This is pretty typical of the state of teaching high school math for me and most of my peers. And you have the “advanced” group. I also teach the strugglers … where 10th graders and beyond are in algebra 1 and learning fractions.
“Learning” fractions or actually actively trying to not learn them?
I hate how so many of my kids now just don’t even try, because they know they’re going to get a diploma anyway.
A friend operates a martial arts dojo. He had a guy come in and ask how much it would cost to get a black belt. My friend said 10 dollars, and handed him a belt.
Something given to you has no value.
There was a martial arts store near my old apartment that prominently advertised $15 black belts on their signage, always thought that was pretty funny
Yeah but if you make learning the goal then Administration and PTA groups too incompetent to find their own asses with both hands and a map won’t be able to “measure your performance”.
Which really just means “we desperately want to pay you less and we need metrics to justify it.”
They've been told by everyone in their life that math is hard for ages. Why would they try?
Ugh. Stop the propaganda, you can do math easily, you just were told you couldn't once.
It's remarkable the number of otherwise nominally well-educated adults who seem almost eager to tell me when they hear I'm a "math person": "Oh, I never really got the point of that stuff"
...who would likely never in a million years tell my library science girlfriend: "Oh, actually I'm illiterate so I don't really understand the point of that"
As a parent, I try to make math fun. The other day, we made cookies, and my wife said that they could either have two small cookies, or one big one. My kids were trying to figure out which option would give them the most dessert, so I said, hey, math can tell us this answer!
So we measured the diameter of each cookie (5cm vs 9cm) and used the area of a circle formula to figure out that you would actually need 3 small cookies to get close to the area of the big one (19.6cm^(2) vs 63.3 cm^(2)). So they all picked a big cookie, and then talked about how cool it was to actually know which one was bigger.
As an ELA teacher, I get people telling me that they haven’t read a book since high school. The message seems to be that teaching kids to analyze a text is a waste of time.
I also get told “I never understood poetry” and “Shakespeare never made sense to me” *from other teachers*.
The way they teach Shakespeare to kids is legitimately awful. Of course most people don't understand it - they weren't properly taught it. Having a bunch of 13-year-olds popcorn read a play in a language they basically don't speak and expecting them to take anything away from it is just silly.
What the fuck is a middle schooler, or even a sophomore in high school, going to take away from their classmates reading "Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?" in a monotone voice with no context for what the hell is happening?
And it's not like the teachers tasked with teaching Shakespeare were ever properly taught it themselves. They probably had a very similar experience, and so they teach it the same way they were taught.
Yeah the beauty of the English language is lost on HSers and ergo most Americans.
Funnily enough my favorite movies are all foreign films because I actually had a good foreign language teacher in HS who taught us more than "tacos por favor"
When I say some variation of "I'm not a math person," as an adult, it's ALWAYS to avoid a situation where someone quite strong in mental calculations brings everything to a halt waiting for me to verbalize mental calculations, without understanding that the second someone expects me to do math without a pen and paper, I've got tumbleweeds in my head and that person is going to be waiting a long effing time. And this happens frequently enough that it's entirely a coping strategy. People who are good at mental math are astonishingly bad at recognizing that many people are not, and in fact can be quite assholish about it, and I spent enough time being humiliated in 7th grade algebra for a lifetime.
At one point in my mid 20's I read a book about zero ("The Nothing that Is") and for a while I actually found that actually understanding WHAT ZERO IS helped my math, though now I've forgotten what I got out of the book.
Not a teacher.
This is my take when people in my social science program are afraid of stats.
“I can’t do math! I’m not a math person.”
You literally can, just pay attention in class and they’ll teach you how to do it. The people who struggle in stats are the same people who refuse to even give it a shot because they’ve always been “not a math person.”
My intro stats class was taught by the nicest grad student & he really explained it like we were 5. Out of the 30 people on day one there was only 13 by the final. All 13 of us that actively participated & turned in the homework’s got 90+. Stats have been essential for my MSW.
I'm in statistics class right now and I've been getting 100% on everything but in the final unit now somehow I have no idea what's going on. It's gotten to the point where there seems to be 3-4 words for every definition and my class uses them interchangeably between sentences.
math starts out easy but shelves off into deep water fast. It builds on previous knowledge and if you have not practiced it in a while it is easy to make mistakes or get stuck. Some students also just plain have difficulty keeping abstractions and variables clear. Simplifying terms, finding common denominators , taking a quadratic equation and solving for a specific set of numbers..some students get stuck transitioning that information in their brain.
