hdctambien

In highschool, at least, you have to somehow elevate the meaning of your subject to be more interesting than the movie theatre/concert/video game system they have in their pocket.

Kids will make eye contact with you and nod along as you teach, but they are wearing air pods and can't hear you over their spotify playlist.

Im not sure I can be more interesting than Taylor Swift, Call of Duty, MrBeast, and texting with friends all at the same time. You need the student to be a little bit receptive to even have the opportunity to convince them what you are teaching is relevant to them.

To be fair, the applications of geometry that most people might end up using in real life are going to be boring to a 15 year old.

How many paving stones do I need to buy for the walkway I'm building in my backyard?

How far from the top of the roof should I start attaching this gutter so that I still have roof to nail it to 30 feet later?

How big of a ladder do I need to get to that branch I want to cut down in that tall tree?

Will I be able to get this couch up the stairs, around the corner, and through the door?

What do you do when both A and B score a 95 and there is only one job?

That's what DEI solves for. Not "higher a lesser candidate," but "when both candidates are equal, use diversity of the company when making the final decision"

If you interview 10 people for one job opening, you have to pick one of them. If 5 of them pass the technical interview you start filtering them on other non-technical things. "Would I like to hang out with this person", "were they funny", "do they have similar hobbies to me?", "did they go to the same school as me?"

Whoever you pick, for whatever reason, didn't take an opportunity from the other 4 qualified people.

Heck, my wife would have a pile of resumes to go through and she only read them until she found 5 people she wanted to call. If you were "the next" person in the pile it was just bad luck that you didn't get called. The people in the pile before you didn't take your opportunity.

Interviewing is hard. People don't have a "technical skill" stat that you can sort by and just take the best one. People interviewing people is a terrible way to decided if someone will be a good fit, but it's the only way we have.

Often you end up with a bunch of people that you feel are equally qualified and you just have to pick one. If you use "dei" to pick rather than "this person was in the same fraternity as me" that's just a different side of the same coin. The difference is that before DEI programs, the people that passed the "post technical" part of the interview were the people that were most similar to the interviewers (that's human nature) and the interviewers were mostly white guys.

Rather than taking away opportunities, DEI takes away the ability for white people to "always win ties"

I think you may have missed a bit of their point... a plex server is a video hosting server.. like a personal Netflix. They wouldn't push their code to their Plex server because it's not a server that accepts code pushes.

I agree. Algebra based Statistics is one of the things that makes people say "Math is a religion". There is a lot of "just trust me" in statistics when you don't know calculus.

I suppose you could switch Probability & Statistics to "Just Enough Calculus" & Statistics to make it a less religious experience... but that also sort of defeats the "nobody really uses Calculus" mentality.

I don't think you'll find too many Math teachers that disagree with you. There are a lot of things that schools should do.

I'm curious to think through what a second track like this would look like.

Assuming the "normal" 8-12 track is:

Algebra 1 -> Geometry -> Algebra 2 -> Trig/PreCalc -> Calculus

I think you need Algebra 1... maybe I'm too stuck in the old ways.. but at some point you need to understand what a variable is and how to "solve for x". How to plot points, read and interpret a graph. Identify patterns in series of numbers, etc.. Call it what you want, but without the content of Algebra 1 you're going to have a hard time communicating ideas in the language of Mathematics. And these kids also have a Physics graduation requirement where they will need to at least solve f=ma.

Geometry is usually the "proofs" class. You're only really learning geometry so you can write proofs. You could plug&play that with a Discrete Math/Sets/Boolean/Logic class. I think Geometry is conceptually easier to understand as a 14/15 year old because you can "see" that the proofs work. Truth tables are kind of visual, but still a little more abstract than triangles and rectangles.

Combinatorics/Probability is already a half year course that's usually combined with the half year course of Statistics. I can see non-AP versions of this class split into two full year classes.

I imagine this would be something like what you're thinking of:

Algebra 1 -> Discrete Math -> Probability -> Statistics

The only thing standing in the way of something like this is politicians (state boards of education) and startup costs. For example, the graduation requirements in Texas are "4 credits of Math including Algebra, Geometry, and Algebra 2" (and the content of those classes are explicitly laid out in the TEKS). And you would also need to buy new textbooks/curriculum... which is money that schools don't really have to spend.

