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Yeah, gently caress parabolas. I'm actually OK with geometric proofs, if only because it's the first time a student will walk through a formal proof and it's a useful skill. Not teaching high school students induction is a loving crime though.
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Sep 13, 2015 03:15
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Xand_Man posted:I think it would be very useful if trig was shortened to make room for more vector math and linear algebra. We already didn't have trigonometry in my school, I think it went Geometry -> Alg 2 -> Pre-Cal -> Some form of Calculus, or maybe with Alg 1 first and then the subsequent three topics. They definitely should teach linear algebra in high school though because it's different from the stuff already taught but it's not really that hard either. Although some of it does require some Calculus. Probability would be fine too (not to be confused with Statistics).
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Sep 13, 2015 03:48
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Xand_Man posted:I think it would be very useful if trig was shortened to make room for more vector math and linear algebra. Yes, lets make cal ii even harder than it already is.
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Sep 13, 2015 04:25
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I'm just jumping in to say that anyone trying to handwave or justify the sort of tracking that takes place in American public education is an rear end in a top hat. I was one of those "super smart" kids, but I wasn't actually that good a student (undiagnosed mental illness, go figure) so I spent a lot of time bouncing between the "gifted" classes and the dumb kid classes (which is how even some of the teachers clearly saw us). I'd guess that only a small percentage of students flipflopped between tracks as many times as I did, so I had a perspective that was pretty unusual and more than a tad alienating. I don't know how many of you have been in a class that was teaching concepts more basic than the class you took the year before, but it's the loving worst and jumping forward isn't much better. Anyway, the impression I got, especially at the high school level, really couldn't have been more damning. My "charter" public high school utterly neglected two thirds of its students (mostly minority and lower income) while giving insane preferential treatment to the whiter and higher-income kids that populated the honors and AP programs. Every aspect of education we received in the "regular" classes was, in fact, substandard. The class sizes were 30-50% bigger across the board. The teachers were less motivated (and frequently less qualified). The instruction moved like molasses and was constantly being interrupted by the entirely predictable problems caused by corralling 35 bored kids in a room with a teacher who couldn't handle it. The text books were older and simpler. The curriculum was often significantly below grade level. Even the desks were shittier. For the record, I was indeed one of those "gifted" California middle schoolers who took 8th grade Algebra 1 and crashed into it like a brick wall. That class was stupidly demanding compared to what came before it and I had a bad teacher (He was also a lovely right-winger who couldn't keep it out of the classroom. Lovely guy, all around.) and didn't do as well as I should have. So the next year I found myself in... Algebra 1 only this time it covered less and moved more slowly and the first month was wasted on remedial concepts I'd learned years earlier (just like how every science class I ever took retaught me the metric system and the periodic table). I probably learned something taking it a second time, but it permanently derailed my math education. By the time I'd taken Geometry and Algebra 2 with a classroom full of kids who were Bad At Mathtm, I started seeing myself the same way and had given up on ever taking Calculus (still haven't) and wound up struggling my way through simple college stats. It's actually really freaky to consider that I was actually pretty good ("gifted" even) at math at one point, given how much I've forgotten/never learned and I can only speculate where I'd be today if I'd been a slightly better student or had slightly better teachers/advisers when I was 13 and really the only difference between me and millions of other kids who never got that opportunity in the first place is that at least I know I got screwed. If you spent your education on the fast track, you likely have no idea how humiliating and dispiriting it is to be one of the slow kids or how much worse they have it. Most of the lower track kids are only vaguely aware of it as well. To them, school is usually boring or pointless or unfair, but few can properly articulate where that malaise comes from. The truth is kids can tell when the school system has given up on them, has pushed them aside, and knowing that hurts in a way that's hard to think about and harder to put into words. It's like someone has stolen your future from you, narrowed your horizons to a tiny patch of sky and yet expects you to keep striving in any case. It's no wonder so many kids just give up or check out. If you asked the gifted kids what they wanted to be when they grew up, it was doctor, artist, lawyer, teacher, scientist. Most of them took going to a good college as a given (though I knew quite a few who wound up at community college with me, usually because of money) and many of them were already planning grad school. If you talked to the lower track kids you'd hear about sports and the military, or trade school or their dad's shop or they'd just stare blankly or shrug or bullshit you because they don't have a good answer. Some of those kids thrive in those circumstances and others make their way to community college or state schools and reclaim their horizons, but many wander through the rest of their lives inhabiting a world made irrevocably dimmer and a few lose that last shard of daylight entirely. If you don't think that's a social justice issue, I don't know what to loving tell you.
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Sep 13, 2015 04:26
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hobbesmaster posted:Yes, lets make cal ii even harder than it already is. Emphasis on start. The basics of calculus are really not that hard and pretty useful!
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Sep 13, 2015 04:28
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What solution are you proposing? Ending all advanced classes?