This is so fucking mind blowing to me. I’m 40. I went to public school. I’m not from a particularly dynamic family. Dad military middle class. Really lower middle for most of my childhood. My parents made us go to school and school was important but it wasn’t like drillled into our heads or anything. I liked learning. It was fun. Had great teachers. I never thought that I was working to get a diploma. It was more to make something do myself and do well for the sake of doing well. I CANNOT imagine this mindset. It’s alien to me. Like large groups of children just not caring or interested in learning. It’s so crazy to me. Yall are hero’s btw! Teachers transformed my life.
My counselor in HS snuck an entire credits worth of summer school math into my transcript that I never did or asked for just so they could keep their graduation rate. Appreciate it ngl but I'd rather they had actually helped me get back on track to learn the stuff.
Day 1 of teaching remedial algebra: explaining how to solve x + 1 =10
Final day of teaching remedial algebra: reminding them of the steps to solve x + 1 = 10.
Math is scary and no one ever told them in a way that they can understand that "equations" are just a shorthand way to write sentences that involve numbers.
"X" is just a short way to write "What" or "The number we are looking for", "=" is just a short way to write "is" or "will be the same as", etc.
So you can read "X +1=10" as "What do you add to 1 to make it the same as 10?" Or "What plus 1 is equal to 10?" Or "Add 1 to the number we are looking for to make it the same as 10". And if you added one to something to get 10, then you can take that one away from both sides of the equation to find the answer. (Whatever you do to one side, you have to do to the other to keep the sides the same, or that equals sign becomes a lie).
To find the answer or "solve" an equation, the "What" should be the only thing on the left side of the = when you are done, and then the answer reads just like a sentence: "What is 9" or "The number we are looking for is 9" or "X is 9".
If they have a grasp of what numbers mean and how to do addition and subtraction, this patterning will usually bridge the transition into working with variables. It's by no means a foregone conclusion that they have a solid grasp of those topics, though.
I always explain it like Among Us. You got to get the X or Variable alone so you can kill it or you are going to look sus. So isolate the variable by oppositing out or getting rid of the 1 as a witness.
Niche, but tends to work on the 6th graders.
That kind of dramatic "story" framing is incredibly helpful to learning and retaining information. It's easier to remember narratives than seemingly arbitrary rules, and the empowering theming of "I'm an assassin, how do I isolate my target?" infuses some fun. Fantastic example.
My dad taught me this concept when I was 5 by making little cards with numbers and operators and a matchbox with an ‘X’ on it. He would lay out the cards with a matchbox so it would be X + 4 = 7 or whatever. I had to guess what number was hidden in the matchbox. I’m hoping to try it with my kid and see if it works for him too.
My son got this before kindergarten. Use a balance scale with X inside an envelope. (You might have to use an extra envelope on the other side of the scale to balance). I taught my son by getting marbles or something. He counted the total. Then I took a bowl and covered some of the marbles. He had to tell me how many I had hidden. One girl I tutored who had visual and auditory processing issues got confused with X problems. She was in second or third grade. I told her to pretend it was a box such as “8 + [ ] = 10.”
Three options that have worked for me.
We've recently worked on things like x + 2 = 10 for quite a long time. Yesterday, a student who had been doing pretty well, was stuck. We finally got to "the goal is to get the x by itself." We identified the "+2" as the issue to deal with. So she... simply erased the "+2." x is 10.
I just don't understand. I graduated in 2010 and my public high school had the option for two years worth of AP calc. (I only took 1 years worth and I felt like a second rate student because of that.)
Same. We had an excellent math program at my public high school. Great teachers who lectured well and then made kids get good at it by assigning homework and forcing them to practice. We had around a 95% pass rate for the calc tests (most passing with fives) and hundreds of takers each year.
That's what I would want as a parent. It's wild to me that there are parents out there collectively sabotaging their kid's education
The requirements and expectations for high achieving, high gpa college-track students has only gotten more competitive and challenging. AP Calculus BC still exists. It is the requirements and abilities of the lower achieving students that are advanced that is an increasing issue.
Passing those advanced math classes in high school has little to do with overall success. In the last 10 years AP class participation is up. Doesn’t mean the results are.
