Steve H's comments on Math Notations interview

excerpts I'm copying here, for safekeeping:

Educators are bound and determined to redefine math, but if they want to open career doors, they really need to take a good look at the Math SAT and work backwards.

I had never heard Steve say this before!

I find this extremely useful, not least because of the brevity.

I can remember this, and I can, quite possibly, do this.

Moving right along....

Mastery of skills is paramount. Spelling ... to writers is NOT like math skills is to mathematicians. This is an ignorant analogy.

yes

Affluent kids get private schools, tutors, and help at home. They get high expectations from their parents.

No kidding.

This pretty much captures the reason a lot of us are here.

I seriously doubt that there can be a meeting of the minds when it comes to basic assumptions and expectations. Mastery is a major issue. You can set all of the standards you want. You can force a school to use Singapore Math. If they don't believe in specific grade-level goals of mastery, then even that will fail. Mastery in math is not like spelling. This is not about middle ground.

Being able to spell is not analogous to being able to do long division.

Everyone knows this. The fact that we do have a math war and do not have a spelling war may be all the evidence you need that bad math education is devastating, while bad (or no) spelling education is merely annoying. If I were to spend the next hour Googling survey data, I'm sure I could show that parents universally want their children to be able to spell. Nevertheless, you will have to search far and wide to find a parent setting up web sites and parent advocacy groups to address his schools' failure to provide systemic instruction in spelling.

What about the kids who don't "blossom"? Is a "math brain" or a "spark" required to get an education in math? When my son goes to school, I expect him to pay attention and work hard even if he doesn't like the material. I check his homework daily and set much higher expectations than the school (that's not saying much). I don't tell him that he doesn't have to finish a writing assignment because he isn't motivated. I will try to motivate him and "spark" his interest, but failing that, I will apply (and the school should too) external motivation, like grades and flunking.

Self-motivation is a nice goal, but if it doesn't happen, then schools darn well better do something else.....If schools want math to be a "pump" and not a "filter", then they need to do some hard pumping. Affluent parents do a lot of pumping. Unfortunately, poor kids have to wait for a "spark".

Wonderful stuff!

Which, of course, goes straight to the heart of the problems I've come to realize parents in "high-performing" districts experience:

Schools aren't happy when parents push their kids.

I've been told, directly, "Don't push him." Other parents have been told the same; entire roomfuls of parents here have been told, "Don't push your kids; everyone has his place."

That's close to a direct quote.

Everyone has his place. Don't push.

Affluent schools, in my experience thus far, do what they can to discourage and delegitimize parent pushing.

Speaking of which, C's first writing assignment in ELA is to be a "Personal Motivation Letter":

Now that you are rapidly growing up, changing, and becoming more independent, your future as a life-long learner will become more and more your own choice and your own responsibility. This is a good thing.

[snip]

2) Write a letter to your English teacher discussing what motivates you and/or when, where or how you become motivated to learn something. Provide at least two or three self-motivating methods.

3) Since this is about self-motivation, do not write about adults you depend upon for motivation.

I'm sure C. will learn from this teacher, but this assignment, as the very first piece of writing the kids are asked to do, is revealing.

For one thing, this teacher (this may be a department assignment - I don't know) is assuming, without having met these kids, that they aren't naturally self-motivated already -- that parents nagging and pushing their kids is a universal in this district:

If you get tired of a parent asking you about your schoolwork, the only way to make it stop is by taking the responsibility yourself on a regular basis. Once a parent sees you have this part of your life under control, everyone in the house will be less “stressed out”.

In fact, Christopher is highly motivated to do his schoolwork, and always has been. This is true of a number of the kids in the class, perhaps a large number. (I don't know them all.)

The nagging and pushing that take place around here are always about our requirement that Christopher do "homework" for us, too.

I'm not sure what he can say to fulfill this assignment. He's not old enough, yet, to have reached the point where he needs self-motivation and anti-procrastination tricks in order to learn something he wants to know. That's because the things he wants to know are pretty simple to learn (cheats for videogames come to mind).

It's not like he's sitting around thinking, "I really want to learn calculus."

That day will come (let us hope), but a desire to learn a demanding and difficult subject is not a feature of most 8th graders' lives.

The fact that this assignment was given to students this teacher has just met tells you something important about how my district perceives parents (and kids). The universal assumption, sometimes explicit, sometimes implied, is that pushy parents are a problem.

Kids need to separate from pushy parents; schools need to help kids separate.

My sense is that affluent schools see pushy parents the same way all schools seem to see state tests.

The truth is that pushy parents and state tests are a problem for the school, not the kids.

One could argue that all education is a spiral.

Perfect!