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Sep 13, 2015 04:42
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Isn't separating kids into different class levels all about helping them succeed? I was just average in high school. I didn't feel screwed by the system because I wasn't taking AP courses. I didn't feel bad that there were kids who were much smarter and more dedicated than me. I liked to get high all the time and get through classes by the skin of my teeth. The article talks about teaching algebra all throughout elementary and middle school. I agree with this, however you're still going to end up with kids who want to learn more and kids who don't give a poo poo. Separate them so teachers can cater to the needs of each group.
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Sep 13, 2015 05:04
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Jack of Hearts posted:What solution are you proposing? Ending all advanced classes? It's a difficult problem, and there's no one solution. Teaching a range of material in class (in terms of material complexity) is extremely difficult and requires a lot of resources. But as soon as you track, you end up with students in the "dumb" classes beginning to massively resent school (their perspective is that they are "dumb" and the school has given up on them by making them second class students; why should they bother putting in effort?), and the students in the "smart" classes. I have a fair bit of teaching experience because I'm getting my PhD, but it's difficult to generalize to secondary schooling because I teach some of the objectively smartest and hardest working students in the world. Also some of the most privileged. But there's still sometimes a noticeable spectrum of abilities. What I've had great success with is doing a flipped classroom (material delivered online, at home etc), with in class sessions focusing on giving people individual attention for the questions and problems they have. Without the need to teach the general material itself in the limited time I have, I can teach to particular students' progress while having everyone in a room together (where peers can assist each other). Of course, this approach has serious problems at the secondary schooling level since it requires students to be willing to participate in the flipped side of the classroom while at home / outside of school. Since family support of education and actually having the time to do this sort of thing varies so drastically with socioeconomic status, it's hard to argue that a similar sort of process implemented in secondary schools wouldn't disproportionately benefit wealthier students. But it's one way to keep students in the same class. You simply can't keep everyone in the same class AND teach the same material to everyone. It's maddening for a gifted student to go at the pace of people who are struggling (and vice versa). But it's worth doing everything possible to keep them in the same class; because the people who are considered gifted changes all the god drat time. A major problem with tracking is that it assigns students a label; they are either dumb, or they are smart. That label affects their perception of themselves and their schooling. It's so easy for kids with high ability who struggle with a basic early concept to give up on their education (even if, had they persevered, they would find themselves to be extremely capable). Even for the kids who'll never excel academically, that brand is tied so deeply to their concept of self-worth and the value of their education that it screws them up for life.
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Sep 13, 2015 05:17
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Unseen posted:Isn't separating kids into different class levels all about helping them succeed? The thing is, in reality the main difference between kids in more advanced courses the the rest of students isn't that they're just magically more dedicated and intelligent (the fact that these classes are disproportionately made up of white/wealthier students is all the proof necessary that this is the case). Tracking isn't necessary inherently wrong, but the way it is implemented (in a way that basically splits students into a "smart" and "dumb" group that only ever intersects for courses like PE and usually provides a substandard learning environment for the latter) is extremely bad and harmful. I think many people in this thread are coming from the perspective of fortunate people who enjoyed (and were capable of) taking more advanced courses. I do not think it is inherently wrong to make the small percent of super high achieving kids sacrifice something if it would have a massive benefit to less fortunate ones (which, from what I understand, it absolutely would; mixing up more and less advanced students absolutely has a positive impact on the less advanced ones). It's not ideal, and I would prefer (and be open to the possibility of) an option that allowed students to take more advanced courses without loving over the majority who don't. But the current situation is not acceptable, and I think many people are seeing the situation through the rose-tinted lens of someone who was never exposed to the rest of the system.
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Sep 13, 2015 05:21
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Again, tracking and AP classes have nothing to do with each other. Nobody is getting rid of AP classes. Tracking has a huge host of problems. First of all, how is the data collected on tracking? How do you ensure that kids go into the right track? Do you do it based on class performance, or on test scores? If you do it on the former, then you miss out on the smart kids who found class dull and disengaged, and to actually do it well you have to track the grade dispersal or mandate it--which raises the whole other issue of what the median and mean grade 'should' be. Tracks are a good name for it, in a way, since it's a system on rails. If you say a kid is smart and put him in the smart group, the tendency will for him to perform better than if you call him in need of help and put him in the slowpokes group. We have very little idea of how accurate we're being when we 'track' students.
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Sep 13, 2015 05:26
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Obdicut posted:Again, tracking and AP classes have nothing to do with each other. Nobody is getting rid of AP classes. My boss (who is a geneticist, which I think is relevant given the whole nature vs nurture debate) has pointed out that, while certain individuals might be marginally more intelligent due to their genes, life is basically a series of events that reinforce whatever small advantage may have initially existed. Like, if you have better parents/home life, your chance of getting into an advanced program very early on is higher, and if you get into a very early advanced program, your chance of getting into honors/AP courses later also improves (and then a good college, job, etc). When looking at final outcomes, actual inherent ability plays a very tiny part.
