@##$%^&* state math curriculum @S#W#E#A#R

[Dr Mordrid]

This is so STUPID!! One of the legs up our kids had going to school was that our A2 curriculum was so tough they were a leg up on kids from other states. Stand and Deliver my arse.....

Grrrrr.....more home schooling to do.....

Link....

Algebra 2 changes add up for some, not others

Some feared course would overwhelm Algebra 2 students

Some of the content is coming out of Algebra 2 in Michigan, which state education department officials say will make the course a bit more manageable for the thousands of students who must pass it to graduate.

But critics, mostly math experts, say the state is watering down one of the most rigorous Algebra 2 curricula in the nation.

Gone now from required content are statistics, probability and basic trigonometry. Left are concepts that include functions, equations and reasoning.

The state says the changes are needed to better align the course with the ACT college entrance exam, allowing teachers to spend more time concentrating on material students will likely see on the test. That's key because most Michigan teens take the test as part of the Michigan Merit Exam.

Many applaud the changes because they make the course more consistent with the way Algebra 2 is taught in most states.

But Jametrius Wade, 16, a junior at Southfield-Lathrup High School, isn't sure he likes the idea. "I think I want to learn some of that stuff," Jametrius said.
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[Fat Tone]

I don't blame you being mad!

[Dr Mordrid]

Columnist Robert Sowell has a great column on education, or what passes for it, today. My wife, a teacher of some 3 decades, loved it as he accurately portrays many of the problems she sees on a daily basis.

Link....

A Letter from a Child

By Thomas Sowell

Recent videos of American children in school singing songs of praise for Barack Obama were a little much, especially for those of us old enough to remember pictures of children singing the praises of dictators like Hitler, Stalin and Mao.

But you don't need a dictator to make you feel queasy about the manipulation of children. The mindset that sees children in school as an opportunity for teachers to impose their own notions, instead of developing the child's ability to think for himself or herself, is a dangerous distortion of education.

Parents send their children to school to acquire the knowledge that has come down to us as a legacy of our culture-- whether it is mathematics, science, or whatever-- so that those children can grow up and go out into the world equipped to face life's challenges.

Too many "educators" see teaching not as a responsibility to the students but as an opportunity for themselves-- whether to indoctrinate a captive audience with the teacher's ideology, manipulate them in social experiments or just do fun things that make teaching easier, whether or not it really educates the child.

You can, of course, call anything that happens in a classroom "education"-- but that does not make it education, except in the eyes of those who cannot think beyond words. Unfortunately, the dumbed-down education of previous generations means that many parents today see nothing wrong with their children being manipulated in school, instead of being educated.

Such parents may see nothing wrong with spending precious time in classrooms chit-chatting about how everyone "feels" about things on television or in their personal life.

But while our children are frittering away time on trivia, other children in other countries are acquiring the skills in math, science or other fields that will allow them to take the jobs our children will meed when they grow up. Foreigners can take those jobs either by coming to America and outperforming Americans or by having those jobs outsourced to them overseas.

In short, schools are supposed to prepare children for the future, not give teachers opportunities for self-indulgences in the present. One of these self-indulgences was exemplified by a letter I received recently from a fifth-grader in the Sayre Elementary School in Lyon, Michigan.

He said, "I have been assigned to ask a famous person a question about how he or she would solve a difficult problem." The problem was what to do about the economy.

Instead, I replied to his parents: With American students consistently scoring near or at the bottom in international tests, I am repeatedly appalled by teachers who waste their students' time by assigning them to write to strangers, chosen only because those strangers' names have appeared in the media.

It is of course much easier-- and more "exciting," to use a word too many educators use-- to do cute little stuff like this than to take on the sober responsibility to develop in students both the knowledge and the ability to think that will enable them to form their own views on matters in both public and private life. What earthly good would it do your son to know what economic policies I think should be followed, especially since what I think should be done will not have the slightest effect on what the government will in fact do? And why should a fifth-grader be expected to deal with such questions that people with Ph.D.'s in economics have trouble wrestling with?

The damage does not end with wasting students' time and misdirecting their energies, serious though these things are. Getting students used to looking to so-called "famous" people for answers is the antithesis of education as a preparation for making up one's own mind as citizens of a democracy, rather than as followers of "leaders."

Nearly two hundred years ago, the great economist David Ricardo said: "I wish that I may never think the smiles of the great and powerful a sufficient inducement to turn aside from the straight path of honesty and the convictions of my own mind."

The fad of assigning students to write to strangers is an irresponsible self-indulgence of teachers who should be teaching. But that practice will not end until enough parents complain to enough principals and enough elected officials to make it end.

[Umfriend]

Over here, education, both elementary as high school has been rather screwed up. It wasn't easy but they've been going at it consitently from about the late 70s so by now they managed rather well at that.

[Fat Tone]

Education gets a lot of knocks here too (esp wrt literacy rates in school leavers) but I can honestly say my experience for my kids has been a huge leap forward from my own.

For example, I can remember starting high school (age 11/12) and times-tables being covered. My son (just started high scool) is light years ahead of that. Admittedly his abilities in maths in particular are years above his class mates but I know what the syllabus is. Even in English, he is covering terms that weren't even mentioned in my secondary education.

Teaching at pre-school imo is poor now. It's much more play- and self-led, so when Adam arrived at school he was a long way behind where Luke was. There's only so much you can do as working parents. Having said that the school has made HUGE leaps with him and we have nothing but praise for them.