I think it all depends on where you went to school and possibly who noticed you while you were there.

I took 2 years of Probability and Statistics in Highschool in 1998-99 and 1999-00 at a school with 200 students. At the 4000 students school I taught at a few years ago we offered AP Probability and Statistics (had have been for at least 10 years, but probably much longer than that). In both situations, you could (and many did) take Stats without Calc.

Most times when people say "schools should teach X", many schools are (and have been) doing it (taxes, car maintenance, carpentry, gardening). Just maybe not your school ... or maybe nobody told you that it was a possibility at your school... Or maybe it's not at your school, but it is offered at another school in your district...

Or maybe it's just not offered at your school. Because there is an AP exam associated with Stats, it is fairly easy to get the class made as long as there are students that want to take the class and enough teacher slots to accommodate that. If a school is understaffed in the math department and class sizes are nearing 40, then you probably won't find a Stats class there.

select kids (perhaps based on prior performance in math classes, or overall GPA) to opt them into the class.

That's how it works now, pretty much everywhere. Your 7th grade teacher recommends you to take the 8th grade algebra class based on your performance (or, at least, their interpretation of your performance)

The question is, where do you draw the line that qualifies someone to take 8th grade algebra? Who do you let in when there is 1 seat left and 3 eligible students to fill that seat? How do you make sure that the grades you are using to determine who makes the cut are accurately measuring mathematical ability of the students and not biased in some other way?

I'm not advocating for either the California or the Dallas solution to this problem, but both those school districts have identified that letting the 7th grade teachers make this placement decisions is a problem.

Grades are a score that parents can use to compare their children to other children.

It doesn't take too many parent-teacher conferences to figure out that the parents that ask for parent-teacher conferences want to see "the line go up" and aren't necessarily concerned with their children being challenged or learning much of anything.

The squeekiest of those wheels move from parent-teacher conferences to parent-administrator conferences (and sometimes parent-lawyer-administrator conferences) and you end up with school-wide policies like failure quotas where you are not allowed to have more than 5% of your students fail your class (ie the responsibility of the students grade falls on the teacher, not the student). And that is how grades stop being a measure of a student's understanding of the material.

I dropped my wife off downtown in her car and she had the key in her purse. The car did make a weird beeping noise as I drove away, but I had no idea what it meant and I was pulling onto the highway which would have been a bad time for the car to stop driving on me.

NPR did some reporting on this a couple years ago: https://www.npr.org/2019/07/11/739860400/broken-promises-tea...

"By the department's last count, only 1% of the people who think they've made their 10 years of payments and apply for loan forgiveness are getting approved.

If you took all the people getting rejected and got them together in one place, Peterson says, you'd have "football stadiums full of nurses, firefighters, teachers, law enforcement officers that are seeking to have their debts forgiven.""

The funny thing about Learning Styles is that there isn't any data that supports it. But there are lots of studies that debunk it.

Here is a Tedx Talk about those studies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=855Now8h5Rs

This is one of the studies (that with citations to many dubunking studies) that I was assigned in my M.Ed program:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1539-6053.20...

I don't know about programming languages, but in mathematics |v| is the notation to get the length of a vector... So maybe Matlab uses that syntax?

What they didn't anticipate was how many people don't buy fruits or vegetables.

The iphone was full of killer apps at release.

The Maps app was so much better than printing MapQuest maps or trying to use the flip phone version of MapQuest.

Being able to access the real internet from anywhere was futuristic.

You could use iMessage without paying $0.10 per text?!?! Can you even imagine paying $0.10 per text (and $0.25 for every text after the first 100 per month?)

Visual voice mail was also a game changer at the time.

And you got an ipod along with all that. (The iphone was my first "big" ipod device)

That's what I did. I'm apparently in the minority. though, because I HATE it. But since I bought it digitally, I can't return it so I'm counting towards those 10M sales. I guess I'll just go back to my Game & Watch Zelda and keep playing Adventures of Link.

