[QUOTE="theone86"]
[QUOTE="surrealnumber5"] and see math competency skyrocket. i would much rather have a lot of B and C kids that know what they are doing that a slew of A students that cant count their fingers and toes, low standards for the loss
surrealnumber5
I can see how one might make the argument thatscoresaren't directly proportional to competency, but how the hell do you make the argument that scores are INVERSELY proportional to competency? If children are competent in math they should be able to register decent scores, period.
And that still doesn't change the fact that if you force advanced math on kids too early it's going to hinder their development rather than improve it.
it is the age my brothers started to teach me, i'd never push a standard beyond my ability. kids have a far better learning capacity than we give them credit for.Haven't we been over the whole judging the rest of the world by your own standards thing before? There is a whole field of psychology dedicated to studying how children and people learn, if just holding kids to higher standards worked then they would have figured that out by now. In fact, that's the oldest method in the book, just hold them to higher standards, and people have been giving it as a common-sense method since long before either of us were born. The problem is it doesn't hold up to objective scrutiny, the results are always overwhelmingly bad and the positive instances can never be reproduced with any consistency.
This is because there is something called a zone of proximal development, which basically means that children learn the fastest and retain learning the best when they are learning skills just beyond their current ones. In other words, if you go to fourth graders that are having trouble with algebra and try to teach them calculus then they are not going to get it because calculus is outside of the range of their ZPD. It's not just ability, either. If their brains are not physically developed enough they will not learn it.And finally children go through developmental stages which, if they aren't in a certain stage when you start teaching them calc, they will not be able to understand calc. If you try to force calc on them the vast majority will not get it, and you run a very real risk of making them feel inadequate and disenchanted and setting their education back even further than it was when you starting trying to teach them calc. It's just a bad idea.
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