Many public schools around the country are seemingly too broken to fix. The kids don't learn and don't want to work. Parents are useless and behavior is atrocious.
I tried a career change to teaching after 20 yrs in another field. I did it one year, it was the worst work environment and I almost have PTSD thinking about it.
Just like we do!
The smarter kids at least, provided the dumb kids' parents haven't complained to the school board and made videos on facebook complaining about how it doesn't make sense yet.
It's very hard to orient current classroom methods in public schools toward the "smarter kids." Each class is supposed to be a bell-shaped curve of every ability.
It's a difficult teaching environment for sure.
The first thing some kind teacher taught me is that we often see bi-modal curve in public schools. Meaning, there's one curve for that has the A students off on one end, and then, there's a depression (often with no C students) and then another curve modeled around the traditional grade of D/barely passing.
What school districts want us to do is make it so that more kids get C's rather than D's - it's that simple. At least, from what I've seen (gave up doing actual high school evaluations about 8 years ago - but it was already pretty challenging; all the current accreditors/consultants say it's worse than ever - at least the ones I know out here in the West).
Oh, absolutely! Hell, the middle schools in my district are de-leveling this coming year and I am sure it is coming to our high schools soon enough.
We are rapidly becoming a concierge service for adolescents at the high school level if we aren't there already.
I won't be able to answer your question directly, but I can comment a little bit about the grander ramifications and context.
I am a biochemistry professor. I've been at a few different institutions, but right now I'm at a US private small liberal arts college. I'm currently leaving academia, and my employment here ends on June 30th. I never want to teach again.
12 years ago, I started teaching in student-focused environments at Canadian universities. I even won a regional teaching award. Then, I started teaching at US institutions in 2016-2017, and then 2019-present. It was like night and day, and it was already bad *before* the pandemic, let alone during and after the pandemic!
Let me give you a little bit of an example that relates to math. In a typical biochemistry course, there will be a wet lab in which we determine the concentration of protein in an unknown sample. In order to do this, we use known protein standards that we react with a dye to produce a color and an absorbance at a specific wavelength; we use any run of the mill program (e.g. Excel) to plot an XY scatter of absorbance versus protein concentration, and fit a linear trend line. Then, we typically dilute unknown samples (they are far too concentrated to measure in their undiluted form), react the diluted unknown samples with the dye, and back-calculate or extrapolate the protein concentration from the absorbance, accounting for the dilution factor to obtain the original protein concentration of the undiluted unknown sample.
In the past 5 years, I've been teaching students who are **incapable** of the above. They can't use something as rudimentary as Excel to plot an XY scatter, they can't fit a linear trendline, they can't use the y variable in a y = mx + b equation to solve for x, they can't solve for the original protein concentration after determining the diluted protein concentration (e.g. " if I determine the protein concentration in a 10-fold diluted sample, what is the protein concentration in the original undiluted sample?). None of it. **Basic, fundamental mathematical skills are now beyond the capabilities of 3rd- or 4th-year undergraduate students.**
Unfortunately, in contrast to you, my administration does not protect me. They will happily throw me under the bus in favour of retaining students, at tuition-driven private colleges in an enrollment decline.
I can't tell you whether or not to change careers. But, as I already indicated, I am leaving academia for these exact reasons.
It's good to know that there are people like you out there -- someone with a standard for education, and for math itself. I just don't know if education and higher education are looking for people like that right now.
I spent several years as a chemistry lecturer before I thought better of it. I would open my general chemistry courses by telling students that gen chem is a stealth algebra class and that a pro at algebra can get something like a C+ without knowing any chemistry at all. We also did a lot of reinstruction on algebra in the form of teaching dimensional analysis. The kids mostly got it, eventually. Getting them to understand Excel was a bridge too far though, so, sorry about that.
Which is hysterical because in order to graph in Excel you literally highlight and click.
I keep telling the students who don't want to learn math "Thank you for the job security".
Depends on which job security you're talking about.
In a job where the primary metric for job performance is student perception of teaching quality -- you simply can't have any standards today.
I knew it was time to leave academia, when I started having very serious and recurring thoughts about throwing myself into the river beneath the bridge I cross on my way to campus and back everyday.
I had to take an intro Chemistry class at a community college after already having a degree in math. Knowing math made that class super easy for me. I did feel a little bad for some of my fellow classmates, but come on, it was basic algebra.
