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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]To the person who posted that they don’t think you can master math just by working hard — how far did you get in math in college?

I was an aerospace engineer at a big state school and there were so many of my classmates that were bad at math.  Like very very bad at math.  These are enlisted kids that were coming back to school under the gi bill, kids that didn’t even go to college the first round.  Or kids that were coming in from community college.  They still eeked out passing grades past calculus (multi variable calculus, diff eq, linear algebra, etc).  They had to go get extra help, but it was set up that if you did the homework (and studied the homework), you would pass.  There’s nothing that can’t be overcome with hard work.  Will you get an a, probably not.  Will it be more work for you? Sure, but if you’re up for the challenge why not.

I wonder if you would say the same thing about writing— are there kids that shouldn’t take English in college because they didn’t score above a 120 as a second grader on the verbal section of the cogat?  That’s ridiculous![/quote]

I don't agree with the statement "There's nothing that can't be overcome with hard work."  My opinion is some people are smarter than other people and there are environments where the content is too hard or moves too fast and some people just won't be able to keep up and do the work.  (Not saying that is this APS math class...but as a general concept.)   And no I don't take comfort in knowing there are a bunch of aerospace engineers out there who are very very bad at math and barely got out of college in the major.

To bring it back to math placement in 6th grade - APS is trying to funnel the kids into prealgebra in 6th grade who are not likely to be very bad at math, now or in the future, so one teacher can serve up to 30 students and move through 3 years of material in 1 year.  The very bad at math kid is going to slow everyone else down, take up a lot of teacher time, and probably have quite a bad time along the way, even if they work really hard.  I don't blame APS for trying to gatekeep the class.

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