Racism? It's Not How Good; It's Skin Color

Hmmm... I'd better send you some of the kids I've been tutoring.

But you may be right. I've often wondered how far you could take ordinary kids if they were raised in an environment which was designed with the goal of increasing their knowledge and abilities, including in mathematics.

Certainly we know the environment makes a big difference. It's a bit jarring to acknowledge this, but Cuba does a much better job of teaching mathematics to its children than other -- 'free' -- Latin American countries. (I think the explanation is mainly due to the fact that Cuban kids aren't selling shoelaces at stoplights: in that country, you had better make sure your kids go to school, or else.)

But sadly -- although I've written to the Queen here offering to revamp their educational system, without results -- you have to go to war with the army you've got, as the man said. And with the existing system, it's just a question of incremental improvements.

 

makes no sense, sounds like the school could also deny based on race as all this law does is allow school to decide based on race... so what if they decide they only want white people, or only black people.. race should not play a role in getting into a school, this is as bad as the rich people buying their stupid kids into schools that they could not get into based on grades

https://www.foxnews.com/us/critics-...on-state-lawmakers-restore-affirmative-action

"On the last day of session, critics heckled state lawmakers who passed an affirmative action measure that would allow public colleges and other entities to consider race and ethnicity when making decisions on admissions."

I believe every applicant should be treated equally, the better your grades, the higher up the list you go, then it's first come, first serve

 

It depends. In theory, yes, sort of. But a lot depends on the Head of each school, and the policy she (or he in some cases) actually makes the teachers implement. So in some schools they do it with rigor: chanting the tables every morning in their 'home' class. But in others, the policy is honored more in the breach than in the reality.

One of the most famous mathematics educators is an English woman named Jo Boaler, who is now a professor at Stanford University in the US. She's written several books on mathematics education, some of them pretty good, in my opinion. But ... she's a hard Leftwinger, of the type which seeks to transform the culture. (As opposed to old-fashioned Leftwingers, who basically wanted to take the culture of the bourgeoisie and make it available to everyone.)

So ... I'm not making this up ... she believes, or said in an interview with the Irish Times, that children do not need to learn their times tables. She is not wrong with respect to the importance of avoiding humiliating children who are slow learners. But the message that some teachers will take away -- have taken away, if some of my tutees are evidence -- is that knowing your times tables is not important. On the contrary, not knowing your times tables is fatal for real progress in maths. And it's not difficult, if done right in school: a brief, daily group session chanting them in unison is the way to start.

 

Which means you have to go back to the massive inequalities of birth and either work to create a more equal society - the US is the most unequal in the Developed world" or work to improve the possibilities of those born into this horrendous inequality so that their birth does not create the possibilities, or lack of them they will have in life. No country which does not offer everyone an equal opportunity can claim to be a Democracy as the very basis of Democracy is that everyone has equal rights but by keeping people stuck in the circumstances they are born in the US more than any other developed society does not provide this.

 

I'm not familiar with the Scottish system. In the rest of the UK, you sit for three exams, at either the 'Foundation' level, or the 'Higher' Level. There is an new, insane grading system which assigns you a final grade on a scale of 1 to 9. (9!!!!) With the Foundation, you can't get higher than a '5'. (Not that these grades mean anything to anyone who has not studied the current system closely.)

Since maths papers can almost be generated by a computer, we ought to allow re-sits, and do it like they do in music: an ascending scale of achievement, to which you can return and try again if you fail, with no assumption that because right now you're at one level, that's the highest you can go.

With GCSE, once you take your exams, unless you absolutely fail outright, that's it. You won't do maths again, unless you go on to do 'A-Level' (roughly like AP in the US.)

 

Apart from saying not learning her tables never did her any harm what she is mainly arguing about is the stress of tests on some children. Funnily enough I can relate to this. At 7 I moved school and knew everything that my class was being taught. One day when I was lined up to go back into class after a break, the teacher of the next form came up to me and shouted out a sum - 9x8 or something. I was in shock but did answer. She did that two more times. Again I answered but had to think particularly due to the shock of this happening then and everyone watching me. Too slow she said. That was my test as to whether I would be put up a year. In the 2 years I was at that school I learned nothing and used to deliberately make mistakes as it was the only way I could get attention. Tests are known to cause stress to many children and stress is known to have an adverse effect on the ability to function.

I am not aware of my daughter learning tables. While I remember I thought this was dreadful, she became very good at mathematics.

My grand daughter had to learn all her tables as your article says up to the 12 times and had to be able to immediately say any sum asked her. She certainly for a while was nervous over maths.

Much more information is available on the effect of stress on learning nowadays. I know because my daughter goes to lectures at her kids school where they discuss it all.