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Sep 13, 2015 06:14
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really the only solution to that's fair to  intelligent ambitious and gifted students is to simply end public education for mentally deficient students as soon as possible so that more resources can be diverted to maximally specialized courses for the aforementioned intelligent ambitious and gifted ones
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Sep 13, 2015 06:14
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Regarding how ridiculous the whole system of whole ends up on "advanced" tracks is, the whole CLUE program (may go by different names in different states?) comes to mind. Basically, there were two ways you could get in; either have an IQ over some cutoff (130 I think?) or submit a portfolio. The latter was basically a way for anyone with aggressive enough parents to get into the program (not that using the IQ was that much better, but at least it wasn't quite as transparently unfair). Basically, if someone is from a well-off family and their parents want them to end up in advanced courses, then that's where they'll end up (unless they're literally retarded or something maybe).
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Sep 13, 2015 06:30
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Jack of Hearts posted:What solution are you proposing? Ending all advanced classes? Unseen posted:Isn't separating kids into different class levels all about helping them succeed? I'll make this as simple as I can. I'm not saying that we can't have separate classes in certain situations (though really I think the value of "gifted" programs has been profoundly overstated), but our education system as it exists today is the epitome of separate-but-not-equal only these days we use test scores (that just happen to skew rich and white) and teacher evaluations (ditto) to determine how much we invest in kids instead of skin color. If tracking didn't leave people on the lower track at a profound disadvantage it wouldn't be a civil rights issue. The problem is that kids on the lower track are frequently screwed and everyone knows it. When I had lower track classes (my school euphemistically called these classes "college prep" which still provokes a bitter sort of laugh from me), they were usually in worse classrooms with more kids and less qualified teachers. Even discounting the instruction we received (or didn't), that is already a blatant case of systemic inequality and yet you can find situations like that at public schools all over the country. It's really beyond defense. I think some of you guys (not you Unseen, you seem cool) need to get over your smart kid entitlement and ask yourselves why you didn't belong on the standard classes, but all those other kids -- some of whom were probably just as smart and hard-working -- did. Obdicut posted:Again, tracking and AP classes have nothing to do with each other. Nobody is getting rid of AP classes. I think you're really off base on this one, actually. In my experience upper-track kids take tons of AP classes (and sometimes can skip half of freshman year) and lower track kids usually take few if any. Schools spend an incredible amount of time and money on AP programs, but only some kids will really be able to benefit from them, which can become another social justice issue if the focus on AP programs saps resources from the regular classes most students take (which is certainly how it seemed at my school). You might have a point in a system that actually worked to prepare all students (not just high track ones) for rigorous AP classes though.
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Sep 13, 2015 07:57
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Honestly I think school should be set at the pace of a bit below the average student. The year should be broken up into lessons that teach concepts and lessons that reinforce concepts, and anyone who performs above average can have alternative classes or time off during the reinforcement lessons. That way you also add incentives for students: the faster they learn the more time they get off. And the slower students benefit through smaller class sizes. Also universities as they currently stand should not exist and instead we should be moving a lot of general education into schools and professional teaching into professional schools and universities left entirely focussed on academia. Absolutely nobody should be going to university for better job prospects unless their desired profession is academic in nature. And conditions of entry should be entirely divorced from school. But I guess that's a different discussion.
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Sep 13, 2015 08:16
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Ytlaya posted:Regarding how ridiculous the whole system of whole ends up on "advanced" tracks is, the whole CLUE program (may go by different names in different states?) comes to mind. Basically, there were two ways you could get in; either have an IQ over some cutoff (130 I think?) or submit a portfolio. The latter was basically a way for anyone with aggressive enough parents to get into the program (not that using the IQ was that much better, but at least it wasn't quite as transparently unfair). Basically, if someone is from a well-off family and their parents want them to end up in advanced courses, then that's where they'll end up (unless they're literally retarded or something maybe). The story of how I wound up in the GATE (gifted and talented education) program is all the evidence you'll ever need that it's all bullshit. At the end of third grade (I think) we were all given a test to see if we were smart or not. Now, there are many different kinds of intelligence, but for some reason this test that would determine if we got into the school's gate equivalent (I forget what they called it) only measured one thing. Pattern recognition. I'm fairly sure the pattern test has become rather famous in the state of California for its ability to precisely measure approximately nothing of value. I failed to properly match a couple zigzags with a couple different upside-down-and-backwards zigzags and was therefor found to be Not Smart. So fourth grade rolls around and my teacher decides maybe I am smart (coincidentally, I'm white and my parents are well educated) so he recommended me to the program. The problem was this time they didn't care about patterns. Instead they wanted me to give them a homework assignment that showed my smartitude. Now, I really should have given them a short essay or something, but instead I gave them this big flipbook portfolio thing I'd made, but I was always a somewhat sloppy student and in retrospect I'm pretty sure my penmanship disqualified me at a glance. Next