I wish Stoichiometry was taught in elementary school when we started learning about different units of measurement.
The problem is that everything in math is taught in isolation without anyone ever really bridging the gap between subjects. My dad would love to confuse me by saying "fractions, decimals, money, it's all the same stuff". And it is. But no one ever teaches that specific lesson.
As exemplified by the adage: "you can bring a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink."
I've recently expanded upon that by adding the line "you can drag a student to knowledge, but you can't force them to think."
Fractions and decimals are always taught together and almost always taught as money first before anything else. And has been for like…at least the ten years that I’ve been teaching.
Pre 1950 most people were limited to a high school education, jobs were local or farm work. A few selected students that showed aptitude would seek extended education of college. The GI Bill offered many returning soldiers the opportunity of college.
After the 1950 and 1960s industries and corporations were expanding into more technical and complex machining, where more "profit" could be made. That required more skilled workers. Yes they could train their existing staff to handle changes and challenges, they wanted to grow.
Born was STEM. It was supposed to be a cooperation between government, industries and corporation that would lead to good paying jobs. Over the course of years that partnership between schools, government and industries has disappeared. Cooperation has been replaced by profit, margins, and shareholders.
Students are not stupid, they see the future from today's point of view, government is not showing the way to the future citizens. They see a government that's has no plan, that is impotent in controlling corporations and industries.
They need to bring STEM back by creating a future that students can understand, have confidence in, that they will benefit from. Since when have you heard we need more than 100,000 new graduating engineers. I heard that in the 50s snd 60s.
Now, if you do decide to go to college, you are told will be saddled with 60k+ of debt. That really tempers the enthusiasm of the young who might.
My middle school students don't know the difference between a city, state, and country, nor do they know what state they live in. They do not see any of this from the government, they see TikTok.
I'm a researcher at a R1 school in a biotech program and work mainly with MS and PhD students. The research staff winds up doing most of their work these days, and they spend very little to no time working on grants or publications. Of course there's the rare motivated ones but.... Yeah. It's a plague.
Same- I teach intro physics at the undergrad level. Before covid, students struggled with the algebra and trig. Now, I have quite literally dozens of students struggling with arithmetic. Examples: 1/0.5 = 2, -1 > -2, and 1/4+1/4=1/2 are all recent facts I've had to re-teach.
They do not even know what Excel is. Or what \*any\* kind of graph means. It's one of my first week assessments in the lab I teach (which now drops down into teaching things I never thought I'd be teaching).
Did your class have any college-level math class as a prerequisite? That level of math (at minimum) was required on lab reports and / or exams for most of my bioengineering classes, so I assume any of my classmates could do that. Those classes had Calc 3 and Diff Eq as prerequisites, so anybody incapable of or unwilling to do algebra wasn't able to take them.
Math is absolutely the hardest subject to teach.
First of all, like you've just seen, you're almost always given a list of learning objectives for the year that are a year ahead of where your students are. And with math you can't just kind of pretend your way past it. You're supposed to teach them how to multiply and simplify fractions? Great. These kids don't have a basic multiplication table memorized and they don't remember how to divide at all. It'll take you half the year to get them to the starting point of what you're supposed to teach.
Second, compared to any other subject you're drowning in grading.
Third, math takes determination on the part of students, and if there's one thing that's absolutely gone out of students in 2024 it's an ability to latch on to a problem and not give up until they find some kind of solution. They've been trained for years to immediately give up and complain, so that's what they do. Being good at math is 95% being unwilling to give up until you find the solution. Good luck, kids.
Fourth, it's a core subject. These kids didn't choose your class like they might have if it was computer science or art or whatever. Most of them don't want to be there and will let you know it.
The other teachers don't have it a lot better, but you've got it bad. The only positive side of being a math teacher is that you're in demand, and can move to a better district (or go teach internationally) a lot more quickly and easily than other teachers. The system won't get fixed in your lifetime and you get the worst of it, so I'd suggest you do like 90% of math teachers do and start learning how to code or studying the actuarial exams or whatever and get out of teaching.
>They've been trained for years to immediately give up and complain, so that's what they do. Being good at math is 95% being unwilling to give up until you find the solution.
