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Dear All,

I wonder how you feel about the following: "California has new ideas about how to teach math, but critics argue it won't work." It brings up some relevant points and links to this article: "California's Math Misadventure is About to Go National." Both are important to read. I spend sleepless nights improving course materials to provide as much support as possible, including tending to the affective domain. As I shared with my colleagues (in response to an email that defended the changes in how we teach math), a dedicated, responsible, caring educator does everything necessary to support and ensure students gain the required knowledge and skills. However, it takes some serious time and effort to get to a certain level and eventually become a professional in STEM. These future experts will build roads and structures or design satellites, vehicles, and airplanes; they will develop new technology and discover rules that will lead to gadgets in medicine and other areas of human endeavor.

By taking away the opportunity for students to learn algebra and gain the needed tools, we are undermining STEM; if it happens across the nation, then it is a very serious process, something that has the potential of dismantling the very basis of future domestic generations becoming experts in science and technology – and that, to put it mildly, is not a good thing.

Thanks,

Violeta

Dear Violeta,

You raise an important issue. If students are kept from learning algebra early on, it is a disservice. I am also perplexed by the arguments for the delay. Here, in FL, after passage of SB1720 which took away developmental Math, we see high numbers of unprepared students taking college level classes. Now, all courses will be divided into 3 pathways. It is good for STEM students. But the liberal arts pathway may have no prerequisites. It is worrying because after these courses students will enter the university without sufficient Math skills. It may be too watered down.

Dear All,

I wonder how you feel about the following: "California has new ideas about how to teach math, but critics argue it won't work." It brings up some relevant points and links to this article: "California's Math Misadventure is About to Go National." Both are important to read. I spend sleepless nights improving course materials to provide as much support as possible, including tending to the affective domain. As I shared with my colleagues (in response to an email that defended the changes in how we teach math), a dedicated, responsible, caring educator does everything necessary to support and ensure students gain the required knowledge and skills. However, it takes some serious time and effort to get to a certain level and eventually become a professional in STEM. These future experts will build roads and structures or design satellites, vehicles, and airplanes; they will develop new technology and discover rules that will lead to gadgets in medicine and other areas of human endeavor.

By taking away the opportunity for students to learn algebra and gain the needed tools, we are undermining STEM; if it happens across the nation, then it is a very serious process, something that has the potential of dismantling the very basis of future domestic generations becoming experts in science and technology – and that, to put it mildly, is not a good thing.

Thanks,

Violeta

Dear All,

I wonder how you feel about the following: "California has new ideas about how to teach math, but critics argue it won't work." It brings up some relevant points and links to this article: "California's Math Misadventure is About to Go National." Both are important to read. I spend sleepless nights improving course materials to provide as much support as possible, including tending to the affective domain. As I shared with my colleagues (in response to an email that defended the changes in how we teach math), a dedicated, responsible, caring educator does everything necessary to support and ensure students gain the required knowledge and skills. However, it takes some serious time and effort to get to a certain level and eventually become a professional in STEM. These future experts will build roads and structures or design satellites, vehicles, and airplanes; they will develop new technology and discover rules that will lead to gadgets in medicine and other areas of human endeavor.

By taking away the opportunity for students to learn algebra and gain the needed tools, we are undermining STEM; if it happens across the nation, then it is a very serious process, something that has the potential of dismantling the very basis of future domestic generations becoming experts in science and technology – and that, to put it mildly, is not a good thing.

Thanks,

Violeta

Some disconnected thoughts that it would take pages, and hours, to defend. My main point: I am not bothered by states looking at how we teach mathematics. My only regret is that the push comes from outside of the community of math educators, not from within.

A quote from the Internet: "About 86 percent of jobs require simple addition and subtraction, but only 5 percent of jobs required calculus." Math educators tend to focus on algebra and STEM, but less than one in five students ever take calculus. So how much algebra did those four out of five need? (A bit, to understand formulas and graphs, yes.) And how soon did they need it? Not directly related but algebra skills may be less in demand in the future. Computer algebra systems (CAS) can do all the algebra we work so hard to teach; they can always find an antiderivative if one exists, but a human being cannot. I have heard of university professors who teach calculus using a CAS. (I did say disconnected...) 

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Philip Mahler
RETIRED
MA

Original Message:
Sent: 10-16-2023 04:31:03
From: Violeta Kovacev-Nikolic
Subject: What do colleagues think?

Dear All,

I wonder how you feel about the following: "California has new ideas about how to teach math, but critics argue it won't work." It brings up some relevant points and links to this article: "California's Math Misadventure is About to Go National." Both are important to read. I spend sleepless nights improving course materials to provide as much support as possible, including tending to the affective domain. As I shared with my colleagues (in response to an email that defended the changes in how we teach math), a dedicated, responsible, caring educator does everything necessary to support and ensure students gain the required knowledge and skills. However, it takes some serious time and effort to get to a certain level and eventually become a professional in STEM. These future experts will build roads and structures or design satellites, vehicles, and airplanes; they will develop new technology and discover rules that will lead to gadgets in medicine and other areas of human endeavor.

By taking away the opportunity for students to learn algebra and gain the needed tools, we are undermining STEM; if it happens across the nation, then it is a very serious process, something that has the potential of dismantling the very basis of future domestic generations becoming experts in science and technology – and that, to put it mildly, is not a good thing.

Thanks,

Violeta

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Violeta Kovacev-Nikolic
Full time faculty
College of the Canyons
Santa Clarita CA
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