Your Thoughts on Montgomery County Schools

[Anonymous]

One of my good friends in college was a math major. He was a brilliant student. He came into college with so many credits that he decided to double major in Russian just to slow himself down because he wanted to have 4 years of college. He completed graduate school in math in one year. He decided to become a math teacher because he had tutored so many math students and thought it was a greater challenge to teach math to struggling students than to be a math professor.

This is great but VERY rare. You will see some education majors get a "math" major but they are taking the math for non-science majors courses under a BA not a BS. Big difference. Math is not a verbal or language driven subject. Education majors have a huge problem understanding how to convey knowledge without blabbering on and on and screwing up the concept.

So many of them think that math must be made friendly, softer and more language based or else the only alternative is rote memorization. The only people doing math by rote memorization ironically are the education majors who never understood math.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

One of my good friends in college was a math major. He was a brilliant student. He came into college with so many credits that he decided to double major in Russian just to slow himself down because he wanted to have 4 years of college. He completed graduate school in math in one year. He decided to become a math teacher because he had tutored so many math students and thought it was a greater challenge to teach math to struggling students than to be a math professor.

This is great but VERY rare. You will see some education majors get a "math" major but they are taking the math for non-science majors courses under a BA not a BS. Big difference. Math is not a verbal or language driven subject. Education majors have a huge problem understanding how to convey knowledge without blabbering on and on and screwing up the concept.

So many of them think that math must be made friendly, softer and more language based or else the only alternative is rote memorization. The only people doing math by rote memorization ironically are the education majors who never understood math.

What evidence do you have for this?

For what it's worth, I had plenty of real, actual math majors -- math professors, in fact -- teach me math, in college. Almost all of them were really, really bad at teaching math.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You are probably still reading now but you probably won't be for long, so let me sneak in this primer: It's a very large (150,000 students, 25 high schools), historically high-performing school district going through a lot of demographic change. It used to be a primarily white, upper-middle class suburban district. Along with the rest of the country it has become increasingly minority and, in some areas, lower income over the years. It is currently implementing what it calls "Curriculum 2.0," which is its brand of the Common Core that other states are adopting. Since it is such a large school district, schools differ tremendously demographically by where in the county you live. There is a large achievement gap along race and class lines. Housing prices tend to follow these lines as well, i.e. some very high performing schools with very high home prices, and many more modest homes with schools with more average performance. The country tries to allocate resources so the schools in the less wealthy areas have smaller class sizes in the early years to help improve outcomes.

Montgomery County was not historically an upper-middle class suburban school district. Many of the areas that comprise the county were, and still are mid- to lower-middle class and some areas were downright rural and poor. This is one of the myths that some people like to circulate about MoCo and is evident when you go outside of the Bethesda, Chevy Chase, Potomac areas. There is nothing upper middle class about much of Silver Spring, the original Takoma Park, Clarksburg, Gaithersburg and others. Real estate is every expensive here in the DC area but there is no need in convincing ourselves that those 1,000 square foot ramblers were upper middle class dwellings.

Yes and I'd expand that to say many areas of Bethesda and CC were middle class too. Those 1500 square foot Cape Cods, colonials and 1200 square foot bungalows are all over close-in Bethesda and CC.