Sea Skimmer wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:The present trend is toward the Common Core standards, which bypass the problem of Republicans hating federally mandated curriculum by just getting every damn state to sign onto the program, at least for math and reading. So far it's 40/50, including Pennsylvania.
Common Core is compatible with 'traditional' math course progression.
Yeah well that would just be the thing, Common Core just says what you should learn, not how it is taught. Its somewhat specific for elementary and middle school grades in dictating certain subjects per grade, but high school is left wide open. The rest is still left up to the specific districts, and even specific schools. Not that I completely think one system should be imposed, but I just have very little faith in the ability of educators to sort out buzzwords from rational methods on such a distributed basis, and plenty of nations do fine with vastly more centralized school systems.
Part of the problem is just the sheer multi-level chaos of the reform system. There's the actual teachers, there's middle management, there's upper management. There's politicians who get bonus points from idiot posturing ("Our schools are failing! We must do something! And this is something! So we must do it!"). There's private contractors who swoop in promoting crank and non-crank systems (usually sincerely), there's these
absolutely enormous 800-pound gorilla private donors (think Gates Foundation) that will give your school system millions of dollars but
only if you change your curriculum to adopt whatever they've decided "best practices" are this year.
It's a mess. This is a great way to create a system where no sensible idea is allowed to survive for more than five years without getting crushed flat under an avalanche of semi-random change-for-the-sake-of-change.
The system gets even less stable when you go "high-stakes" and fire huge numbers of people at once; while there are certainly people in a big school district who won't be missed, when the numbers you're planning to remove in the next few years start creeping up toward Stalinist purge territory, it just makes things more chaotic than they have to be.
That said, most districts are on a normalish curriculum most of the time; it's just that these fads can keep shambling along for a long time before someone does their homework comprehensively enough to get rid of them. And the political atmosphere ever since No Child Left Behind* makes everyone very eager to find the golden hammer that will solve all their problems.
*("100% of children will be at grade level by 2014! 100% of ESOL kids will be fluent in English! OR ELSE! Apply for your waivers NOW!" and yes these are actually standards that were written into the bill back in 2001)
Edi wrote:So, looks like the math education in the US is ridiculously slowed down and spread out.
Back when I was in elementary and high school, algebra started on 7th grade. After 9th grade you either go to grades 10-12 or to vocational school. If you take the high school (grades 10-12) route, you can choose between long math (11 courses) or short math (7 courses). In the long math, you get more algebra and trigonometry and such in the first few courses, with more advanced calculus stuff toward the end. By the time you are through, you should be able to do derivations and basic integrals without any problems. Don't know why, but of those two I always found the integral side much easier.
A significant fraction of kids are on basically this route- but it's not the
standard. Among other things because not all the kids will pass it. Schools in the US today aren't usually afraid to hold kids back in math, but when you need good and steadily rising test scores to survive as an institution, you can't afford to have too many kids who are below their designated grade level.
On the one hand that's pressure to try harder. On the other, it's pressure to define "grade level" downward. So algebra gets pushed back so that you can use Grade 7 and 8 to be
really sure the kids know how to do basic arithmetic.
Students who do well on placement exams get 8th grade Algebra I (a large fraction) or 7th grade Algebra I (a smaller fraction that includes me).
You need more math and earlier and you need better teachers. It helps here that the teacher education and training system mostly weeds out those who are unable to teach. In high school a teacher must actually have a master's degree in his or her chosen field and in most other institutions the teachers and lecturers must hold a relevant degree in the field they are teaching that is one level higher than the institution where they teach provides.
Math teachers do not need a master's degree
in mathematics, and this would be useless to them. Honestly, they need at most a sophomore-level college education in math. What they really need is an education in HOW to teach math, or very very good instincts.
Both can be tested for, but a degree in "math education" is not the same as a degree in "mathematics." Group theory and partial differential equations will not help you; spending two years as a student teacher trying to get it right in a classroom and learning how not to do it by watching burned-out old fools will.
When I was in high school it wasn't difficult; it was boring. Not because math is boring, but because the coursework was easy and the curriculum kept repeating stuff it had already taught us.
