Timeline for Teaching math too soon in middle school and high school
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
41 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 18, 2023 at 0:17 | answer | added | Joseph O'Rourke | timeline score: 3 | |
| Feb 17, 2023 at 23:36 | answer | added | James S. Cook | timeline score: 3 | |
| Feb 17, 2023 at 21:59 | comment | added | Rusty Core | More like a year too late. Traditional schedule is two years late. | |
| Feb 17, 2023 at 15:46 | answer | added | Justin Hancock | timeline score: 2 | |
| Feb 15, 2023 at 0:15 | comment | added | Robbie Goodwin | That's much clearer, thanks. Did you really mean 'preteens are so obnoxious'? I thought that was teens? | |
| Feb 13, 2023 at 23:23 | comment | added | B. Goddard | @RobbieGoodwin I have heard (more than once, but I don't remember where) that puberty is when the brain makes major changes. It goes from being a sponge to being logical. The reason (given) that preteens are so obnoxious is that they've developed new powers and don't think adults have them. There was something about the later one enters puberty, the better his spatial relations ability will be (which fits with the classic nerd stereotype. | |
| Feb 13, 2023 at 23:20 | comment | added | B. Goddard | @Flater No, the problem has many facets and you keep jumping from one to the other. This is why we can't fix education. There are too many mindless know-it-alls like you that won't let the adults talk. | |
| Feb 13, 2023 at 23:08 | comment | added | Robbie Goodwin | Can you say what 'puberty' might have to do with this? Is it not obvious that 'puberty' occurs within a range of at least two or three; perhaps four or five or more years? My doubt is, simply, that you're asking what anyone here knows of real research, instead of doing your own? | |
| Feb 13, 2023 at 22:25 | comment | added | Flater | @B.Goddard: If you keep conflating different problems and solutions to those individual problems, you're not going to get anywhere. This isn't about me not understanding the issue, it's about you moving the goalpost in your response (presumably unintentionally). Overfilling a curriculum, teaching something at a premature developmental stage, and torturing a child to learn something at all costs are three completely different scenarios that fail for three different reasons, and conflating them is needlessly obstructive to tackling and potentially solving them individually. | |
| Feb 13, 2023 at 22:21 | comment | added | B. Goddard | @Flater Want to explain how to cram 20 different topics into, say, 5th grade math, when there is only time for 5 and not have there be any pressure? 5th graders aren't able to learn that many topics well. You really don't understand this issue. | |
| Feb 13, 2023 at 22:17 | comment | added | Flater | @B.Goddard Excessively pushing a child past their natural ability is detrimental. I agree that the scenario you paint often does not lead to a head start. However, an early age-appropriate introduction without pressure or torture (as you put it) is reasonably likely to help the child at a later age. Again anecdotally, this is something I can attest to as my grandfather did this for both my mother and me, and we both struggled significantly less with the things we had been introduced to at an earlier stage. The issue here is one of pressure and torture, not of inability to learn. | |
| Feb 13, 2023 at 10:47 | answer | added | AnoE | timeline score: 4 | |
| Feb 13, 2023 at 10:27 | comment | added | B. Goddard | @Flater "hard-pressed to think that a 7th grader is not developmentally able to add fractions when taught properly". You seem to be missing the main point in all your comments: The reason that fractions are not taught properly is that the curriculum is stuffed with things that are better left till later because those are the things the student is not developmentally ready for. | |
| Feb 13, 2023 at 10:24 | comment | added | B. Goddard | @Flater About the ease a 10th grader has. There are mom's out there that push their 4-year-olds to read. (Yes, some 4 yo's can read, but not most.) They torture their kid for a year and half, when, if they had just waited, the kid could have easily learned to read. They get zero advantage over their peers who got to have more pleasant 4-yo experiences. | |
| Feb 13, 2023 at 10:21 | comment | added | B. Goddard | @Flater They are different issues, but I don't think they are "very different." The curriculum is being stuffed with things the students are ready for. I think the issues are different sides of the same coin. | |
| Feb 13, 2023 at 4:03 | answer | added | Melissa Menier | timeline score: 4 | |
| Feb 12, 2023 at 22:47 | comment | added | Flater | @B.Goddard: The core argument you're making is about the developmental ability of a child to handle the specific topic ("if we'd let most students get another year through or past puberty, and develop their ability to think abstractly more, then they'd have less trouble in math"), but your comment here is arguing about a stuffed curriculum. Those are two very different issues that require different solutions (and therefore different approaches as to how to approach a possible solution) | |
| Feb 12, 2023 at 22:45 | comment | added | B. Goddard | @Flater The problem here is that things like "baby stats" is being shoved into the early curriculum. There are 100 topics that 5th graders are perfectly capable of mastering, but there's only time for 10 of them. Let's quit trying to teach all 100 every year. Statistics and data handling are easy topics that can be taught efficiently and quickly in one selected year. That would be better than using stats to muddy EVERY year. | |
| Feb 12, 2023 at 22:40 | comment | added | Flater | [..] To put it differently, the fact that I could immediately recall that 7 times 8 is 56 when I was in middle school is precisely because I was taught multiplication tables early on in primary/elementary school. It is not proof that I should have only been taught multiplication tables in middle school. | |