My daughter was taught in her early learning with the 'discovery method'. This is where you get kids to discover for themselves what things are rather than rote learning - you use education for what the word means - to draw out, rather than to push in. It is imo no question the better learning method. Unfortunately it also is far more demanding of the teacher and partly due to most of the teachers not having been taught in this way they were not up to it. This failure is why it is generally thought to not be a good method and why schools were demanded to move back rote learning.

 

Actually, the US does not do too badly, with respect to education, compared to the rest of the world. (This may not say much for the rest of the world, but it's true.)

You have to remember that the US is very multi-racial. So if you compare the US to Finland, say, you're not comparing like to like.

To do that, compare US white students to Finnish students. (When you compare just white US students to their European counterparts, the US is about average. Probably not where Americans would like it to be, but not disastrous either.) African-Americans compare very well with African-Africans and, believe it or not, Asian Americans compare very well with Asian-Asians.

I know this sounds ... hard to believe. But look here, to see the work of my favorite Muslim immigrant to Sweden, Tino Sanandoji.

No one should comment about the problems of American education unless they have tried to get some familiarlity with the situation at a typical American inner-city (ie. Black) school. It's simply not the case that putting more money into the system is going to change much. Washington DC spends more than $25 000 a year per child on its education system, more than double the national average, and gets dismal results: only about one in five of its eighth graders are proficient at maths or reading. Of course, one can say "racism!" which will explain nothing. Those kids are not being taught by white racist teachers who are telling them that they are inferior. The problem is much deeper and more complex than that.

 

Apart from saying not learning her tables never did her any harm what she is mainly arguing about is the stress of tests on some children. Funnily enough I can relate to this. At 7 I moved school and knew everything that my class was being taught. One day when I was lined up to go back into class after a break, the teacher of the next form came up to me and shouted out a sum - 9x8 or something. I was in shock but did answer. She did that two more times. Again I answered but had to think particularly due to the shock of this happening then and everyone watching me. Too slow she said. That was my test as to whether I would be put up a year. In the 2 years I was at that school I learned nothing and used to deliberately make mistakes as it was the only way I could get attention. Tests are known to cause stress to many children and stress is known to have an adverse effect on the ability to function.

I am not aware of my daughter learning tables. While I remember I thought this was dreadful, she became very good at mathematics.

My grand daughter had to learn all her tables as your article says up to the 12 times and had to be able to immediately say any sum asked her. She certainly for a while was nervous over maths.

Much more information is available on the effect of stress on learning nowadays. I know because my daughter goes to lectures at her kids school where they discuss it all.

My daughter was taught in her early learning with the 'discovery method'. This is where you get kids to discover for themselves what things are rather than rote learning - you use education for what the word means - to draw out, rather than to push in. It is imo no question the better learning method. Unfortunately it also is far more demanding of the teacher and partly due to most of the teachers not having been taught in this way they were not up to it. This failure is why it is generally thought to not be a good method and why schools were demanded to move back rote learning.

 

Yes. I absolutely agree with taking the stress and humiliation out of learning. And, via my tutees, I know that there are teachers who seem to enjoy humiliating children. (On the other hand, the reverse is also true, and it might help explain, in part, bad teacher behavior.)

And I am entirely with the people who say we need to teach proficiency, deep understanding, not just parrot-fashion stimulus-response stuff. No one actually disagrees with this. I try to get all my tutees to have a deep understanding of, say, trigonometry -- not just memorizing SOH-CAH-TOA but looking at a right triangle and seeing that, for a given angle, the ratio of the lengths of the sides does not change. But first they need a good feel for what a 'ratio' is, and this begins with a rote-learned definition.

As for discovery learning. I would like to give you some links to read, where we have actually tested this in practice. I should say that I have found that arguing about this issue abstractly is pointless -- you have to take concrete examples and talk about how you would teach this or that topic. (For instance, to factorize a quadratic equation, you need to be able to quickly know, for example, what two numbers add to make 14, and multiply to make 48. How can someone who does not know their times tables do this?)

Like everything else in education, it's not absolutely straightforward. But .... I do not believe that what it took the human race two thousand years to discover, and even then, only by its most brilliant members -- say, Newton's Laws of Motion -- can be discovered by a 14-year old. They have to be taught. Now ... there are ways to do it which are terrible, rote, meaningless -- and ways to do it which help develop understanding. I start by asking my tutees to think about the International Space Station -- maybe show them a short video of life on board it -- and to note that the astronauts are weightless ... floating about. Then I ask them to imagine that they could build a tower up to the height of the Station -- it's just 250 miles above us, which most of them are startled to learn, when you see, on a globe, how close to the surface of the earth it is -- and then what would happen if they (wearing their space suit) climbed up to the top of that tower, on a level with the Space Station as it whizzes by, with its weightless astronauts.

Question: would they too, at the same height as the astronauts, be weightless as well? When they have answered, always wrongly, we can begin to discuss Newton's Laws of Motion and also his Law of Gravity, and why, if they started digging down to the center of the Earth, they would weigh less and less.

