Posted on 08/05/2008 8:11:11 AM PDT by too much time
Fast Learners Montgomery County officials say accelerating students in math will better prepare them for college, but a revered teacher says it's time to step on the brakes. By Emily Messner Sunday, August 3, 2008; Page W20
It's the day before final exams start at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, and Eric Walstein is teaching a class he calls "a travesty." It's not that he minds teaching Algebra II, but these students are in Blair's acclaimed math and science magnet program, and traditionally the magnet hasn't bothered with the course -- the kids were smart enough, and their grounding in the fundamentals of algebra strong enough, that they could proceed directly from geometry in middle school to precalculus in high school and pick up the additional algebra they needed along the way. But the precalculus teachers found so many freshmen struggling
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
In its drive to please parents, the schools are failing the students. OK. No one would do that on purpose. They don't mean to fail the students. They truly want the students to succeed, right? So they are going to drop all pretense, shelve the foolish new math books, and get back to teaching math the way it was taught decades ago.
Right?
Yes! Wait - I just saw a pig fly by my window and it is snowing here in Georgia (yes, Georgia is like hell in August)!
"Drop all pretense" means that the educrats will admit their constructivist ideas are hogwash - that will not happen.
the chinese and indians love these types of articles...
Yikes - I should have posted the latest local paper article written by our Superintendent about our "Lake Wobegon" (in Georgia) school system -that would fool 'em.
You get all the way to the end and the truth comes out, but poor Mr. Walstein doesn't see what's coming next. If SATs become the problem, then drop the SATs, it is already underway(Wake Forest et al) and let the Universities offer more remedial courses at $300 a credit hour.
Walstein's outspokenness stands out, but he is not alone in believing that the county is moving too many students through the math curriculum too fast. "You would have a hard time finding one math teacher in this county who supports the scope and sequence of the way math is taught," says Billie Bradshaw, the math and science magnet program coordinator at Poolesville High School.
Of course, we teachers are too stupid to know anything about how it should be taught; that's the business of administrators. /sarcasm
The "business of administrators" who have not helped a student with math in years. They need to watch a struggling 5th grader try to dray lattice grids correctly and fast enough to finish the state exam in time- or perhaps watch an 8th grader who cannot finish the math ITBS because they cannot use their calculator.
A friend of ours is a psychologist; couple of PhD’s and all.
We had some interesting discussions with him about how the brain works.
Until kids hit puberty, they are very concrete thinkers. Once the hormones hit, and especially for females, they become more abstract, making subjects like math much more difficult for them to deal with.
He said that it was good to get as much math down in the grade school years as possible so that when the hormone wash hits and girls have more trouble with the reasoning, they still have a good solid foundation to fall back on, because that stuff that they already had wouldn’t be lost.
It the kids really got the basics down, like they did before the new math came along, through memorization, likely we’d see a lot less trouble in algebra and trig. After all, Newton developed calculus before all this new fangled math was invented. Most inventors for the last few hundred years didn’t have much of what we’d consider a decent education.
The only reform that math needs is to get back to what worked in the past. I think that they’d be surprised at how much the kids would learn by 8th grade. I think it would be considered very accelerated. But if it’s explained right, the concepts and techniques are not hard to master.
Some administrators became administrators because they weren't that good in the classroom to begin with.
The BEST administrators do what they do best - make it easier for teachers to do their jobs - and LET teachers do their jobs.
Others, even though they weren't very good teachers, or didn't even like being teachers, think they can tell teachers how to do what they themselves couldn't do.
I have sometimes wondered if math wouldn’t be best taught self paced (I know there are pitfalls to this approach). But it always seemed to me (as a student and later as a teacher) that the worst thing about math of any sort is that if you miss a concept, you will struggle ever after. Most kids don’t have enough interest to go back and learn something they missed, they just eventually say, “I’m stupid at math” and be done.
I got completely lost at the beginning of algebra, and I struggled thru that and geometry (altho I found geometry kind of fun) and had to take TWO remedial math courses before taking college algebra (which I made an A in—it was hard work, but I understood most of it).
susie
I was frustrated by the math program we taught in my 4th grade class. It was algebra concepts, and some of the kids got them no problem, but a fair number just were not mature enough yet to understand the more abstract stuff. I worry that they will forever think math is too hard for them, and give up.
susie
Not that I’m a math or elementary teacher, but I thought in 4th grade they were supposed to be perfecting multiplying multiple digits, long division, and fractions.
They worked on that, but a lot of the stuff looked just like algebra to me. I’m not a math expert by any means, but some of it was very abstract and I could tell that many of the kids were like, “huh”? I felt like (but this is just a personal observation) they were introducing some of this stuff too early for some of the kids.
susie
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