Reply to End 2.0 MCPS math curriculum. List complaints about specific problems.

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[quote=Anonymous]

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This probably should just be it's own thread as OP didn't want to rehash. I've responded to OP above.

I also have a son who is finishing Alg I this year. The curriculum is function based and qualitative at the expense of computation. It's very much about questions like what does f(x + b) look like. This is fine, but it's a level of abstraction that students aren't ready for. Not because they can't understand, they actually get by pretty well with translating and reflecting graphs, but because they don't have the computational experience to appreciate it and without those skills when will this qualitative understanding be useful?

So you don't want anecdotes but that's my easiest entry point. By the time my older DC got to pre-calc this year, she was very good at things like identifying if the graph of a function is even or odd. (A concept I think I wasn't introduced to until college and shortcutting series expansions, but when I did need it, it could be defined in a moment without motivation.) And even so, she hadn't been taught the quantitative definitions for even and odd and been asked to work with those, i.e., f(-x) = f(x) and f(-x)= -f(x). So that is a skill she had that was different from my experience.

However, she couldn't find a common denominator for two rational functions, e.g. 1/x + 1/(x+3) = (2x+3)/(x^2+3x). (She could do it for two fractions, but her comfort level with manipulating variables abstractly wasn't there because she'd done very little of this over the past three years and even arithmetic hadn't been reinforced in a while.) This was something she had to quickly brush up on. Basically to make use of what she had learned in the prior three years she needed a crash course in traditional high school math.

And this is completely turned on it's head. The traditional approach is to take the understanding from ES arithmetic and turn that into abstract computation and then once abstract computation is in place including ugly functions like roots and logs, and trig, apply that understanding to functional abstraction in pre-calc. Pushing those concepts into the earlier classes at the expense of computation, accomplishes nothing.

But here's the thing, it's actually insidious to flip this on it's head and turn math into nothing but qualitative discussions. Because the students sound like they're learning advanced concepts and if they are weak on computation, they aren't being confronted. The only trouble is the teachers aren't that well versed in functional considerations and we're left with a gobbledegook of edu-speak and high-minded math and tests that are graded more subjectively than an English essay.

So that's my rant take it for what you will. I'm a math person, I don't like arguing against introducing concepts that I am absolutely passionate about, but the pendulum has swung too far on this. I'm also concerned that even the parents who have a technical background either don't have the energy to get to the bottom of what's different in this curriculum or they may have students who are already so well prepped at home, they don't aren't having issues. It doesn't help that the only reference is disorganized packets that no one would tackle willingly."
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