year, my new teacher tried again. This time, there was a new test (no I don't know why either): synonyms and antonyms. Now, I had the verbal skills and vocabulary of a high schooler (thanks mom and dad) which is probably why my teachers kept recommending me in the first place, so naturally that was a breeze and bam! just like that, fast track. Now If I want to think about how my education might have gone differently, I just imagine what would have happened if my parents hadn't been assertive in parent-teacher conferences, or if I'd just been a bit quieter and less eager to show how smart I was (I was not well-liked in grade school). That stupid pattern test might have been the only opportunity I had and I would have blown it because my spatial reasoning/visual memory borders on learning disabled (at least according to a different test in middle school). No one would have given me that one test that I could handily pass and who knows how long it would have been until a different equally arbitrary set of test scores put me back on track. The whole thing is complete madness. Duckbox fucked around with this message at 08:39 on Sep 13, 2015 |
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Sep 13, 2015 08:32
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Duckbag posted:The story of how I wound up in the GATE (gifted and talented education) program is all the evidence you'll ever need that it's all bullshit. At the end of third grade (I think) we were all given a test to see if we were smart or not. Now, there are many different kinds of intelligence, but for some reason this test that would determine if we got into the school's gate equivalent (I forget what they called it) only measured one thing. Pattern recognition. I'm fairly sure the pattern test has become rather famous in the state of California for its ability to precisely measure approximately nothing of value. I failed to properly match a couple zigzags with a couple different upside-down-and-backwards zigzags and was therefor found to be Not Smart. So fourth grade rolls around and my teacher decides maybe I am smart (coincidentally, I'm white and my parents are well educated) so he recommended me to the program. The problem was this time they didn't care about patterns. Instead they wanted me to give them a homework assignment that showed my smartitude. Now, I really should have given them a short essay or something, but instead I gave them this big flipbook portfolio thing I'd made, but I was always a somewhat sloppy student and in retrospect I'm pretty sure my penmanship disqualified me at a glance. Next year, my new teacher tried again. This time, there was a new test (no I don't know why either): synonyms and antonyms. Now, I had the verbal skills and vocabulary of a high schooler (thanks mom and dad) which is probably why my teachers kept recommending me in the first place, so naturally that was a breeze and bam! just like that, fast track. Hahah that pattern test is how I got into GATE. No one I've met ever took that one so I've always assumed it was some weird bullshit my elementary school at the time did.
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Sep 13, 2015 08:42
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Yeah, I'm pretty sure kids all over California (and elsewhere?) took it for years and it's loving insane. It's sort of like taking the ten or so spacial reasoning questions from a standard IQ test and saying, "you know what we don't need those other 90 questions." Actually, it's exactly like that. I think they were concerned about catching flak for a racial bias in the verbal section or something like that so they decided to just test "pure intelligence" even though there's no reason to think that abstract pattern recognition is at all correlated with whether or not you should be in more advanced english/math classes. As far as I know, no one has ever gone to prison for making that test, but maybe they should have?
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Sep 13, 2015 08:56
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e: nm
blah_blah fucked around with this message at 10:52 on Sep 13, 2015 |
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Sep 13, 2015 09:35
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full disclosure: you sound like a poo poo
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Sep 13, 2015 10:00
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Tracking is bad for gifted kids too. Learning to interact with a diversity of other people is good for you. School isn't just about academics, it's also about socialization in an academic setting. Join the National Honors Society or take additional college courses if you're so loving gifted. That poo poo looks great on a college ap just as well. There's a big push from the ACLU to remove artificial barriers to enter AP and honors classes as an attempt to dismantle the little white/asian self-described genius clubs. One has to wonder why teachers all fight over getting the advanced classes. It's about behavior more than it is about the opportunity to push gifted students farther. I rarely get cynical about teachers, but I have spent enough time observing educators to see a pattern. Teachers of the general population, who aren't bitter and burnt out, seem to be more likely to implement actual research based instructional strategies and will get more involved in the students learning. While I have seen a lot of this same kind of teaching in advanced courses as well, I have seen way more quiet textbook work and worksheets while the teacher passively fucks around on the computer because he's just not going to have to worry about classroom management. If you're gathering geniuses together because they need to be around eachother to excel, then where are the dialoguing strategies? Where is the collaboration? Where is there peer interaction deeper than just following the steps of a chemistry lab together? You don't often see advanced instructional strategies in these classes because the idea of a concentration of excellence is disingenuous. It's about not having to be challenged to get along with "bad kids".
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Sep 13, 2015 11:08
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Higsian posted:Also universities as they currently stand should not exist and instead we should be moving a lot of general education into schools and professional teaching into professional schools and universities left entirely focussed on academia. Absolutely nobody should be going to university for better job prospects unless their desired profession is academic in nature. And conditions of entry should be entirely divorced from school. But I guess that's a different discussion. Kinda hard to justify as long as the legacy of the Morrill Act exists.