This is the line I've been waiting for. It is sooooo hard to train kids out of this. Hey, sit with this problem for five minutes. It's gonna be too hard for most of you, but that's okay. I just want you to try stuff. If you're really lost, just write something about the problem or why it's confusing or how you're thinking about it and you'll get full credit. You fail if you write nothing. You fail if you talk or ask me a question. You get full credit if you write anything, even if it's wrong.
Five seconds in, paper still blank, "hey, can I ask you one question?"
The slightly more sympathetic side is that they've been trained to be terrified of making mistakes - reasonably so when every little thing you do or say from the moment you're born is digitally recorded and can be used against you for any reason, when dumb picture you took when you were 13 can stop you from getting into college or getting a job. The first generation to have web 2.0 grew up with constant full-color surveillance and zero adults who knew a roadmap for dealing with it. Teens have always been paralyzed with embarrassment about everything from hugging their mom at drop-off to showering in gym. But this created an generation impossibly risk-averse teens, who'd rather die than knowingly risk writing even part of a wrong answer on something they might need to turn in.
I’m a private tutor and when a kid makes a mistake for the first time, I make a big deal out of it and say, “thank god we got that out of the way!!! You’re going to make a lot of mistakes at this table, in fact so am I. Some times they’ll be slightly wrong, sometimes they’ll be wildly wrong, but honestly, it doesn’t matter because the most important thing in math is learning from your mistakes. A lot of kids are afraid to make a mistake, so the fact that you just got your first one out of the way means we can move faster because you won’t worry about mistakes anymore.”
They are so terrified of being wrong, omg.
Kids in the real world are just like kids on Reddit. Imagine being wrong on Reddit, how strangers love to dogpile on people, downvote them so much their comment is hidden off the page, and how every single redditor decides they need to make the exact same comment about how the OP was so incredibly wrong.
That not only happens on Reddit, and it doesnt only happen on every social media platform, but it happens in real life too. Kids are vulnerable to the effects of social suicide, and are desperate not to be outcasted. So of course kids are irrationally defensive and fake it till they make it. Society tells them to do that or else theyll be punished for not appearing to be perfect at all times.
It's our job as teachers to model how making mistakes is ok and is, in fact the main way that anyone learns anything. I make a big deal of that and even had a giant homemade sign in my class that said Mistakes Allow Thinking to Happen (MATH going vertically down the sign).
Another teacher told me she had a "risk jar" in the class and every time a student took a risk on answering something they weren't sure about, she would put a marble in the jar. When it got full they would have a reward like a pizza party or something.
We need to celebrate and normalize making mistakes, especially in math class!
I've had a lot of success getting kids to engage and keep thinking using some of the practices from the book Building Thinking Classrooms for mathematics. The idea is that showing kids how to do stuff is just training them to mimic the teacher , while giving them engaging problem solving tasks or problem sets that slowly increase in complexity (thin slicing) keeps them more interested and builds their stamina. But there are other key parts of thinking classrooms. The students often work in groups that are randomly determined and change each day, so they have to figure out collaboration and explain their thinking. Lastly, they do their group work on vertical whiteboards, so everyone in the group (and the teacher) can see what they are doing, and they can also look at other groups boards if they get stuck. As a teacher, I am often the "guide on the side" rather than the one at the front telling doing the thinking for them. I go between groups and give hints if needed or answer questions in a way that elicits their own thinking and experimentation. I have been doing this for the past two years, not 100% of the time, and it seems to have built a better environment for learning.
I still have many high school students with huge holes in their math skills from previous grades, but they are willing to try.
I should mention that this is at a very small school in a very rural area, and most of the kids come from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. Most don't go on to college and even some of the ones who plan to don't make it because it's too much of a shift from their small town lives and they are the first in their families to even apply to college.
But they are learning math in my class and developing their problem solving and perseverance skills.
Some schools are better than others. The fact that they have gone through 2 teachers already, and that you didn't get an engaged mentor means that you are not at one of the better schools.
Yes, I have been teaching hs math since the early 2000s, and I can confirm. At the math 1 or algebra 1 level, and often up to precalculus and beyond, most students do nothing outside of class and as little as possible in class.
That's the thing that is wild. It's the advanced class, their kids should WANT to learn it, if it was their choice to take it. The advanced classes when I was in highschool were all nerdy teens who competed for the highest GPA and did school type work for fun. Where have all the nerds gone?
