Reply to The state of MCPS is atrocious

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]And if your source is from 2019, it’s irrelevant. COVID revealed to a ton of parents how awful MCPS really is.

Moreover, only 17% of the people contacted for the 2019 survey responded.

https://moco360.media/2019/10/03/parents-pleased-with-mcps-survey-shows/[/quote]

And yet they keep sending their kids to MCPS schools, while they themselves do little to affect any change or want to increase taxes to pay for their champagne wishes.[/quote]

What choice do most of us have?  Not everyone is wealthy or living in a "good" school district.  The only "affordable" privates are Catholic schools and that's only for elementary.  Only a few Catholic schools are remotely welcoming to non-Catholic/non-Christian families.  The rest of us cannot afford $50-60K privates, and there are very few privates let alone non-religious ones.

And, the privates don't have the same math track come MS/HS.[/quote]

Every private I’ve seen has MS/HS math tracks.[/quote]

They aren't equal.  Of course they have MS/HS math tracks but often Algebra isn't started till 8th, or even 9th, vs. MCPS is 6/7th grade.[/quote]

And it’s been shown that pushing kids too fast in math isn’t always appropriate. It’s not as though MCPS kids are excelling in math; far from it. So this wouldn’t be what I brag about.[/quote]

This! I have a friend who teaches math at a state university. He says it would be better if middle/high schools slowed down and spent more time on Algebra instead of pushing kids through at young ages. The number of remedial Math classes at his university is growing.[/quote]

MCPS curriculum experts testified to this at the BOE meeting recently. Compacted math is leading to superficial and poor understanding of algebraic fundamentals.[/quote]

No.  Compacted Math is not the issue.  My kid went through Compacted Math and did great.

The issue is that too many students are placed in Compacted Math, when they should be in regular Math.

Another issue is that MCPS passes kids along even when they have not mastered the material.

There were SO many kids in DD’s Matt classes who should not have been accelerated and who could not keep up.

Keep Compacted Math for kids who can handle it.  [/quote]

Just because compacted math worked for your kid doesn’t mean it’s a good idea from a pedagogical standpoint. [/quote]

I agree with the earlier poster that compacted math should be available for some, but with an acknowledgment that it’s not the best choice for everyone.

Of course rushing kids through math is bad pedagogy.  They should be given time to master concepts and practice them.  However, once a child has learned something, I don’t see what the pedagogical advantage is in refusing to teach them anything else for some predetermined interval.

The important thing is that kids learn the material.  Time is not the only variable in that process.  The content children are exposed to, how it is presented, and the children themselves are just some of the other variables involved in the process.  Regardless of how many hours they sit in a math classroom, they can only learn material they’re taught.

For example:

In 1st grade, as differentiation for advanced students, they offered advanced problems on the back of the regularly assigned homework.  Giving a kid a worksheet with the instruction to put in the correct > or < symbol without mentioning that those symbols represent greater than or less than is never going to work.  Of course advanced students aren’t automatically going to know this.  You could keep students in the class for 10 years, and they might eventually through trial and error figure out what you wanted, but I wouldn’t call it good pedagogy.  Or you could actually teach the concept and move on.

Similarly, I was frequently frustrated by MCPS’s emphasis on calculator use.  I told my kids they weren’t allowed to use calculators on homework without checking with me first.  When DD told me they had a worksheet where they had to get square roots, it seemed like a calculator might be necessary, until I looked at the assignment.  With problems like (sqrt 3) + (sqrt 27), she could have punched those numbers into a calculator and obtained a correct answer, while entirely missing the lesson.  Knowing how to SIMPLIFY the problem is a much more valuable lesson.  She could have filled out countless worksheets for years with the decimal answers to square roots that her calculator spit out, without ever learning how to actually work with radicals.  On the other hand, once she had mastered working with radicals (fully understanding the concept, being able to employ it with ease, and had it solidly fixed in her memory), continuing to repeat the same lesson instead of using it to progress to the next level serves no purpose other than to frustrate and discourage.

I think good pedagogy is to give students the right amount of time.  For some, this may mean compacted math (or even more acceleration), for others it may mean a slower math progression, perhaps even with additional instructional time with a double period, summer school, or tutoring.  Every kid is different, so expecting them to learn at the same rate seems not only like bad pedagogy, but as something that is blatantly illogical.

I think we should have a wide variety of math classes and provide supports to help students succeed at their level and progress to the next level.  Flexible ability grouping is not tracking.  I don’t believe in gate keeping, but I also don’t believe in lowering standards.  I don’t think our goal should be to go at any particular pace nor to get all the same students to the same place at the same time.  I think the goal should be to teach all students what they need to know, and enable them to learn as much beyond that as they want. [/quote]

You don’t just move a kid along right after they’ve learned a math concept. There’s an element of brain development that is separate from intelligence that influences how quickly kids should learn math.

This is where you need to read the research to understand why more and more experts are urging less acceleration in math, even for very smart kids who can understand higher level concepts. [/quote]

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