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Sep 13, 2015 13:51
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Bast Relief posted:Tracking is bad for gifted kids too. Learning to interact with a diversity of other people is good for you. School isn't just about academics, it's also about socialization in an academic setting. Again: are you sure you've actually seen a gifted class operate before? All the ones I was in had roughly the same amount of disruptive students as normal classes, and some of them were far worse than normal classes in that regard. Many of the kids originally got tested precisely because they were the disruptive little shits in normal classes (sometimes being in GATE helped, often it did not). The people that worked hard, got good grades and never caused problems eventually ended up in IB; there was some overlap, but a lot less than you'd think. Saying that gifted programs are where high achievers should end up is like saying that low achievers, regardless of reason, should be put into special ed classes. It makes no sense. Honestly, it sounds like the administration of these programs is fundamentally flawed in most places, from the stories I hear, and if that's the case, that's the issue that should be fixed.
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Sep 13, 2015 14:16
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Bast Relief posted:There's a big push from the ACLU to remove artificial barriers to enter AP and honors classes as an attempt to dismantle the little white/asian self-described genius clubs. Yeah, I had to jump through a lot of hoops to get into the English/Social Studies honors class at my high school because I had a lousy eighth-grade year and didn't make into those classes initially as a freshman. I don't understand why; it seems like I should have been able to move up just based on my grades in 9th grade English and Social Studies and teacher recommendation. Instead I doubt I ever would have been able to get into the class without my mother really pushing for it. They still made me come into school early one day and write an essay (about myself!) so they could have an excuse to approve the apparently unusual move from one track to another. Such utter bullshit.
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Sep 13, 2015 14:39
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I kind of had the opposite experience to duckbag. Got into GATE on the basis of pattern matching but I would've been screwed if it had been synonyms and antonyms because my vocabulary just isn't that large despite me reading a ton when I was younger, which I put down to me not being a native speaker. And my parents, not being intimately familiar with the school system or even knowing what a PTA is, probably would never have pushed for me to join GATE.
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Sep 13, 2015 15:40
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Ytlaya posted:My boss (who is a geneticist, which I think is relevant given the whole nature vs nurture debate) has pointed out that, while certain individuals might be marginally more intelligent due to their genes, life is basically a series of events that reinforce whatever small advantage may have initially existed. Like, if you have better parents/home life, your chance of getting into an advanced program very early on is higher, and if you get into a very early advanced program, your chance of getting into honors/AP courses later also improves (and then a good college, job, etc). When looking at final outcomes, actual inherent ability plays a very tiny part. When we're talking about math we're not talking about intelligence. We're just talking about math. For what it's worth it's highly unlikely that a large percentage of intelligence isn't genetic but along with that you need to understand that intelligence is highly segmented and math is just a small subset of it. It takes huge amounts of raw intelligence to be good poet, or top athlete and you can be these things while being "bad at math". So it may be helpful to try and separate "smart" from the debate over tracking. The thing about the sciences is that they're technical. This is the same reason that sports are tracked as well. The fact that crappy basketball players can't keep up with good basketball players at a technical level is why we separate them and if done right, it's better for everyone (speaking from experience playing a rec league way over my head). But existing math education is like if nobody ever went on to play basketball but if everyone was eventually going to coach some of it. You wouldn't approach that situation by drilling students on jump shots and tracking them by how well they could do that. You'd go right at the primary, higher level use cases. I think those higher level concepts are both more applicable and also more accessible which also potentially alleviates the tracking problem. When math sticks to higher level and more intuitive use cases there may be less need to track to begin with. asdf32 fucked around with this message at 15:54 on Sep 13, 2015 |
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Sep 13, 2015 15:50
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I got into my school's GATE program from the first year and stayed in it for about 2 years before I started my mass truancy spree and fell out of it. I attended school roughly half the time and did assignments the night before they were due like a lot of students and didn't even do them at all for some of them. And then I still got into university based off my test scores because I was loving gifted and talented. Seriously, people who, for whatever reason, are really "gifted and talented" don't need a leg up in life; they already have a big one. Just make sure everyone else has a solid education and ensure resources exist for self-learning. If people are super smart and dedicated they can learn to teach themselves, which is an extremely valuable skill. Not to mention the privilege you get being gifted in a school. In the second last year of school when I got caught having truanted over a literal year's worth of school days I didn't even get a slap on the wrist. The only thing I had to do was talk to the truant officer and promise to come to school every day and he decided not to punish me because I was a "good student". They knew I would still score well in the standardized tests and look like a model student in the school's stats just so long as the inconvenient little fact that I hardly attended was never officially acknowledged. It reminded me of the time I passed all my courses during a term in which I never attended any of them after the first week. I never did anything assessable for those courses at all but they still passed me. With B's and C's too. loving amazing. This wasn't even no child left behind, I can't even imagine how easy coasting must be in America now. I reiterate: gifted students don't need help to get even further ahead, they get plenty just being who they are.
