Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I also hire a lot of people, as a NASA contractor. Personable people from China, Taiwan, Singapore, Russia, Iran, Israel etc.

My vote is for less emphasis on studying peace, harmony, love and sports in American public high schools and more on math, science, languages, English etc.

The fact is, Wilson's track record on AP participation is dismal. Only a little more than half the students take and pass at least 1 AP with a score of 3 each year.

I hire a lot of people from China...

The one criticism of Chinese education is it doesn’t produce creative thinkers. A big portion of their economy is based on good and ideas that were copied from US and European models. If you have jobs that require rote calculation and programming, then the Chinese make good candidates. They also don’t study history and there isn’t much in the way of grammar. They also don’t emphasize playing or recess. So, there is a lot of time to study math and science, yes.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I hope that those "making policy" will know that comparing absolute numbers of people in two populations makes no sense when the population size is so different. Singapore has all of 5.5 million or so in the whole country versus ~320 million in the US.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Singapore has four official national languages and comes top, or near the top, of the PISA listings for math.

The US has one national language. English.

We got a scholarship to a private.

This post is unintentionally illustrative of the point about diversity.

Unlike most countries, the US has ZERO official languages due to the diversity of languages spoken here. Dozens of languages are spoken in the US, including indigenous languages in Native American communities and a huge number of immigrant languages, the largest of course being English. For many non-English world languages, the largest or second largest community of speakers in the world is here rather than in the country of origin. Speaking of Singapore, we do have larger communities of almost every Singapore language group than Singapore does --- 250K Tamil speakers vs about 170K in Singapore, 3.4 million Chinese speakers (all dialects) versus 1.7 million for all dialects in Singapore. The only possible exception is Malay, for which I didn't immediately see US data (and which I know nothing about). This is the kind of American history/culture 101 stuff that's important if you hope to make policy, participate in politics or run an HR department in a city like LA or New York (or Sheboygan Wisconsin, where board meetings for many companies were until recently conducted in German).

The ability to work with data like this and not just confidently spout nonsense about language and ethnicity is an important skill, and one that Wilson students are more likely to have than many others. But yes, math is important too, and is something that Wilson could do much better.

Um... the PP suggested that the US had one "national language." The point of this post was that the US has many, many languages and no single "national" language. We happen to have more speakers of all of Singapore's languages than they do. We also have millions of Spanish speakers, German speakers, Tagalog speakers, etc.

What was your point, exactly?

Just that I hope people making policy know not to use absolute numbers as a basis for conclusions about differently sized populations. I only mention this because the PP referred to making policy and the "ability to work with data and not just confidently spout nonsense about language...".
I agree with the statement that the US has no official language.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I hope that those "making policy" will know that comparing absolute numbers of people in two populations makes no sense when the population size is so different. Singapore has all of 5.5 million or so in the whole country versus ~320 million in the US.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Singapore has four official national languages and comes top, or near the top, of the PISA listings for math.

The US has one national language. English.

We got a scholarship to a private.

This post is unintentionally illustrative of the point about diversity.

Unlike most countries, the US has ZERO official languages due to the diversity of languages spoken here. Dozens of languages are spoken in the US, including indigenous languages in Native American communities and a huge number of immigrant languages, the largest of course being English. For many non-English world languages, the largest or second largest community of speakers in the world is here rather than in the country of origin. Speaking of Singapore, we do have larger communities of almost every Singapore language group than Singapore does --- 250K Tamil speakers vs about 170K in Singapore, 3.4 million Chinese speakers (all dialects) versus 1.7 million for all dialects in Singapore. The only possible exception is Malay, for which I didn't immediately see US data (and which I know nothing about). This is the kind of American history/culture 101 stuff that's important if you hope to make policy, participate in politics or run an HR department in a city like LA or New York (or Sheboygan Wisconsin, where board meetings for many companies were until recently conducted in German).

The ability to work with data like this and not just confidently spout nonsense about language and ethnicity is an important skill, and one that Wilson students are more likely to have than many others. But yes, math is important too, and is something that Wilson could do much better.

Um... the PP suggested that the US had one "national language." The point of this post was that the US has many, many languages and no single "national" language. We happen to have more speakers of all of Singapore's languages than they do. We also have millions of Spanish speakers, German speakers, Tagalog speakers, etc.

What was your point, exactly?

Anonymous wrote:
I hope that those "making policy" will know that comparing absolute numbers of people in two populations makes no sense when the population size is so different. Singapore has all of 5.5 million or so in the whole country versus ~320 million in the US.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Singapore has four official national languages and comes top, or near the top, of the PISA listings for math.

The US has one national language. English.

We got a scholarship to a private.

This post is unintentionally illustrative of the point about diversity.

