California State University students don't need four years of high school math to be successful, says columnist Sandy Banks
I’ve never managed to master much beyond the nuts and bolts of math. I was an honor student who could ace almost every subject, but ninth grade geometry tripped me up. I slipped through with a C, but needed three tries to pass trigonometry, with a D.
Do we really want to keep students like me out of college because of an obsession with the supremacy of STEM? After all, there are still plenty of careers that don’t require expertise in the meaning of imaginary numbers or the minutiae of quadratic equations.by requiring an additional year of math, I couldn’t help but think back to all those nights I spent hunched over homework, feeling dumb because I couldn’t get my head around complicated formulas that I would never need.
Brian Shay has taught all levels of math at San Diego’s Canyon Crest Academy, a public high school with 2,500 students. He was a finalist last year for a national award for excellence in math teaching, he’s helped develop California’s math content and standards, and he mentored hundreds of teachers during his 20-year career.
He believes our dismal math scores would rise over time if we employed that real-world mind-set at every level of math instruction — and if we put as much energy into preparing and supporting teachers as we spend worrying about students’ career choices.I was surprised to learn that research has shown that many teachers, particularly in elementary school, suffer from unaddressed math anxiety themselves.
“One of the biggest challenges is that the way we learned math in the past is not the most effective way to learn now,” said Shay, who was taught to “parrot” whatever the teacher said. He may have students still struggling with fractions in a class with others who are ready for calculus. “So some will do the basic steps, and others will go a little further. That way the advanced students aren’t bored and the students who need more support aren’t so disheartened that they give up,” he said.AdvertisementCalifornia already has a high-minded conceptual blueprint for teaching math, rooted in the sort of quantitative reasoning skills the CSU system is trying to promote.
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