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Sep 13, 2015 16:48
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There's a whole lot of reasons why tracking has problems, there's a whole lot of reasons why not tracking has problems, "omg my whole life was ruined because I was bored in math class and everyone who ever defends tracking is a monster" appears on neither one of those lists. And as someone who was also bounced from the "smart" track in 8th grade (for me mostly because of mental health issues that developed in my teens and helped trash my high school academics) you can gently caress right off with your "smart kid entitlement" bullshit. Also I will say, as someone who had to take a remedial algebra course the first semester of their engineering program some of you are vastly overusing the word "required" in regards to learning Calc I in high school.
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Sep 13, 2015 18:37
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PT6A posted:Again: are you sure you've actually seen a gifted class operate before? All the ones I was in had roughly the same amount of disruptive students as normal classes, and some of them were far worse than normal classes in that regard. Many of the kids originally got tested precisely because they were the disruptive little shits in normal classes (sometimes being in GATE helped, often it did not). I'm sorry, I failed to communicate that my purview is 9-12th grade. My only experience with GATE was my mom refusing to let me go, much to my displeasure, because she thought socializing with normal kids was way more important. I absolutely agree with your last paragraph there though, and it's unfortunate to hear both parents and teachers cry about bringing back tracking. I can understand parent's selfishly wanting what they perceive as being best for their child. However, at the educator level the rhetoric frustrates me because it creates undesirable general population classes that often get passed off to new and less skilled teachers who are less equipped to serve that population, and then those students never move out of their performance deficit. The academy I was a part of, in contrast, had its funding tied to the inclusion of at risk students. At least 50% of the population of incoming freshmen had to have three of the risk factors as defined by the state. I can't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but academy members showed a significantly larger gain in student achievement from 9-12th grade than the rest of the school. Specifically, at risk students showed significant achievement improvement if they were placed in the academy. Certainly none of the high achievers were held back from their true potential because half of the kids in their classes were not acheiving at grade level when they began. *To clarify, academies in the context I worked with them were not separate schools, but a program within a school focused around a theme, like VAPA, ag, engineering or health for example.
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Sep 13, 2015 19:01
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Bast Relief posted:Tracking is bad for gifted kids too. Learning to interact with a diversity of other people is good for you. School isn't just about academics, it's also about socialization in an academic setting. My [combined junior high/high schoo] GATE school got way more tolerable at the high school level once the gifted lifers left to different schools with AP and IB programs and the ratio of inner city hoodrats to leftover GATE kids went up. In fact, the odd mix of kids led to way less cliquey bullshit than most high schools have I think, so that was cool. Now, this was in the hard inner city of uh, Calgary, so this might not hold as well for Philadelphia. Math education is hosed and has been perpetually been trying to be rewritten unsuccessfully for the last half-century. There's an old Churchhill quote about democracy being the worst form of government, except for all the others that I feel kinda applies to your standard math curriculum as well. The balance of trying to get students understand the abstract part while also learning the required technical skills is a pretty fuckin' delicate tightrope. Right now, the curriculum is based around tedious technical calculation and rote bullshit. The unfortunate problem with redesigning stuff to gun for better abstract understanding is that in most redesigned curriculum you either have a) Kids that can't do algebra . b) A curriculum that is only accessible to the top 10% of the class. Getting an unmotivated/developing student to care about abstraction is an incredible challenge. Maybe there's a way, but it certainly requires people with a better understanding of math than the average school teacher. The easy answer is to split the curriculum and do tracking/tiering, but that's obviously not particularly socially conscious. I don't have any answers. poo poo's hard. blah_blah posted:I mean, if you want to go down this path, there's way too much material on trigonometry (especially needlessly convoluted identities) and conic sections, and two column proofs in geometry are mostly a waste of time. I always thought teaching younger kids basic graph theory would be cute. It's pretty much the math of connect the dots. I guess it's hard to say anything too formal without proofs, but you could totally kill a week or two in a junior high or high school classroom by showing them planarity, colourings, matchings, and just in general showing them how you can use graphs to model real life stuff and relationships.
