That still existed in the 1990s (just in a different way).
My brother and I fast-tracked high school in Canada back when they still had OACs in Ontario. It was not rare to leap a year forward by doing extra classes during the summer (you would then graduate one year ahead of time). Jumping two years would be rare though as that would necessitate actually jumping one year forward.
email this morning: " Alleviate Your Teacher Shortage with Virtual Teachers"
Stride can go eat an actual bag of dicks.
It seems to me that students that are able to thrive with virtual teachers could probably manage with no teachers at all.
I have no data to back up that impression.
gaaaaaa, mastery grading/learning is going to be the death of me (and/or my colleagues and/or my students) :headagainstthewall: our LMS isnât quite equipped to do it properly, and everyone seems to have a different definition of what it even is
For the non-teachers: In a traditional grading scale, you do assignments, points get tossed in a single bucket, and then at the end of the marking period you blend up the contents of the bucket, and the single number that is the average of the bucket is your grade. What mastery grading tries to do instead is assess standards/topics separately â so each standard/topic has its own bucket â and then form a composite mastery score which is then scaled to a letter grade, basically an average of all the buckets. So a mastery grade measures actual learning progress rather than just overall work completion. It saves a kid who is actually making good learning progress on a majority of the standards/topics from otherwise technically being labeled a failure on a traditional grading scale.
If youâre having trouble personally you can definitely ask some actudorks for help. Calculating averages is like, our whole sad-ass purpose in life.
When doing grading do you enter numbers into a spreadsheet or something?
Itâs not the calculation thatâs killing me. Itâs that our report card system apparently only ever pulls information from the traditional gradebook, and basically completely ignores the mastery gradebook. So essentially, the way weâre implementing mastery so far is just as a fancy data collection tool that doesnât really give us that much different information vs. the traditional gradebook information would anyway. Which is not what mastery grading is. In a way, itâs supposed to be a way of life, not just a data collection tool.
While I was looking up information about the worthlessness of PISA type tests, I also saw a rant about how thereâs a âwar on Algebra 2â (which apparently started in California) with complaints about teaching things like Data Science as an alternative to Algebra 2. There is plenty to complain about with math reformism/modernism, but Iâm not sure that this is the best trench to dig into.
When Ohio (very much not a âblueâ state) introduced Algebra 2 alternate pathways a couple years or so ago, I was actually thrilled. From my perspective at a dropout recovery and prevention school, many of our kids are on career paths that wonât necessarily take them to traditional 4-year college. Which means that they likely wonât need to follow the traditional college prep math path that would take them through Algebra 2. This is consistent with research I read about when doing classes for my business license (which I also have) that surveyed employers and found that most donât really use math skills beyond Algebra 1, maybe Geometry in some cases.
So to me, framing it as a âwar on Algebra 2â means youâre probably clinging to the not only unhelpful but also potentially damaging tired old view that when you say âcollege and career readinessâ you really mean âcollege or youâre worthless.â Instead, we need to do more to get people to think of it as just âcareer readinessâ - some careers need college and some donât, so itâs already all covered.
Eh, you need to learn more math than youâll ultimately need to know, to compensate for the stuff that youâre naturally going to forget.
When you first take Algebra I itâs hard. By the time youâre finished with Algebra II, the Algebra I concepts have been reinforced so many times that itâs easy.
So if kids need to know Algebra I, then itâs quite reasonable to insist that they learn Algebra II. Twenty years later they will have no idea what the difference is between a parabola and a hyperbola, but they will be able to solve a single-variable equation for X no problem, and maybe even a system of two equations and two unknowns.
Ok, maybe not YOU because Iâm on a board of mathematical savants, but when normal people, and certainly people who are at risk of dropping out of high school, learn Algebra IâŚ
There are a ton of math topics that we teach because itâs the way that it has always been done, not because it is either pedagogically the right thing to do or the most useful thing to do. And then if we change, people get upset because it isnât the way they were done things. When I was a kid, we were taught long multiplication and long division mechanically, with no clue as to why it works (I ended up not actually learning long division until 7th grade when I was doing it with polynomials). My kids are taught why long multiplication works, as well as how to do it, which I think is a step up but angers many parents b/c the kids arenât drilled enough to do it mechanically as well as we could.