I also bought the Dragon Quest Builders game and hated that. It turns out I like classic RPG and action puzzler games but I don't like crafting and sandbox games. Now I know.

Kevin is doing NFT stuff these days.

It's a job like any other, so go to the school's careers page and find the listing for a job you're qualified for, and apply.

That was Steve Prefontaine's opinion, too. And it got him 4th in the Olympics.

Pacer or not, you still have to run the run and that's not nothing.

It is easier to run behind someone and match their pace than it is to lead a race. It is also easier to run faster for shorter distances. A rabbit is someone that runs a fast pace for less than the full race distance so the real racers can be pulled through the early miles and save energy for their push to the finish.

Races want runners to run fast times, because that makes them prestigious. Runners want to run fast times, for obvious reasons. So races provide rabbits which lures fast runners to those races.

I taught in a Texas district that starts high school at 9:05. I appreciated that over the 6:50 start I had in Massachusetts... but it didn't really change much for the students.

I would get up at 5am so I could run before school and I would still be getting emails from students that hadn't gone to bed yet. I don't think any of my students in TX were getting any more sleep than the students I taught in MA. They were just staying up later. But maybe on average, the student body is getting more sleep in TX than in MA ... but no way they are getting 9 hours on school nights.

A 60 year old woman (well, a 65+ yo) doesn't spend 8+ hours a day at work or have kids at home.

Would you give that money to the abused/neglected kids that social workers protect, or the parents that are abusing/neglecting them?

Who would be in charge of identifying who gets that money and managing the systems that distribute that money and would they get paid more than the social workers that got fired?

Because minimum wage is well below what it should be if you want to consider it as the line for what is and isn't exploitive.

Be careful, it sounds like you're describing Common Core Math and several states made that illegal

The existence of a calculus class doesn't stop a student from taking music courses or being in the school band. In fact, at the schools I went to/taught at most students that took Calculus were also in the band.

For the last couple decades, at least, you can take all of those classes as 4 year programs at my local, public high school. In fact, you can take most of them at the same time. As it turns out, students have more than 1 class on their schedules every year!

We also have mechanical engineering, culinary, law enforcement & forensic science, marketing & business, computer science, game design, education, ROTC, printshop, photography, we even have a class that teaches students how to do their taxes! (it is literally 2 lessons) and this is in Texas where people assume the worst about our schools.

Many people that comment here about education don't really know what happens in a school outside of their memories of going to school as a teenager. When I became a teacher and looked back at the school I went to, I was surprised at all the opportunities that were available that I either wasn't interested in, or didn't notice existed. Most things that people think "schools should teach" are actually being taught at schools.

I wish I could upvote this 100 times.

There is a world of difference between tools for learning how to code and tools for producing code.

Something students don't always realize is that their teacher doesn't need 30 copies of a program that prints "Hello, World". You are not "producing code", you are "demonstrating your understanding" of the content.

Autocomplete, autoformatting, auto-anything is harmful for the learning process. If the computer does it for you, then how do I know you know how to do it?

Once you can demonstrate that you know how to format your code properly, then those auto-tools can help you, rather than being a crutch.

Once you know "I can solve this problem by using a substring" you can use autocomplete to figure out the exact syntax for the substr() method. But if you're just looking through the auto-complete method list and clicking on things until one of them works... that's not "knowing how to program".

The AP Exam covers Java and you have less than 180 days to cover everything from "what is a variable" to inheritance, recursion, and sorting algorithms.

My school has gone back and forth with starting with Python or Java in the Pre-AP course. There are pros and cons for both options, but ultimately a language is just a language. The concepts are what is really being taught.

The difference between a math variable and a computer variable and how "x = x + 1" works can be difficult for some students to wrap their minds around. Getting students comfortable/competent with a language and then switching it mid year would be a tough ask for quite a few students.

Keep in mind, many of the students taking Computer Science in high school are not exactly the same students that would have taught themselves to program at 15 and 16. Self-taught students are easy to teach (although they provide their own challenges), but you have to approach things much differently (and often slowly) for students that don't already "think like a programmer".