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Sep 13, 2015 19:56
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Jarmak posted:There's a whole lot of reasons why tracking has problems, there's a whole lot of reasons why not tracking has problems, "omg my whole life was ruined because I was bored in math class and everyone who ever defends tracking is a monster" appears on neither one of those lists. And as someone who was also bounced from the "smart" track in 8th grade (for me mostly because of mental health issues that developed in my teens and helped trash my high school academics) you can gently caress right off with your "smart kid entitlement" bullshit. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I wasn't talking about you, what with us being in the same loving boat and all. For me, it was clinical depression. People kept checking me for learning disabilities and poo poo, but missed the self-hating elephant in the room because diagnosing mental illness in teenagers is apparently loving hard. Did getting stuck in different classes from all my friends help with my social isolation though? gently caress no. Did suddenly being one of the "dumb kids' and having people ask me "if you're so smart, what are you doing here?" help my self-esteem? Again, gently caress no. Is all of this relevant to a discussion of tracking? Hell yes it is. Anyway, I'll spare you all the rest of my goddamn life story. The original point I was trying to make was never that I was a poor sadbrain baby whose life got ruined by tracking. My life ain't over yet and this poo poo is more just an unpleasant memory than the ongoing bane of my existence. No my point was, and I'll make this point again, that I saw both tracks and they were not alike. It's like you've spent your whole life living in the suburbs and things aren't perfect but the streets are clean and the crime rate is low and the city services are reliable. Then you move a few miles down the street and suddenly there are no sidewalks and there's trash in the street and you have to watch where you park and where you walk and when you lock your doors or you'll get robbed and the cops will take an hour to respond. You're in the same city, you've got the same police department, the same trash collectors, the same public works, so it should be the same, right? But there is a difference. You can see it in the faces of the people that live there, the way they walk, the dreams they have, who they are, who they aren't, what they have and what they can't have. Someone, perhaps everyone, has decided that these people have less value that if they get deprived or pushed around they won't complain because this is their place and they know it. Are there ways to track kids in the classroom without perpetrating that same sort of socioeconomic injustice? Possibly, but I've seen the ways programs like GATE can create academic gated communities where a lucky or privileged few can opt out of a failing school system and I've heard the way people in those communities talk about (and are talked about by) everyone else and it churns my stomach.
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Sep 13, 2015 22:14
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I can't help but wonder if there should be less emphasis about some kids sacrificing for other kids, and more on proper funding for schools and understanding that schools can't solve poverty by themselves.
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Sep 13, 2015 22:26
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computer parts posted:We already didn't have trigonometry in my school, I think it went Geometry -> Alg 2 -> Pre-Cal -> Some form of Calculus, or maybe with Alg 1 first and then the subsequent three topics. Just as a baseline for the discussion of "Pre-Cal vs. Trigonometry", in my personal experience, I'm pretty sure Pre-Cal is basically "Trigonometry-Plus" and usually adds some other stuff like probabilities (usually just discrete, which is tied in with...), basic combinatorics, and some Algebra II refresher stuff (of which the probabilities and combinatorics might be part, but in more detail). Maybe some basic systems of linear equations stuff, but I don't think it was anything more than can be solved by substitution or elimination of variables. I might have come across matrices in that class, briefly, but I think it wasn't really until college that we actually covered them in detail.
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Sep 13, 2015 22:33
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Higsian posted:I reiterate: gifted students don't need help to get even further ahead, they get plenty just being who they are. The main value of gifted programs isn't in improving the graduation rates of their participants. It's that the students in them are substantially more likely to be successful across most reasonable metrics, and to make disproportionate contributions to society, the economy, technology, and so on. Consequently it makes sense to actively invest in their future rather than treat them as an afterthought. You could make a similar argument to this for e.g. university students -- pretty much anyone attending a 4-year university directly out of high school is in the top 50% or so of their age cohort in terms of life outcomes, so why do they 'need help to get even further ahead' (by state-level public funding, federally-subsidized loans, etc)? The answer here, as before, is that society turns out to benefit a lot from having a robust postsecondary education system.
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Sep 13, 2015 22:47
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Gifted students can also become terrors if they get bored in school, which happens when material is too easy for them. They can also become incredibly lazy if they can coast by on natural talent, resulting in them not developing the necessary learning skills required to cope when they are ultimately challenged.
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Sep 13, 2015 23:04
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blah_blah posted:The main value of gifted programs isn't in improving the graduation rates of their participants. It's that the students in them are substantially more likely to be successful across most reasonable metrics, and to make disproportionate contributions to society, the economy, technology, and so on. Consequently it makes sense to actively invest in their future rather than treat them as an afterthought. Again, to make this claim in a scientific way, you'd have to track students in gifted programs vs. control groups of students not identified as gifted, but given the same resources, and students identified as gifted but not put into gifted programs. That people identified as smart and given more resources to succeed succeed more than those who don't is hardly a surprising outcome. Nobody thinks that we should neglect or ignore talented or ambitious children, but there are problems that have been discussed already: how much of the ambition is from the child rather than the parent, how good our net is at actually identifying gifted children, whether segregation benefits intellectually at harm to social skills, etc. It is not a simple problem. Even if you took it as a proved statement that this group you've identified as gifted will make disproportionate contributions, that doesn't follow that they should get extra resources. You would also need to test whether giving those resources to the lower groups actually had a better effect on society overall; that fixing deficits may have a better effect than raising peaks. quote:You could make a similar argument to this for e.g. university students -- pretty much anyone attending a 4-year university directly out of high school is in the top 50% or so of their age cohort in terms of life outcomes, so why do they 'need help to get even further ahead' (by state-level public funding, federally-subsidized loans, etc)? The answer here, as before, is that society turns out to benefit a lot from having a robust postsecondary education system. What isn't known, though, is how much we're losing by not educating that other 50% more. Obviously, a great secondary school system is awesome, but what if it were capturing only 25% of the population, or 10%, or 5%? The vastly increased access to college that the GI bill allowed was a huge boon for the country--your argument could have been used against it, to instead put those resources towards students already in college. We also have a huge dropout problem in college--does this represent kids who 'shouldn't' be going to college or are they people who with more help could achieve a lot more? None of these questions are easy; resource allocation is an incredibly difficult problem. It is not a problem that is helped by people like OP freaking out when the system is changed.
