politics

There is a population in every school who do not want to engage with it, and are a detriment to the entire system

This includes low-functioning special needs

I worked with low-functioning special needs in special education elementary classes actually. They are far more "daycare" obviously.

Create a separate system for them, but there is no saving them Packaging them in with the normal kids makes your metrics look better

But in absolutes, the same number of people are going to wash out

low-functioning special needs kids can absolutely still be taught to do basic jobs, like working retail, rather than them sitting and being a burden on their families.

Agreed, but there's no value having them in the normal education system

yeah, separate tracking I agree with for them, I just think that that tracking level needs to still TRY to make something out of them, don't just make it a daycare completely

A lot of the issues we have with tracking currently is that teachers kinda just don't care about the lower levels of students, and that would absolutely continue with the system you're discussing. That's obviously difficult to fix, but still, teachers need to do better.

I do not think there is value in dragging down everyone in the hopes of reforming serial truants, violent instigators, and other non-participants

I don't mean to literally give up on them from day 1

Yes, I agree, I'm just saying that the actual teachers who would be teaching the lower levels here absolutely will not be trying very hard

people do NOT want to teach idiots

Yep

If people don't know this, it's common for schools to allow K-6 teachers to draft kids for their classes each yeah

Ahh, did not know that

To try to avoid too many of the bottom 15% being one person's problem

I was in an honors program though, and there was only one teacher per year for that program

Yeah, you're not getting the drugs in honours thankfully

Most teachers can peg those ratios from super early on too, where kids will fall

Parental involvement is also the biggest measure of how they turn out

yeeeeep

having-a-father privilege is real

very unfortunate as a teacher when parents just make everything worse for their children

If you get natural reinforcement of critical thinking and learning opportunities outside of state-run daycare, you turn out really well

You don't need gold star parents, just ones who know to encourage good habits and development

I went to private school until high school so I actually learned

I mean, not everything can be taught in school anyway though, there is a certain level of knowledge that just has to be taught at home

It's difficult for a school teacher to encourage good eating habits if the parents don't care

a teacher can't force you to read a lot in your free time

a parent can

Yep, and the longer the school system is a failure, the more parents will write it off as well

Also includes schools offloading too much to parents

They rightfully get frustrated when a kid comes home with a mountain of homework they have to essentially re-teach

What do you mean? We don't give homework anymore :)

lol.... I hate that catching on

Same with fully virtual lesson plans

There's a balance that's not that hard to strike

legit a high school I went to recently said, along the entire school (including the AP classes) they legit just NEVER give homework with the justification being "Well, they don't do it anyway" I really had to hold back from smacking those teachers

Not reading the rest of the discussion, but math basically can be broken into two camps, computation heavy and proof heavy

proof heavy stuff I would caution about teaching students earlier, they need more mathematical maturity to do

computations for calc stuff, easily can be done by grade 6, maybe earlier if you set up the fundamentals correctly before that

first time he's vied for more maturity in children

Mathematical maturity, you can have that at 12

I really think math courses should be partially history up until newton/leibniz. Then you do proper calculus study

but usually you gain that through years of practice and gaining intuition

I think it is fundamentally hard to teach math optimally. What is being done is not working, but part of the issue is the people teaching early math are not math people

you end up with teachers with english degrees who themselves hate math teaching math to 1-6th graders

preempt the question of "when will I ever use this" with the example of when and why it was used

if someone who does not understand why math is cool is teaching math, the students pick up on that and hate it more

You don't even need to explain when it will show up, but that does help

You literally just need someone who likes math and understands the bigger picture teaching it

Math is inherently fun if you structure it that way (it is essentially just a puzzle)

I like this actually

no school does that because 95+% of teachers are not from a math background at an elementary level

Too many students legitimately believe that math is useless and boring and that a massive failure on the part of teachers

no school does that because they don't have textbooks that tell the teachers to say it

Same for science too

And by the time it is highschool where you will have people with a math background, kids who otherwise might have liked math have been selected out of it by poor early education

This is more a funding issue though, since if you had a dedicated math guy teaching math at elementary schools, I bet you math results would go up

(or math guys)

I have been thinking vaguely about how math education works lately, because of teaching during my TA work

Not exactly the same as this because I am dealing with math majors in their 3rd/4th year of a university math program, but still, I really do think you can systematically fix a lot of issues by just having the right people teaching the material

When half of what spooky said about the 15% applies to yourself, and yet you have a bachelors degree.

Half of the spooky opinions don't seem grounded with anyone who does actual work in the education system.

Every class of 300 students, you're talking about throwing away 45 of them. For every school, to every class that graduates, would be an astronomical number of kids being "Thrown out." Literally, the population would be more stupid and worthless by throwing them out. I don't think I could name 45 kids from 3 years of high school that I believed should have been thrown out just for being "stupid."

I know what you're all thinking, so don't say it

FWIW the kids I teach honors math are so below what I was

like “what do you mean add to both sides? I don’t get like terms?” Are questions I get almost daily

Covid and its consequences didn’t do these kids much help because they were in 2nd grade or lower when that happened basically

6th graders messing up placevalue of all things too

Asked them to write 42.7 in word form and got forty two point seven

constantly get billion and million wrong and I’m like did you even do anything before you got to my math class

Teach as in tutoring I assume

Thats kind of not a fair comparison, because the kids who are put into tutoring are more likely to be the bottom of the bellcurve

In my area the problem was the union and the teachers themselves who kept and pushed for classes to stay online and not at school. Even after Covid was ended and kids were supposed to go back to school in person the teachers and union made another push and almost protested to keep everything online. However the state, school district, and parents wanted their day care system back. It required the teachers to basically do zero work and get paid for nothing (which most of them still do). But even before Covid this was a trending problem that existed almost two decades prior.

Those teachers deserve death

They clearly don’t care about teaching