Unlike most countries, the US has ZERO official languages due to the diversity of languages spoken here. Dozens of languages are spoken in the US, including indigenous languages in Native American communities and a huge number of immigrant languages, the largest of course being English. For many non-English world languages, the largest or second largest community of speakers in the world is here rather than in the country of origin. Speaking of Singapore, we do have larger communities of almost every Singapore language group than Singapore does --- 250K Tamil speakers vs about 170K in Singapore, 3.4 million Chinese speakers (all dialects) versus 1.7 million for all dialects in Singapore. The only possible exception is Malay, for which I didn't immediately see US data (and which I know nothing about). This is the kind of American history/culture 101 stuff that's important if you hope to make policy, participate in politics or run an HR department in a city like LA or New York (or Sheboygan Wisconsin, where board meetings for many companies were until recently conducted in German).

The ability to work with data like this and not just confidently spout nonsense about language and ethnicity is an important skill, and one that Wilson students are more likely to have than many others. But yes, math is important too, and is something that Wilson could do much better.

Anonymous wrote:
I hope that those "making policy" will know that comparing absolute numbers of people in two populations makes no sense when the population size is so different. Singapore has all of 5.5 million or so in the whole country versus ~320 million in the US.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Singapore has four official national languages and comes top, or near the top, of the PISA listings for math.

The US has one national language. English.

We got a scholarship to a private.

This post is unintentionally illustrative of the point about diversity.

Unlike most countries, the US has ZERO official languages due to the diversity of languages spoken here. Dozens of languages are spoken in the US, including indigenous languages in Native American communities and a huge number of immigrant languages, the largest of course being English. For many non-English world languages, the largest or second largest community of speakers in the world is here rather than in the country of origin. Speaking of Singapore, we do have larger communities of almost every Singapore language group than Singapore does --- 250K Tamil speakers vs about 170K in Singapore, 3.4 million Chinese speakers (all dialects) versus 1.7 million for all dialects in Singapore. The only possible exception is Malay, for which I didn't immediately see US data (and which I know nothing about). This is the kind of American history/culture 101 stuff that's important if you hope to make policy, participate in politics or run an HR department in a city like LA or New York (or Sheboygan Wisconsin, where board meetings for many companies were until recently conducted in German).

The ability to work with data like this and not just confidently spout nonsense about language and ethnicity is an important skill, and one that Wilson students are more likely to have than many others. But yes, math is important too, and is something that Wilson could do much better.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Singapore has four official national languages and comes top, or near the top, of the PISA listings for math.

The US has one national language. English.

We got a scholarship to a private.

This post is unintentionally illustrative of the point about diversity.

Unlike most countries, the US has ZERO official languages due to the diversity of languages spoken here. Dozens of languages are spoken in the US, including indigenous languages in Native American communities and a huge number of immigrant languages, the largest of course being English. For many non-English world languages, the largest or second largest community of speakers in the world is here rather than in the country of origin. Speaking of Singapore, we do have larger communities of almost every Singapore language group than Singapore does --- 250K Tamil speakers vs about 170K in Singapore, 3.4 million Chinese speakers (all dialects) versus 1.7 million for all dialects in Singapore. The only possible exception is Malay, for which I didn't immediately see US data (and which I know nothing about). This is the kind of American history/culture 101 stuff that's important if you hope to make policy, participate in politics or run an HR department in a city like LA or New York (or Sheboygan Wisconsin, where board meetings for many companies were until recently conducted in German).

The ability to work with data like this and not just confidently spout nonsense about language and ethnicity is an important skill, and one that Wilson students are more likely to have than many others. But yes, math is important too, and is something that Wilson could do much better.

Anonymous wrote:Would never go back to public. Would sell my plasma before I'd let my kid be subjected to the affective BS that passes for public education today. I love my private where my kid is aware there's an academic pecking order and if you want to complete in the classroom and for spots in college you've got to put in the work.

Anonymous wrote:I also hire a lot of people, as a NASA contractor. Personable people from China, Taiwan, Singapore, Russia, Iran, Israel etc.

My vote is for less emphasis on studying peace, harmony, love and sports in American public high schools and more on math, science, languages, English etc.

The fact is, Wilson's track record on AP participation is dismal. Only a little more than half the students take and pass at least 1 AP with a score of 3 each year.

I hire a lot of people from China...

Anonymous wrote:I also hire a lot of people, as a NASA contractor. Personable people from China, Taiwan, Singapore, Russia, Iran, Israel etc.

My vote is for less emphasis on studying peace, harmony, love and sports in American public high schools and more on math, science, languages, English etc.

The fact is, Wilson's track record on AP participation is dismal. Only a little more than half the students take and pass at least 1 AP with a score of 3 each year.

I hire a lot of people from China...