There is a HUGE problem with the attitude of school leavers. My wife sometimes teaches 16-18 year-olds on programmes like 'entry to employment'. These are the kids who have always struggles at school. Their attitude stinks. They think nothing of F'ing and Blinding at my wife and at each other. I could go on, but my BP needs looking after.

[cjolley]

For example, I can remember starting high school (age 11/12) and times-tables being covered.

Seriously? When were you in HS? I started HS in 1966 and we would have been mortified to be assigned times-tables.

They think nothing of F'ing and Blinding at my wife and at each other.

Ah, the English and Americans. Separated by a common language


The whole problem boils down to laziness and lack of trust.
Lazy teachers plus lazy students = a whole lot of lazy goin' on.
Lack of trust that kids will rise to what is expected of them. They will.

[Umfriend]

Time-tables as in what is 3 times 6, for all numbers x times y and x and y being {1, 2, ..., 9, 10}?

[Brian Ellis]

We started the times tables at 6-7 y.o. We HAD to know and be able to use them, up to 12 x, when we went from prep to junior school at 8-9, the same as we had to be literate and be able to write short essays. Of course, that was in Scotland, with a totally different educational system to England.

[Umfriend]

So time-tables is indeed x times y with x and y being from 1 to 10?

FT, you started those at age 11?? Over here they start in 4th grade (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 10) and 5th grade (6, 7, 8 and 9). That's 7-8 and 8-9 yo.

[lowlifecat]

X and y where numbers between 1 and 12 when i was in elementary. iirc we started in grade 2 or 3.

[Evildead666]

Seriously? When were you in HS? I started HS in 1966 and we would have been mortified to be assigned times-tables.



Ah, the English and Americans. Separated by a common language


The whole problem boils down to laziness and lack of trust.
Lazy teachers plus lazy students = a whole lot of lazy goin' on.
Lack of trust that kids will rise to what is expected of them. They will.

Parents are a good deal of the problem.
When I started secondary school (11yrs) I was relatively good at maths, but mostly nothing else. We had logarithmic tables instead of calculators, and I still don't understand how the log tables even worked....
What was a bitch was that even in upper sixth ( final year of high school) they still gave us bloody Log tables, and I Still couldn't F'ing read them....

The School in England have mostly been going downhill, the exams getting easier as the years have gone on.
Ma was a teacher for years in England, and a lot of her friends are still there, having worked in the English system.

I personally, feel that when corporal punishment went out, and the teachers couldn't do ANYTHING to punish the kids, it got out of hand.
The parents wouldn't punish the child because it was "the schools job" to keep him in check at school. Basically, school has become a day-care centre for some...

I stillcan't do basic grammar in English or French, due to the fact that when I came over here, I missed the teaching gramar in Endgland, and while I was learning to understand french, I missed out on the basics of French grammar too....

Thank god Grammar isn't worth sh*t anymore....

If it was me, I'd bring back borstalls, and send the little sh*ts there. The only problem would be the same problems we had when we shut them down. Abuse.

The kids need a "beacon of light" to inspire them, and space exploration could be it, except only like one in a million could become an astronaught, so they are all "Got no future...." like back in the 70's.....

edit : I only started reading really when I was 12 and got my first Stephen King book of short stories, the first book with more than 20-odd pages (and not aimed at the 6-8 years olds, my Ma's class group), Skeleton Crew
School NEVER got me into reading. Looking back i'm surprised about how relaxed they were...

[Evildead666]

My one saving grace was my passion for computers, which was a 'home' based sort of schooling....
In school they taught us about Winchester drives and stuff, never even knew they existed, since we were already on 286's by then.....

[Brian Ellis]

My one saving grace was my passion for computers, which was a 'home' based sort of schooling....

Computers, when I was at school? They were called slide rules or guessing sticks.



This is what they looked like. Strangely, I still have one on my desk, although I never use it. This was a development of Napier's bones, originally a series of bones, whose length were in logarithmic progression. putting the 2 bone and the 3 bone, for example, on the logarithmic scale showed the answer to be 6. They were just a simple application of logarithms, to which we were introduced in first form of the senior school (age 10-11). For the anecdote, John Napier was the son of a patrician family in Edinburgh. He "invented" the decimal point about 1600 and logarithms shortly thereafter. He was born and lived in a keep called originally Merchiston castle, later tower, built to protect the family treasures from English marauders. This keep was about 200 m up Colinton Road from the upper gate of the school I went to. We almost revered Napier as a mathematical demi-god. The name was changed from Merchiston castle to tower, because a very expensive and snobbish private school rented the castle in the mid-19th century and changed its name to Merchiston Castle School. It later moved 3 or 4 km down Colinton Road to its own purpose-built campus but retained the name. This caused a lot of confusion between the school and the original castle, so Edinburgh council decided to call it tower when they founded Napier University in the grounds of the keep.

[Dr Mordrid]

We used an abacus in elementary school and a slide rule in high school. That elementary school was also a one-roomer - each grade had it's own row. Advantage: younger kids who were a leg up could listen to the upper-el's lessons. Teacher took that into her lesson plans. We even had ink wells and real slate blackboards

Lutheran school next to the church.

[Mehen]

X and y where numbers between 1 and 12 when i was in elementary. iirc we started in grade 2 or 3.

We started them in Grade 3. I knew them in Grade 1