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)?
I did all the math thru calculus in college because it was required. Never used anything above basic math in my career in IT or in normal life. Total waste of time.. the courses students need are in statistics, personal finance, and investing. Or just focus on basic literacy so they read and learn themselves. When at least a third of SC students coming out of high school can’t read, it doesn’t matter if they can do a quadratic equation.
I did the opposite. I took it all in high school, and was therefore exempt from taking it in college. So taking algebra a year late didn’t hold me back — although in order to get to calculus, I took three math courses in my senior year: Algebra 5 (Hawaii counted the courses by semester, so Algebra II was called Algebra III and IV, and I was taking an extra semester past that), analytical geometry and either calculus or pre-cal; I forget which.
I forget whether I did that by testing out or not. I think Memphis State just accepted my transcript or something.
By the way, and I know you’ll reject this entirely, but kids are expected to take these courses for a nunber of reasons. First, applying your standard, I’m guessing most kids have no idea what they will be doing the rest of their lives, so they need a good grounding in a variety of areas — including especially the ones that don’t interest them, since their brains evidently need some workout in those areas. Second, education isn’t about job training, unless you’re attending a vocational school. It’s about preparing you to function as a citizen in a complicated world, and possessing enough information about a broad spectrum of topics that you have understanding of things far beyond what you get up and grind away at all day in an office or workshop.
Of course, we all enjoy the joke from the movie “Peggy Sue Got Married.” You ever see that? It’s about a woman of about 40 who gets transported back in time to her high school years. When her Algebra II teacher asks her to explain why she was doodling during a test, she says confidently, “Well, uh, Mr. Snelgrove, I happen to know that in the future I will not have the slightest use for algebra. And I speak from experience.”
Of course, with math it’s more than likely true for most people. I don’t ever use anything more complicated than the very simplest “solving for x” and geometric calculations when I’m trying to figure out how much lumber I need to build a bookcase or something.
I remember that in analytical geometry, we learned to work with such odd, 3D shapes as a sort of saddle-looking thing with varying parabolas one way and hyperbolas in another. I thought those were cool, but I’d have no idea how to express them now. You have to practice that stuff. But I’m glad to know that I at least gave that part of my brain a workout, and succeeded at it when I needed to…
I may not have been clear. I only took calculus in college because it was required for my C.S. degree — I did all the rest in high school. I also had my first statistics class in college and wondered why I had to waste so much time in high school on trigonometry instead.
Algebra isn’t some magic tool that can teach kids to think… it’s no different than doing a crossword puzzle or a Sudoko in terms of thinking skills. We make it required simply because it always been required.. there’s no attempt to try something different.
And, I repeat, if you can’t read or write by the time you leave high school, your education was wasted on things that won’t matter. My daughter is a high school teacher and the number of kids who simply cannot read or do even basic math like fractions in the 11th grade is a direct indictment of the system.
OK, yeah, I misunderstood you.
But on that last point… is it the system or what these kids bring to the system because of other factors in their lives?
Whichever, please pass on my thanks and admiration to your daughter for taking on this challenge. I don’t think I could do it. I often say there’s one thing I could never do, and that’s sales. But I should probably say “two things,” and add teaching school…
Actually, there are probably lots of other things, if I think harder about it.
In my youth, I thought I could do anything, and I just chose to be a newspaper editor because I liked it. I don’t have that sort of exaggerated confidence anymore. There are lots of things I lack the skills for, and I’m not just talking about playing for the Red Sox…
By the way, going back to what Doug said here: “And, I repeat, if you can’t read or write by the time you leave high school, your education was wasted on things that won’t matter.”
Well, yeah, and I’d go farther — if you can’t read and write, you can’t learn those other things anyway. Certainly not English or history or science or geography. Not even the math, unless you don’t need the word problems or the written explanations of the mathematical processes. I suppose special texbooks could be written that are all diagrams and numbers.
But… and someone far more versed in the brain and education would have to comment here… if you can’t read and write in your own language, how could read or write equations? And how could you read music — which I suppose is simpler than written language, but it’s too complicated for me, because I may be able to find the G above middle C, but I don’t have the muscle memory to instataneously hit that note when I see it.
But all this may be babbling nonsense, because I don’t understand how learning those things works. I even have trouble understanding certain processes involving the English language… but I still got an A in linguistics this spring. Or did I mention that before?
I couldn’t get that analytical geometry 3d graph that I mentioned earlier (in the last graf of this comment) out of my mind, so I looked it up and found that it’s called a hyperbolic parabaloid.
It’s somewhere between this figure and this one. Although I think the one in my textbook was in black and white…
See, I can still remember stuff I learned in school 55 years ago, but if it’s in math, I have to describe it with words — such as “looked like a saddle.”
But now that I’ve looked that up, I can tell you the equation being illustrated (or at least partially illustrated) is z=x2−y2.
Ask me in five minutes, though, and I’ll have forgotten that. Being a word guy, I’ll fall back on “saddle.”
And from calculus, I remember a problem that involved calculating how long it would take to fill up a curved swimming pool of varying depths with a hose of a certain diameter flowing at a stated rate. I don’t have the slightest idea how to do that, but it had something to do with “related rates.” I think…
From a story in The Atlantic today:
It’s worse for the young. Fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have slid for the past decade. From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent.
…
But we’re going to expect these kids to do algebra?
No, we’re not. And I admit to a guilty conscience, because when I write something like this post, I’m being rather insular, or perhaps you’d say, class-specific.
My subject — to oversimplify, “Is it better to take your algebra in the 8th or the 9th grade?” — is one for a certain subgroup of the population. That is, the people who take it for granted they’re going to college, and know they’ve got to take algebra sometime.
Well, that’s just a bit over a third of the population, which is something those of us who are academically fortunate (to that degree, anyway) have to remind ourselves of frequently…