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Is California going to lower the standard of maths education in public schools?
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I personally believe the level of maths has to increase a lot more in schools out here and to be competitive with the education that the rest of the world is getting, and given how much of our future of our children and of our civilization is based on skills like maths and engineering, lowering the standards doesn't sound like the right way to go at all. So would love to get some more perspective on it
Mark Smithivas
@msmithivas · 0:50
Hi, Arish, and thank you for posting this. I had heard about this because someone who is a prominent tech person in Silicon Valley posted about this a couple of weeks ago, and I haven't had a chance to really look deeply into this. I'm also not sure if I can read the WSJ article because it's behind a paywall. But my biases is that I generally feel they are leaning or biased in certain ways around education
Tim Ereneta
@Tim · 1:04
This is hardly any kind of objective reporting. I am aware of the changes in the California mathematical framework. I haven't dive Dove Divin have not read through it yet. I am working with colleagues at the University to see its impact, but I would say that I would not trust the messenger in this case
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 2:19
Kids are changing, and for them to not be able to pursue their subject of choice, whatever the subject may be, if it's math, it's math, if it's literature, it's literature. But I think taking away the ability to pursue advanced courses in the name of fairness, I think for all will have parents
I think that might be helpful if you don't want to actually read the whole curriculum yourself. I'm also going to add a picture of one of the replies from that credit, which calls out the fact that the inequity is not really fair to kind of penalize smart students because we do the same things in sports in JV and other sports. Kind of the more gifted athletes are encouraged and nobody is asking for all athletes and to kind of get the same playing time and everybody will be treated equally there
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 2:35
So at a time when private industry is talking about the need for improving education standards, so they do not have to go looking outside of the country for high skilled workers. And at a time when the President is talking about investing in public school systems to improve the US standards, and he's earmarked quite a bit for this in his infrastructure plan
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 0:51
And all of this comes with a lot of math. And so to say that we will not offer the option for those kids that are interested in the subject to pursue it at greater depth. It's just plain horrifying
Tim Ereneta
@Tim · 4:15
I do think that the idea to not give children advanced tracking in math in junior high school is certainly a topic worth debating. There's evidence from some school districts that slowing down the pace of math in junior high leads to increased enrollment in AP courses and even calculus in high school. But I haven't seen all the data on that. There's just some suggestions. I will say I was looking in the Los Angeles Times today that yesterday the state Commission actually removed part of those recommendations
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 2:07
But these are some of the concerns that we have as parents, which is we want to make sure that our children can pursue the subjects that are of interest to them, the depth that they wish to pursue and with the support of the system. So when it comes to, for example, this accelerated learning program that he just talked about, what happens once he's covered the course material in a shorter period of time, then what does he do with the rest of his time?
Mark Smithivas
@msmithivas · 4:34
So all of this is not even talking about math, which is a whole subject to itself. I like to think of math as there's computational thinking, and there's a lot of different ways of being mathematical and working with numbers. That's not just advanced calculus, for example, statistics or financial knowledge. Anyway, thank you for listening to my rant, and I really could talk about education all day. So thanks for listening
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 4:24
So it's very stressful on young kids. But the thing that I've observed is what happened was by the time we entered high school and College, we were very resilient when it came to stress. I'm not saying that people didn't buckle, but for the most part because we dealt with these kinds of academic rigorous stress. Throughout our years, we built a certain level of resilience that I don't find today in my kids, my kids easily buckle under stress
Things have to be done and you do it and you will try to do it as best as you can. And studying a lot of different subjects in school, even the ones you don't like builds up that resilience for you to face the a real world down the line. I hope these arguments make sense, so I am definitely on to the side of this one
Mark Smithivas
@msmithivas · 4:12
So again, I think we all want our kids to have a love of learning and curiosity. And I do believe if we ask kids for too much traditional education, it can have a detrimental effect. Getting back to the original topic of this, which was about math education and some California standards. If we want to say that we want our kids to have balanced education, exposure to different things, stresses that are caused by homework and tests
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 1:13
I really don't know what the longterm effects of this policy will be, but as a parent, I'm obviously worried and I think that's a fair position to have. I guess it's like the public health thing. I guess at some point I have to just bow to the wisdom of experts taking this decision and hope that they're doing the right thing. But I am going to go do some more research on this, so stay tuned
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