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Sep 13, 2015 23:05
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well we're clearly losing nothing by binning the little parasites, only galtian supermangs are capable of making significant contributions to society as clearly shown by st. rand's fiction
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Sep 13, 2015 23:13
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Obdicut posted:Again, to make this claim in a scientific way, you'd have to track students in gifted programs vs. control groups of students not identified as gifted, but given the same resources, and students identified as gifted but not put into gifted programs. That people identified as smart and given more resources to succeed succeed more than those who don't is hardly a surprising outcome. I don't think it follows that gifted programs are 'extra resources', but rather academic curricula appropriate to a student's demonstrated skill. They are functionally no different than remedial courses for low-performing students. While there are certainly issues with e.g. the perceived 'best' teachers at a school only teaching honors courses, the lowest achieving students in a school eat up a much larger chunk of resources than the highest performing ones do. I mean, you've advocated in this very thread that high performing students should be using their free time after coasting through the material to help their lower-performing peers. That represents a massive shift in resources towards low performing students! It's also pretty rich of you to go [citation needed] any time someone states something that you feel is unsubstantiated, but your first post in this thread was Obdicut posted:Having smart kids tutor and teach other kids is demonstrably super-good for them. They're not going to be seriously delayed by not learning Algebra I in favor of having a much more concrete and thorough knowledge of math. There's not going to be enough of those kids to make up a whole class at most schools. if there are, sure, make a special math class for them, but I'd bet the kids who stick with the norm and help the other kids will, later on, outperform the kids who get a 1 year jump on algebra I. which is probably the most [citation needed] thing that anyone has written in this thread to date (and, by the way, is contradicted by numerous papers indicating that tracking has a positive impact on academic achievement for high-performing students). There also are natural experiments that have assessed the impact of gifted and talented magnet programs on students near the cutoff for admission into magnet schools (see this NBER paper). Turns out that if you are near the bottom of your class, you get very little benefit from having superior peers and teachers, which basically answers your question about what happens if you give low-performing students access to the same quality of instruction and peers as their higher-performing counterparts. Obdicut posted:What isn't known, though, is how much we're losing by not educating that other 50% more. Obviously, a great secondary school system is awesome, but what if it were capturing only 25% of the population, or 10%, or 5%? The vastly increased access to college that the GI bill allowed was a huge boon for the country--your argument could have been used against it, to instead put those resources towards students already in college. We also have a huge dropout problem in college--does this represent kids who 'shouldn't' be going to college or are they people who with more help could achieve a lot more? None of these questions are easy; resource allocation is an incredibly difficult problem. It is not a problem that is helped by people like OP freaking out when the system is changed. Sure, I'm not asserting that the 50% proportion is somehow a canonical one. I'm just arguing that at the postsecondary level we already have made a conscious decision to subsidize people who are already doing well, and there is almost certainly inefficiency there if we aren't doing the same at the primary and secondary levels. It is also well-documented that public funding for universities produces tremendous economic benefit (see e.g. here).
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Sep 14, 2015 00:36
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Yashichi posted:That's really lovely but it seems to be a distinct issue from students having different levels of ability and classes that reflect that fact The problem is that there is no perfect, objective way to evaluate a student's academic abilities. The problems with standardized testing - including the racial disparities - are heavily debated, and leaving it up to a teacher's or administrator's judgement is exactly how all the minorities end up in a lower level. Yashichi posted:I'm not sure why the course of action is to pretend all students are equal because racists might abuse the system. Shouldn't the goal be to improve educational opportunities for students with these disadvantages instead? If a kid is having trouble in class, is it because they're just plain dumber...or is it because the curriculum is insufficient to handle a wide variety of learning styles? It's tempting to blame the underperforming students for their failures and praise the advanced students for their understanding, but it could just as well be that the overperforming students just happen to be better at rote memorization. According to the OP article, the vast majority of kids performed poorly in 8th-grade Algebra 1, so depending on which view of school performance you follow, either most of the kids are stupid (in which case it's a waste of limited resources to cater to the few who aren't) or the curriculum up to that point wasn't preparing the kids properly to understand Algebra 1, in which case the curriculum needed to be shuffled around.
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Sep 14, 2015 02:14
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hobbesmaster posted:Yes, lets make cal ii even harder than it already is.
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Sep 14, 2015 02:49
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