(no subject)

[cahn]

WELP my kids have been in school... three?... weeks and I have a rant!

I happened to ask A. about his math class today because I'd heard from a friend that A. had been placed in math class with her kid and our conversation made me curious about what math they were doing. A. told me that they were doing more complicated multiplication, and he further told me, in his calm but insistent and somewhat annoyed voice (that kid really does have superior emotional regulation) that his teacher had said he'd done a problem wrong and that he'd really done it right.

So I asked him to write it out for me. This is what he wrote:

(99*497) + (1*497) = __ *497 =

He further explained that the right side of the first equality was his explanation of how to do the problem, not what his teacher said. (He knew that in the blank space went 99 + 1 = 100, and then he could do the problem.) He said his teacher said that was wrong because there were parentheses, so he should do the multiplication of 99 and 497 because that was inside the parentheses. ("But it works!" he said about his method.)

(I think maybe she was trying to see whether he could multiply 99 by 497 -- which I don't think he knows how to do -- but then why not just give him that problem?)

Now, my children are famously unreliable narrators in the sense of being very good at leaving out context (this is the same child who said that his teacher takes balls from him, and we later learned that it was a game that his teacher was playing with all the kids during recess that involved them grabbing balls away from each other) so I should keep my mind open that it might be a misinterpretation or that additional context might make it okay. But... I really rather don't think there's additional context here that makes it okay. I mean, I think the additional context is that (I know from school gossip) his math teacher wasn't originally hired as a math teacher and got pulled into the job at the last minute, because you know, staffing.

We of course told him he had done it correctly and cleverly, and I am additionally pretty happy that he understood he had done it right even though the teacher had told him it was wrong. But ARGH. If I didn't have to work full-time right now (I have to work full-time right now) I would SO be spending some time teaching in our school, because they SO need help with lower-grade math. (Upper-grade math at this school has a lovely awesome teacher. Lower-grade math has been foxed by lack of good math staffing for YEARS. Fortunately for E, the lower-grade math problem happened literally the year after she went to upper-grade math.)

Comments

[cahn]

math education can't be left to the mathematicians (because every time they get their hands on it, the result is something that everyone hates

...but then again when you leave it to the education folks they come up with great plans like teaching physics in the 9th grade (someone -- maybe crystalpyramid? -- talked about doing a heuristic physics class and that sounds OK, but our district does AP Physics in 9th grade and GAH NO) and then there's the New California Mathematics Framework which is... not good.

And heh, I like Common Core actually! I have specific problems with some of the implementation details, but I like a lot of things about it conceptually -- like you say, what the curriculum is actually for. (One of the things that is so great about Art of Problem Solving/Beast Academy -- which does follow Common Core -- is that it's all designed by actual math people.)

We live in a high COL place too and I honestly don't understand how teachers live here unless they have a spouse who has a better-paying job. If I got paid as much to teach as I get for my current job, I'd try teaching... but otherwise it doesn't seem very attractive!

[crystalpyramid]

NO NO NO AP PHYSICS IN 9TH GRADE WHAAAT

(Also I graded AP Physics 1 the first year they ran it and it looked like a shitshow.)

[cahn]

MY FEELINGS EXACTLY

I think it's a district thing under our awful superintendent. I found out just a couple of weeks ago from a coworker who also teaches a class in computer science at one of the local high schools and whose daughter is a sophomore. She is a smart kid and her dad is obviously technical and she took AP Physics, as directed, in the 9th grade and did fine in the class relative to her peers. And got a 2 on the AP. BECAUSE FRESHMEN HAVE NO BUSINESS TAKING THE PHYSICS AP. (Her dad reported to me that now she has a complex about physics. I ASK YOU. WHY.)

[(Anonymous)]

I mean it's a relatively new, more conceptual, Physics AP and I'm pretty sure the College Board's entire plan with it was to market it much more widely so they could make more money. But when we grading it we were very troubled by how almost everyone who took it had no idea what they were doing and failed. They've been running it for almost a decade now but I'm kind of skeptical that anything substantial has changed. Also kind of skeptical about whether colleges actually accept it for credit, so is the only point to give kids a complex??? And make money. And make money.

I have no regrets about leaving the school where I taught AP Physics C, which is, in contrast, a perfectly reasonable class. Especially the part where nobody is trying to get me to spend a week locked in a room in Kansas City grading things.

[cahn]

Gahhhhhh. Yeah, I don't really see how a college would accept it for credit?? Argh! Also it seems like it's just mechanics now?? Which doesn't make any sense to me either??

I took AP Physics C back in the day and thought it was extremely reasonable! And it actually meant something in terms of college mastery!

[crystalpyramid]

I suspect that "percent of students taking AP classes" is a statistic that districts like to boast about or get ranked by, and "percent of students scoring a 3 or higher on AP exams" is not used often enough as a sanity check.

[cahn]

Oh nooooo that makes so much sense.