Likewise, for most students I would argue that basic statistics and practical math is more useful than a deep knowledge of trig identities and calculus. People should be able to look at basic facts about a pandemic and realize that what doctors are saying makes sense. Newspaper editors should be able to understand why Nate Silver and the NYT were able to look at the same 2016 polling data, and have Silver correctly give Trump a 1/3 chance of winning while the NYT incorrectly assumed independence between states and gave Trump a < 1% chance of winning.
Side rant: Years ago I was teaching an upper level stats class at a top 20 university. On day 1, I solved an interesting problem, wrote the answer to 4 decimal places on the board. Asked them to do the same thing with different numbers for homework. Got 38 different answers from 40 students, all rounded to 4 decimal places. 3 correct, 37 of them rounded wrong. I couldnât figure out how there existed that many ways of incorrectly rounding. This is a skill that math and stat majors should have.
Rationalizing the denominator comes to mind for me. I get that itâs easier to wrap the head around a fraction if it at least has an integer denominator. But itâs often taught as âyou have to do this or elseâ rather than âit makes your life easier if you do this.â
I also bristle at calling a fraction in which the numerator happens to be greater than the denominator âimproper.â I get that âfractionâ is most useful as a word when 0 < fraction < 1. But calling fraction > 1 âimproperâ has always been a goofy word choice to me. I mean, itâs still a rational number.
Yeah, convincing students that they can do useful things with improper fractions was sometimes hard.
Weâd sometimes devolve into a discussion about the word âimproperâ and how it doesnât mean âwrongâ.
Also it helped that I was teaching when Titanic came out, which was marketed as having a 2 hour & 87 minute runtime (or whatever it was). Which is essentially an improper fraction. Hey⌠theyâre not wrong. That really is the run time! How much longer is Titanic than this other movie with a 2 hour & 45 minute runtime? What if it was stated as 3 hours & 27 minutes⌠how would you solve the subtraction problem?
Whatâs that? Itâs easier to do the subtraction if you have the improper fraction??? Do that then!!!
Iâve always had the impression that rationalizing the denominator was something done to make expressions easier for teachers to grade. But recently saw someone point out that it is easier to do mental approximations to fractions when the denominator is rationalized. E.g., I donât know what 1/sqrt(5) is, but 22^2 = 484, so sqrt(5) / 5 is 2.23-ish / 5, or somewhere around 0.446. (Actual numbers, sqrt(5) is 2.236 and 1/sqrt(5) is 0.447).
Not algebra, but my granddaughterâs response to my urging she take more math was to wear this t-shirt:
The thing about further education is that its very hard to communicate to people that what you are âlearningâ will make it easier for you to understand the world around you.
As the price of education has increased over the last few decades, I am increasingly seeing the narrative of âI only want to learn things that I can monetise so that I can make enough money to have a comfortable lifeâ.
This basically creates armies of people who have huge educational (critical thinking) blind spots, and who then rely on superficial google/social media commentaries to fill them.
Thatâs where Iâm a little torn. Part of me wants to be all #getoffmylawn young people have no intellectual curiosity anymore and lamenty of the fact that the instant gratification TikTok generation only wants to do things that are easy and/or useful in the moment. You should learn something because it is good to learn in general and good to learn that thing in particular, not because as you said it can be monetized.
But part of me is also realistic especially with my typical kiddo about where they actually are now, and meet them where they are now and go from there. I canât make their zone of proximal development be where I want it to be/think it should be just by sheer force of will.
The need for instant gratification is a learned trait. Mainly from watching screens as extremely young people. becomes an addiction in some.
Maybe the zillenials are more ADD, but itâs not like every 19th century schoolboy mastered physics, spoke 10 languages, memorized history books, and could play piano concertos.
Learning is boring and hard.
All the ones we read about do!
Well, we educate everyone so that those few do not fall through cracks.
And even that attempt doesnât always work.
Yep, itâs easier for mental arithmetic if the denominator is a whole number.
Iâm so old that I did math before calculators. Itâs also easier to look up sqrt(5) in a table then divide that decimal number by a whole number.
Iâd guess that is the reason for the rule. Which kind of fits âitâs the way weâve always done itâ category.
