I did volunteer tutoring at a community college a few years ago–non-credit math classes for those who didn’t pass the placement exam for Math 100. It sure seemed like a waste of time for those students to have to take the Algebra classes “learning” things that they won’t ever think about again. I decided I would have a greater impact tutoring elementary school students instead. This is the other pole.

I don’t think we are addressing the real cause of why so many students are failing math placement exams at the college level; in my state it was 84% in 2007! If we had math entrance exams for middle school (not something I am endorsing), we would see the same problem; in my state, 63% of fourth graders and 75% of eighth graders were below grade level on the NAEP Math test. The majority of elementary school teachers are poor at math. We need to push for math specialists in elementary schools and open up math to a far more students.

He called the forthcoming Common Core math standards “the last, best hope” for meaningful math reform.

Dan, was your impression that he liked those or was he using them as an example of the old school.

Was there a set of standards he suggested using as a model?

I hope people are at least mostly tongue-in-cheek about testing legislators … I mean, if we want to just say “stop mandating standardized tests”, I’m all for it, but let’s not doom our students to receiving only enough math knowledge to be a *politician*.

*shudder*

My husband went to Boalt Hall. Law school is the top pick for those on the policy and politics track, which was why he went there. He’s also a math-phobe claiming an inability to do math once he got to fractions. The only math required for law school admissions at that time (LSAT) was a section of logic problems similar to those you find in Dell Puzzle magazines. It was all logic, no numbers or symbols.

One lovely spring day in Berkeley the students were “off-task” in some truly boring first year class (Civil Procedure, Tax Law, or Contracts). The teacher asked what they were all doing there at one of the top ranked law schools in the country if they weren’t interested in law? One student raised his hand to share this nugget, ‘I didn’t have to do math.”

That will be a super majority of elected officials. If they went to school beyond their Bachelors (likely in PoliSci, with just a glossing of statistics), they went to law school, and they went there to become a politician, and because they didn’t have to do math.

We’re still trying to make everybody good at everything. That wasn’t the model for most of history. We accepted that some people like and do better at some things than others. We encouraged some sort of foundational skills in all areas and then…let them advance and excel further in the things that interested them, whether it was math or science (providing the motivation for math too) or literature or basket-weaving or inventing or…

Then again, perhaps this is 3.5 months of middle school math in a high poverty, inner city school speaking. Right now, I’m most interested in developing *thinking* skills. And by that, I’m talking about basics of thinking: taking a minute to picture the problem, or really understand what the question is asking, etc. Harder, of course, when many kids are reading below grade level by several grades and their ability to read aloud is not an indication of their comprehension, which is usually lower. Of course, I’m just as concerned with their scores on the state test, by which we’ll all be judged. The thinking skills certainly can’t hurt them on that, but there are those who would prefer not muddying the water with too much thought.

Sigh.

i like elissa’s idea. i’m there.
at least as long as we’re still making a standard curriculum. (i’m bent on kids making their own. i know – i know – just a bent i have.)

kate is smart – we need to figure that out.
the power we now have access to via networking – can’t that make a big enough impression – to enough of those people we are going to need to impress?

If the question is why algebra 2 classes have a verb focus. My guess would be that algebra are the foundational skills for the more interesting application questions in calculus.

For a large number of students, Algebra 2 is the end of their mathematical careers. Shouldn’t it be looked at as more than just foundational? And can’t the course be interesting enough on its own, rather than just be a prerequisite for calculus?

@Riggins Have you seen Arthur Benjamin’s recent TED talk about changing math education?