Reply to Open enrollment for Math 7 Honors

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=pettifogger][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Parent here, so a different perspective... In my experience, kids who were in AAP or otherwise advanced in math in ES typically take Honors Algebra in 7th, not Math 7 Honors.  Our MS has already moved to an Honors for all strategy so all 7th graders not enrolled in Algebra or a remedial course take Math 7 Honors. Based on what you've stated about your child, I assume they would be fine.[/quote]

AAP teacher here.

The above is absolutely incorrect. Approximately 20%-50% of my students, depending on the year, take Algebra HN in 7th grade. The others take Math 7 HN.[/quote]

Different AAP teacher here. Agree. It also varies year to year. Some years more test in than others. Honestly, if the IAAT wasn’t 10 mins per section, you would see more students qualifying. I hate the Iowa because kids think they are dumb if they can’t work as fast, which is completely false. [/quote]

That's a very feel-good statement but processing speed has always been considered a major component of intelligence. It is a big contributor to IQ scores. In addition, even in practice (like in a work environment), people who very quickly solve a problem or pick up new information and are able to quickly form a judgment about it are considered by others to be more intelligent. Therefore, if a student cannot solve math problems quickly, they are in fact less intelligent.[/quote]

This statement is completely false. Speed is an artificial construct of the standard k-12 curriculum and standardized testing, that's it. It has nothing to do with problem solving abilities and should never be used to assess intelligence. In particular, speed becomes almost meaningless at higher levels where problems are difficult enough to demand insight and ingenuity. Nobody in college, in jobs or academia, or at the IMO olympiad is complaining that they cannot do well because they are too slow. There many other contributing factors but speed is not going to be one of them. It's quite a terrible thing to test children on something as trivial as speed and then suggest that they are not smart enough because they needed a few more minutes because they were not rushing through something. We wouldn't expect our engineers, scientists, and doctors to rush through things and we certainly wouldn't want to deal with the consequences of a rushed solution, so why don't we give children enough time to think?[/quote]

It's not about whether the kid is smart enough or not.  It's about having sufficient fluency to handle the multistep algebra problems.  I worked with some AAP students, and surprisingly many of them took forever to do something as simple as two digit multiplication.  Either, they didn't have their facts memorized cold, or they were still using very inefficient algorithms.  Algebra would have been torture, because every single homework set intended to take 30 minutes would have required 2 hours.  The IAAT might be too fast of a test, but at least some test to ensure that the kids are sufficiently fluent and don't require inordinate amounts of time to complete their work would be appropriate.  [/quote]

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