When I attended Karr Junior High School in New Orleans for my 7th and 8th grades, standardized testing had me on the college-prep track, along with a lot of my friends at the time.
But not one of us took algegra in the 8th grade. We weren’t allowed to. Everyone had to wait until the 9th. The thing is, I was no longer living there in the 9th.
That year, which my Dad spent in the mangrove swamps of IV Corps in Vietnam, I attended Bennettsville High School (an institution that, like the once-magnificent State newspaper building, has vanished from the Earth). We stayed there with my grandparents while my Dad was at war.
And in B’ville, the most academically inclined kids had taken algebra in the 8th grade, when I was taking plain “math” (and frankly, not doing too well at it). So I took algebra in the 9th with the cohort of kids who were also probably headed to college, but were not overeager to get there.
This will surprise some of you whose experience of South Carolina public schools has come after real integration came to the state in 1970. That’s when all the seg academies cropped up, and from then on white voters became gradually less and less invested (monetarily and in terms of giving a damn whether the public schools succeeded or not). I arrived at BHS three years before that happened, and things were in many ways the way they had been when my mother attended the older BHS downtown. All the middle (and upper) class white folks did what they could to support the Green Gremlins (easily the best and most original mascot name of all the schools I attended).
Also, economically, Bennettsville was a far more prosperous place than it is now. That helped.
Anyway, at that point South Carolina was ahead of Lousiana in math, in spite of all those free textbooks Huey Long passed out during the Depression. Still, only those kids assessed as having the skill were taking algebra in the 8th.
But suppose you see your entire community as the most academically advanced in the nation? What happens if you try to prove how wicked smaht all your kids are? (Although in Cambridge, they probably don’t say it that way, but leave that to the Southies.)
Apparently, this happens:
Cambridge made all eighth-graders take algebra. It went so poorly that 60 percent of students will have to retake it.
In other words, living near Harvard Yard, or even MIT, did not automatically endow children with outstanding math skills.
Perhaps they were skilled in other ways. You know how there are word people and number people? Maybe some of them repeating algebra will someday write the Great American Novel. Or become awesome auto mechanics (who can also be found in Cambridge). Different strokes. Also, even if kids have the same inclinations, their brains develop at different rates.
The Globe story contains a lot of fingerpointing, with some teachers charging (anonymously) that the administration rushed the rollout of this experiment, and and administrators saying no we didn’t.
The larger issue, of course, is whether all kids should be forced to learn at the same rate as those who are more gifted in what the Brits call “maths.” This seems doubtful to me, and in this passage the story backs me up:
Other districts and at least two states have tried offering Algebra I to all or most eighth-graders, and studies of those efforts have found negative results for less well-prepared students….
Secondary school is when you start individualizing education according to children’s personal talents and interests. It’s not the time to make them proceed at the same rates in every possible direction.
Anyway, thoughts? And what was your experience with math in school? Did that help or hurt? And do you recommend tailoring the curriculum to each individual student (as public schools have traditionally done, to the extent possible), or expected everyone to keep up on everything at the same rate (which trends more toward the small private school approach)?
