Posted on 02/26/2008 7:56:12 AM PST by george76
Willie Angelo's grasp of math, never firm, took a sharp nose dive just before Christmas.
"Towards the end of last semester, it was all building up," said Angelo... "It was too much for me to handle."
So there he was at a recent early-morning tutoring session with his teacher, struggling to learn polynomials - mathematical expressions studded with digits, X's, exponents and parentheses.
He's not alone.
Students across Colorado are struggling with math, according to results of statewide achievement tests.
And the test scores go down as the students get older.
The vast majority of students - 68 percent - scored at the proficient or advanced level in the third grade in tests given last spring under the Colorado Student Assessment Program, or CSAP.
But only 30 percent of 10th-graders scored at that level.
The pattern has been the same for five years - a nearly straight decline between third and 10th grades in the percentage of students who score at the proficient or advanced levels.
The pattern is the same in most of the state's 176 school districts...the proficiency rate of 10th-graders is still lower than those of third- graders in the same district.
Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress suggest that older students nationwide have problems in math, with fourth-graders outperforming eighth-graders over the past four NAEP cycles but not in some earlier versions.
(Excerpt) Read more at rockymountainnews.com ...
ht : comments
Trouble in high school
Well, shoot, who has time to learn about math when you’re too busy practising putting condoms on bananas?
The more you teach math, the less people understand.
Sounds like we need to spend more money on the problem.
< /NEA >
Well, shoot, who has time to learn about math when you’re too busy practising putting condoms on bananas?
Something is clearly missing in how they're presenting the information.
My kids are astounded that their classmates don't know how to do any mental multiplication or know their squares up through at least 12, and this is at the high school level.
Ping
Here’s a shocker for you: Most Americans in their 20’s can not do long division. Something you used to learn around fourth grade.
Don’t believe it? Try it among 20 people in that age bracket and you will be surprised at the results.
And you wonder why so many are falling for Obama’s “Hope” and “Change”.
Government schools almost always choose to teach math the bad way. (And this is true for other subjects as well.) Public education is the only field where a history of bad results and failure to accomplish the primary goal (educate students) is justification for big increases in budget. Most businesses get more money when they succeed. Public schools get more money when they fail.
That's why they fail.
We give my 6yr old a pad & crayons to doodle in church (it helps keep him quiet). Last Sunday I looked over at him and he was doing multiplication problems. On his own.
I saw the 9th grade math book that our local public school “uses” and the first lesson was on how to make numbers in sign language....
I understand the teacher rarely refers to it, which is a good thing because as I leafed through the pages, they were so cluttered with pictures of kids in wheelchairs working with manipulatives and and insets with irrelevant information, that you could hardly find out where the problems the kids were to work on were. And there were precious few of those, too.
Try giving a young cashier enough small change to get back 75 cents in quarters. They look at you like you have three heads.
That’s such a great feeling...
I guess Willie gets an ‘F’ and has to retake the course.
And three tails.
How about take out all the BS math that kids won’t ever come across for the rest of their lives?
I feel like he and kids like him are the real hope of our society.
Do you homeschool your son?
And what's the probability of that outcome?
Most kids can give you change at the local burger joint without refering to the cash register first.
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