Reply to Deal, BASIS or Latin for a engineering-minded boy who also loves humanities

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Let me quote John Dewey “If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow. 
This is my feeling about BASIS.
My child is doing quite well, but I feel the model and curriculum, which has not been modified since the first BASIS was established 14 years ago is shortchanging kids.
A very good Algebra II student who has no difficulty with solving Saxon problems, my child was not able to tackle  several Algebra I  test problems given at another school, where criticial thinking has to be used to crack the problem,  rather than simply applying a formula and solving it.
When I think of a STEM school these days, I envision a school like the Bulldog Tech middle school in San Jose.  [/quote]

You aren't going to solve a quadratic simply through critical thinking in the time given during an exam.  Beyond a certain point, it's all about tools and technique to get to the answer.  The critical thinking piece is important, yes - in understanding the question and understanding which technique was used, but after that, it's all just "plug and chug".  Having spent 20 years in the engineering field, most of what one ends up doing may involve a lot of sometimes complex math, but is ultimately just deconstructing problems and "plug and chug".  That said, one wonders how the particular problems your child were set up?  Perhaps they were particular types or formats of word problems which the other school in question had spent some time on going over?  Or, it could be any number of other things.  But I doubt that it was ultimately anything totally alien, which your child had never been exposed to.  I don't think it's valid to generalize and extrapolate just from the fact that one kid didn't understand some problems, a lot more information is needed to make any kinds of judgement.[/quote]

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