| Feb 12, 2023 at 22:38 | comment | added | Flater | "And these easy things, like finding quartiles, can be learned by a 10th grader in one day." I think you're putting the cart before the horse there. The ease with which a 10th grader can do these kinds of things is caused by them having been taught it a while ago and having had the time to get familiar with it. Nothing new is ever easy to learn especially abstract things like math, unless you have been taught all of the underlying principles well and have had sufficient time to get to grips with them. | |
| Feb 12, 2023 at 22:31 | comment | added | Flater | @Stef: Trick: For the Nth grade, add 5 or 6 to get the student's approximate age. | |
| Feb 12, 2023 at 22:30 | comment | added | Flater | "they can't teach Prealgebra to 7th graders because they can't add fractions" I sincerely doubt this is a child-developmental issue. I was taught to add fractions in 3rd grade (primary/elementary, so around age 8-9) and it was considered commonplace in the classroom to be able to do so by 4th grade. I know anecdotal evidence is not what you're asking for but I'm hard-pressed to think that a 7th grader is not developmentally able to add fractions when taught properly, which if true would frame challenge the basis of your question as would mean it's being taught too late and/or badly. | |
| Feb 12, 2023 at 20:57 | comment | added | tbrookside | You will have a real problem convincing the parents of students at a private high school that their kids should not be on a math schedule that is at least the same as that at strong public districts. | |
| Feb 12, 2023 at 18:30 | comment | added | Miguel | @Stef I would say that starting primary school at 6 years old is more or less universal, so 12th grade is the last year before University. Even I do not know the exact meaning of Algebra I, I can agree with the general approach of the question. | |
| Feb 12, 2023 at 15:01 | comment | added | user14805 | I'm not convinced students will develop the ability to think abstractly without being required to practise things that force them to do so. I.e., being exposed to difficult maths is the only way to develop the abilities to handle difficult maths | |
| Feb 12, 2023 at 9:23 | comment | added | Stef | This looks like an interesting question, but it's pretty much unintelligible from outside of the USA. I don't know how old a "12th grader" is in the USA, nor do I know the difference between "algebra 1" and "algebra 2". | |
| Feb 12, 2023 at 8:12 | comment | added | njuffa | The study cited in the question is concerned with the effects of modifying the age at which children are first enrolled in school. It finds some evidence that delaying initial enrollment has beneficial effects (e.g. minor improvements to mental health and test scores). I do not see anything in it about the progression of teaching math in later years, so I fail to see how this study "tangentially" supports the hypothesis central to the question regarding math education in grades 5 and up. | |
| Feb 12, 2023 at 2:44 | comment | added | fedja | You can also view it from another side: it is not that the problems are too hard for the students, but that the students are not adequately trained for the problems. Since the level of the technological civilization today is way above that of Ancient Greece, the message to the students should be "brace up, clench your teeth, and become competitive, or AI will make you obsolete by the time you reach your 40's". In a sense it is a message to all of us, but we (the older generation in our 50's and up) have a chance to escape into the afterlife before that happens. They don't. | |
| Feb 11, 2023 at 21:07 | comment | added | Hearth | Just an anecdote, but: this is about the same track I took through math education when I was in high school, and personally, I've always felt it went too slow. I'm probably not a typical student, but I was bored out of my mind through every math class until finally reaching calculus in 12th grade and starting to really understand the reasoning behind all the stuff I'd previously been taught as "it's like this because that's how it is, stop asking". I hated math for all its rote memorization until I got to calculus, and now I love it. | |
| Feb 11, 2023 at 19:55 | answer | added | Amit | timeline score: 6 | |
| Feb 11, 2023 at 19:25 | comment | added | B. Goddard | @BlueRaja-DannyPflughoeft It's not separate if the main reason they're not being taught solidly is because things are being taught too soon. | |
| Feb 11, 2023 at 14:07 | comment | added | B. Goddard | I expect strong students to be accelerated. The little school I'm teaching in would have huge scheduling problems if we tried to split grades. So I'm objecting that the "normal" schedule is Alg 1 in 8th, etc. | |
| Feb 11, 2023 at 9:19 | comment | added | fyrepenguin | Do you object to any teaching of calculus in high school, or mainly object to it being in the “main” track for math education by 12th grade? | |
| Feb 11, 2023 at 1:01 | comment | added | BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft | "I wish the schools would teach the [lower] math solidly, so that I can teach [the higher math]" - this is a completely separate hypothesis from "they're not old enough", and I suspect it's the correct explanation. See also this TED talk from Sal Khan about how we need to put more emphasis on the fundamentals. | |
| Feb 11, 2023 at 0:44 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| Feb 11, 2023 at 4:02 | |||||
| Feb 10, 2023 at 22:44 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Feb 10, 2023 at 20:50 | history | edited | B. Goddard | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Feb 10, 2023 at 17:38 | answer | added | user52817 | timeline score: 9 | |
| Feb 10, 2023 at 16:26 | answer | added | guest | timeline score: 17 | |
| Feb 10, 2023 at 15:22 | comment | added | ryang | finding quartiles, and be learned by a 10th grader in one day. Why are we torturing 5th graders with it for a week? I winced while reading this. | |
| Feb 10, 2023 at 14:40 | history | asked | B. Goddard | CC BY-SA 4.0 |