 

I was talking about inequality and the developed world. The US has the most inequality in the developed world. That is what I said.

This would only make a difference if the US believes in not giving coloured people the same opportunities as whites and that certainly is what I have heard.

I see, you are unaware of white privilege. I hope you are not a bell curve person. That was proven like all before and since to be false.

I see playing the mac line now. An american whether white or black or any other colour does not function different to people from other countries. Your system does and it is your system which produces results and makes the US the most unequal country of the developed world.

and the line about Asians doing better at school than whites. This is one which has been well talked about at Stormfront so that they have decided to 'accept' that they are intellectually superior.

I think it is more East Asians. This is due to them having an extremely high emphasis on learning and getting family approval from this. The criticism offered to this method is that it leaves the areas of play and creativity out. Creativity is essential for unusually high intelligence and apparently is going to be very much required of those who are going to get jobs in the future. White Americans also enjoy play which is how research determined the difference. Black American's do not come from a history of a demand for high academic achievement. They come from a history of slavery and massive discrimination against them. One of the reasons for positive discrimination is to give children the idea that they can make it by seeing others who look like them making it. This can have a massive difference in what children believe they can achieve and if they do not believe they can achieve the chances of them working for it are very small. It obviously is not a long term thing but done for a while with other changes also being made it can make a big difference. In the UK positive discrimination is currently against the law. However it is required that people keep records of who they accept and reject as rejecting all people with strange sounding names would be an indication of prejudice at work.

 

Alexa: I wrote a long reply to you, partly in agreement and partly not, but my own clumsiness in doing something wrong with the 'post reply' button, combined with the criminal 15-minute editing limit of this stupid forum software, wiped it all out and I can't recover it.
So I'll just say: I read The Bell Curve when it came out, and then read everything I could in reply to it afterwards. Some of the critiques made a good point here or there, but none of them convinced me. (The best guy I know of in the 'anti-Bell Curve' camp is James Flynn, a rare honest liberal.) But I try to stay out of the race and IQ debate because most people don't know enough about statistics, IQ, etc. to have an intelligent opinion, and most academics who ought to know enough are either afraid to say what they think, or are dishonest demagogues. Most but not all, and it's always fun to read things by people who obviously are Thoughtcriminals on this issue, but who are rightly afraid to be open in their views.

In any case, whatever about the theses of The Bell Curve (and remember that the book had only one chapter about race, it's mainly about IQ as a whole), it has little to do with my own views on the education system, which I believe could do a much better job for everyone -- as does Charles Murray, and I agree with him that we ask too little of the top third, and too much of the bottom third. (Or rather, too much of the wrong sort of thing.)

 

What good is "facing up" to the core of our human nature going to do?

 

Fk equality! I rather be free and earn my dues. I’m not interested in how low my brothers can fall; I’m more interested and how far I can rise.

Equal is Unfair:

 

yes, and everyone should be helped that needs it equally... regardless of race

 

One of the inevitable effects of race-based affirmative action, is that it then devalues the genuine achievements of members of the thus-aided race.
Unless they are obviously where they are because of their genuine merits -- as is the case in sports and entertainment -- everyone secretly suspects that
they got there because of their race. Even the most pious liberals believe this. So if you're Black and really brilliant, and get admitted to Harvard, you will know that everyone thinks you got there because you're Black, and not because you're really brilliant.

It's the acceptance of what everyone knows is a lie, but is compelled to pretend to believe, that demoralizes a society. This was one of the things that undermined the old Soviet Union. People were compelled to pay lip service to various things, to affirm things they knew were not true -- and this produced a deeply cynical population.

 

Are we incapable of learning enough about individuals given this ‘advantage’ to ascertain if they actually are ‘brilliant’?
In today’s academic world complete idiots can take out degrees in the arts and Business Administration not worth the paper they’re printed on, with or without any positive discrimination.

 

agree, look at Trump, he won with millions less votes because of Affirmative action for the smaller states...

 

No, you're right. I didn't study it (IOW, no formal education in 'social studies'), I just lived it personally - both via accident of birth, and via living in the Third World. That my actual field of study intersects with poverty on a regular basis is quite beside the point .. I guess.

You win.

 

Thanks for nothing, I was trying to avoid that subject today. It’s seriously become too scary.

 

Good. Our schools do an amazing job.

 

There’s a place waiting for you in Galt’s Gulch.

 

We all are, once we reach about 30 (but even then, you could still do it). Hence my reference to kids.

 

Your very indistinct line between 'raising' and 'teaching' muddies the conversation considerably.

But I'll plod on. Schools already do all they need to do (which is too much IMO, further diminishing academic outcomes), and all they CAN do. Change must come from the home.

 

1) the 21stC 'hard Leftwinger' IS the bourgeoisie. jess sayin'

2) could not possibly agree more on the times tables. they're essential, as is a good deal of rote learning.