities who can't deal with fractions or proportions, let alone scientific notation or long division of polynomials.

Given that these educated people are parents, what are the chances that the average parent will be qualified to help their kids with math homework in the grades?

I know the answer to that one.

Slim to none.

Next:

"Accelerated Math Adds Up To a Division Over Merits"

Yes, you're so right, I just think that Albert Einstein kid was a little too "smart for his britches" and should have been held back a couple of years!

That would have made it much fairer for the other students in his classes.

Another Stop Manic Moms and Dads! sentiment:

The issue here is not whether children should or shouldn't be in accelerated math programs, it's whether parents should be allowed to pressure teachers and administrators. Children should be placed based on performance only to prevent manic moms and dads from pushing their children beyond their level.

This is a big one around here.

For years we were told that the accelerated math class was filled with "kids who don't belong" and got in thanks to "pushy parents" etc.

That particular meme went splat after the district clamped down on the pushy parents and required all the kids to test into the class. The first placement test was Top Secret; the middle school refused to show a copy to the 4-5 teachers in order to prevent them from prepping their students. The goal was to cut kids from the track, not help kids get into it, so the grade school teachers had to be kept in the dark.

Lo and behold, the kids who tested in fair and square also had a he** of a time of it.

C. was one of them.

Moving right along:

american grade school math has always been a sad joke. Europeans learn algebra+geometry in 7th grade. I support accelerated math.

and:

The advanced part isn't what is new, it is the quotas (80% of 8th graders are expected to be in Algebra) that are new.

Pushing the regular kids into advanced math is just as bad as keeping the advanced kids in regular math.

Why can't we just teach them what they are ready for? (because we don't have the time or money to teach individuals in our school system)

That's sure my beef.

Next:

Back in the 1950's I went through an accelerated math program like the one described here. The idea can't be all that new.

Things went downhill fast after the 1950s. See: The Race Between Education and Technology.

old chestnut:

I would forewarn the stories from Japan with their relatively high suicide rate of children from the pressure brought to bear on them to excel, mostly for the parents sake rather than the childs.

There isn't any higher teen suicide rate in Japan.

There is a higher teen suicide rate here. (see: Stigler, The Learning Gap)

"My wife is a teacher. Everyday, she sees pushy parents who insist that their kids are "gifted." It's a disgusting conceit on the part of loser parents who want to pretend that their failures can be fixed by their kids"

I think it works both ways. Teachers will hold truly gifted children back. My daughter was tagged as "gifted" through testing and I put her in an accelerated math program outside of school (loving it doing well too), but her school is refusing to commit to placing her in the high level math class. This is private school and they are control freaks. I'm thinking of putting her in public school where it sounds like she'll get more of an appropriate education.

And really, most parents want what's best for their child so your comment is rather inflammatory and I'm sure untrue.

Pushy parents! Holy moly, life would be good without pushy parents, for sure.

Having taught pupils of many nationalities and from widely varied backgrounds, I would affirm that children from the U.S.A. are extremely backward compared with others around the world, resulting in widespread adult ignorance. Some pushing along would certainly not come amiss!

Here's the full version of the pushy parent quote:

According to the article:

"I think parents of what I call above-average to gifted kids . . . were all saying, 'Our kids are bored,' " said Louise Epstein, a Fairfax mother and president of the Fairfax County Association for the Gifted.

My wife is a teacher. Everyday, she sees pushy parents who insist that their kids are "gifted." It's a disgusting conceit on the part of loser parents who want to pretend that their failures can be fixed by their kids.

Get a grip--suck it up. If your kid can hack it, all the better. I'm concerned that teachers, beaten down to nothing, will submit, merely to survive to the next paycheck.

I for one am not remotely concerned that teachers will "submit." They won't. History tells us this is true.

Will they feel beaten down & survive from one paycheck to the next? Yes. Algebra in 8th grade will, like everything else in the edu-world, be implemented from the top down with teachers being handed heterogeneous groups of kids half of whom won't remotely be ready to learn algebra. It will be a miserable experience.

That's not because of pushy parents.

That's because of pushy administrators.

Pushy parents have even less control over the administrative practices of public schools than teachers do.

Grade level math might be better termed decelerated math. I remember 4th-7th grade math as utterly boring and repetitive. Algebra got me interested again--in the 8th grade. I would have enjoyed an earlier shot at it.

and, last word:

Isn't there time in high school for advanced math? I don't remember doing much algebra in grade school (grades 1-8), but in my prep school we were required to take algebra I, algebra II, geometry, trigonometry, calculus I, and calculus II. In other words, I was always in a math course, all the way through high school. I didn't like any of it, but I had no choice.

Still, I guess it was good for me, as I could always count on a 99th percentile score in any standardized test I took. SAT, GMAT, etc. Isn't that good enough?

I say let the parents/kids chose, at least for the grade school kids.