redkudu: Well said. At-risk students do get scared, frustrated, and demoralized. It’s such a shame, because some of them are very bright with lots of potential. They tend to miss a lot of school, however, due to family problems, that they lose the thread of what’s going on, especially in math.
Lori: My grandchildren are being homeschooled. At first I was against it, but the more I see, the more approving I have become.
Elizabeth: Great point. I would love to see what would happen if districts had to pay for remedial education! Maybe they would even treat their teachers better.
Brian: I agree. People who are great at math, sometimes are not the best teachers. They can’t always get down to the students’ levels and see what the student doesn’t understand. (This is not to say that there aren’t many fantastic teachers who excel in math!!)
On the other hand, there are some excellent elementary ed teachers who really don’t get math. My sister teaches math methods for elem ed. teachers in a college, and she tells me some horror stories about the lack of knowledge some of her students have. (This is not to say that there aren’t many fantastic elem ed teachers who excel in math.!)
Stacy: Good point about voc ed. Why does everyone need a college degree?

I taught high school chemistry and I had some students who couldn’t add 8 plus 5 and get the right answer. I was supposed to teach them logarithms? I looked up their records and discovered they had received “A” in their last math class. But, it had been a long-term substitute teacher. Perhaps he just wanted to get everyone through. There are just so many things out of our control.

Whew! I think that was four cents worth!

I don’t have a very good idea what is taught in elementary school and high school now days. I think a few things can be taken for granted. Teachers, at all levels, have good intentions and want their students to learn. Teachers learn from their own experience, and the have the experience of others available to them in at least some forms. And teachers were students once themselves. But against this generally positive outlook we also have reason to believe that teachers get a lot of bad advice (a lot from the NCTM, which I have tried to document in my article httm://www.brianrude.com/disagr.htm ), and that those with experience and ability in teaching math are not very good at helping those who don’t (in my humble opinion), and that those with practical experience and ability in teaching math are not the ones teaching in ed school, and that in many situations teachers are laboring under administrative and societal and restrictions and expectations that are draining, if not actually counterproductive. The result of all this in the typical sixth grade classroom . . . . . I don’t know.

But it is that NCTM perspective that interests me the most. In 1996, or maybe it was 1995, I wasn’t thinking anything about math. But when my daughter brought home her seventh grade math book that began to change. I discovered it had no chapter on fractions. I couldn’t figure that out, so I keep looking over a period of months and eventually wrote up my thoughts in my article “Chicago Math”, which I later put on my website. Here’s a link. httm://www.brianrude.com/chi-mth.htm

My hypothesis is that fractions are often poorly taught, which makes it hard to teach decimals well, which makes it hard to teach per cents well, which makes it hard to teach a lot of applications of arithmetic, which means arithmetic is seldom understood very well by students, which gives them a poor foundation for algebra, which means a lot of algebra must be repeated year after year, which means that I end up teaching in college algebra simple things like equation solving and the meaning of slope which presumably were covered years back. In other words we have allowed ourselves to slide into a stagnant spiral syndrome, as I have mentioned in a comment above.

If this is what is happening it wouldn’t do much good to send them back to the sixth grade to learn what they should have learned then.

And if this is not what is happening . . . . . . . . then what is happening?

If college students cannot handle the 10 fractions listed on that page, perhaps they should go back to 6th grade and learn what they need to learn.

A student cannot succeed in higher math without the basics of add, subtract, multiply, divide, percentages, and fractions. As my 9th grade algebra teacher used to say:

“You guys and gals have no problem doing algebra, you just can’t add and subtract”

Sad indeed

My AP students do not take remedial courses in college. They are generally either exempted from Comp or report breezing through it — even my weak AP students (my course is open to any who care to enroll).

In general, however, it is the stronger students who take AP.

Perhaps, then, parents and students would demand that their high school do the job their suppose to be doing, preparing them for college, or at least the “college bound” students.

It seems to me that 4 year colleges shouldn’t be offering remedial classes. Maybe, yes, community colleges.

Those kids that intend to go to college and are on a college track should be leaving high school prepared. This is an obvious failure at the high school level and that’s where it should be addressed. Colleges could help by not accept poorly prepared students, leaving the high schools accountable. My guess is that they enjoy the revenue stream that the remedial classes provide.

I think we’re depriving a lot of kids opportunites by insisting that everyone, or nearly everyone, should be college educated. There are many wonderful vocational trades that are interesting, demanding and provide a satisfying living. We need qualilty vocational training, apprentice opportunities and interships at younger ages, intergrated into schooling at the high school level.

These kids are being ripped-off.

Way back when I graduated from a top private high school with a strong writing program, I enrolled in a state school that required ALL freshmen to take remedial english.

Seems to me there are two solutions — either the colleges shut up as remedial education is a revenue producer/make work for them by design. If colleges/universities were truly bothered by having to provide remedial education they should charge the school district from which the students come for the cost of remedial education.

Do the later and changes will be made immediately. I bet you real money the madness of sending “all” kids to college will end today.

And yet, as the number of students who are taking AP or IB classes has skyrocketed, has the number of students who are finishing college also gone up? Or do better students take AP courses?