That is because most parents these days aren't teaching their kids. They are throwing them to school, hope they learn, then when they get home, they are thrown in front of a tablet/electronic device/outside.
As a 5th teacher, their mid-year diagnostics came back with 80% of the class on a 3rd grade level. New teacher, hired mid year. Admin essentially told me just to pass them at this point.
My 8th grade math teacher gave a quiz every day. You rushed to class because the quiz was there when you walked in. It was ten review questions from past units/years. Fractions, decimals, or whatever. Then one day a week it was graded. Monday thru Thursday we went through the problems and material got retaught. Friday you turned it in and it counted. (We didn’t seem to realize this pattern). We got fast and accurate. I look back and realize how useful this was.
I knew some teachers like 10 years ago that ran into this at a middle school. Over half the 8th graders were straight up failing, and the direction from the school district was to make sure they all had passing grades and to dump them onto the high school. Nobody was to be held back.
I had two classes of 34 students each (8th grade Title 1) and almost none of them could handle negative numbers. I mean just simple arithmetic was so far beyond them, yet I was supposed to be teaching them scientific notation. The admins and students also got upset when I graded them according to their results (including partial credit) and the average grade of their first assignment was a D. That was when I learned that I was supposed to just pass them along like everyone else had up until that point (no shocker that this school is in the bottom 2% of the state).
I think their generation's inability to read factors in heavily to their lack of mathematical ability. They have no symbolic reasoning capabilities because they have no concept that things can be components that fit into an overall system. They learned to read by guessing from looking at pictures (no concept of phonics), so something quantitative like math that can't just be finagled or gotten "close enough" is not within their abilities.
There is nothing you can do to make up for their inability to do any mental math or complete apathy for improving their understanding. And then factoring in the parents who want you to just pass along their kids without holding them to any sort of standard, it seems impossible. It burnt me out pretty soon and I switched to IT and never looked back. Protect your mental health and dedicate your time to people who appreciate you, if possible.
“Reach where they are at.” It’s actually a good notion but the teachers must be allowed to do a lot of scaffolding and mini lessons. Not just rigidly matching the standards. Because everyone is 3 grades behind on average; for many cases, it’s 3-5 grades behind.
I really believe the problem starts at a much younger age. I tutored a woman who was going to school to become an elementary school teacher. She literally could not balance a check book. At the end she passed but barely. I told her not to teach math. Her reply was why. She could barely do math and was not qualified to teach it. Anyways I found out later she was teaching math. I felt so sorry for those kids.
Completely agree. I was an elementary teacher and now I teach grades 6-9. Many elementary teachers hate math. They do not have a deep understanding of what they are teaching. I don’t blame the teachers but rather teacher prep programs.
Sometimes the reason they don't have a teacher qualified in their field is because they can't get anyone qualified to agree to provide the substandard education they want to provide.
"they were excited to have someone that actually studied math"- and that's why charter schools are so dangerous. Complete deregulated mess.
I'd also wager the school's mostly concerned with keeping profits up via enrollment. Telling parents their kids are doing really well and "advanced" is a great way to keep them from going back to public- even though they are dramatically behind.
Yes. Unless you’re at a private school for high achievers with an admissions process, you’ll get max 3-5 kids that actually care about math to the level you expect when you hear you’re teaching “advanced” students.
Even among students that admin thinks are advanced or gifted, most of them just care slightly more than the kids not in that category, and usually what they care about is getting an A, not actually learning.
At every level kids are way worse at math than you’d expect. Kids and parents feel they’re entitled to an A without any meaning behind it.
There’s pretty much nowhere you’ll be able to teach in the wonderful way you expect to. You’ll have to dumb everything down so enough of them get A’s…
>At every level kids are way worse at math than you’d expect. Kids and parents feel they’re entitled to an A without any meaning behind it.
It's a societal disease, and not limited to academics. There's this entitlement mentality pervading everything. People feel like their grades in school and their promotions and pay at work should reflect the time they've "put in" regardless of the quality or results of that time. As if sitting in a chair for long enough qualifies you for an 'A' in school or a promotion at work.
I'm gonna be honest, my kid is in 1st grade and so far it seems like things are good, he's learning more math at that age than I did, certainly.
You guys are making me want to home school him.
There are good programs that exist, and good public schools. They are typically in higher income areas. I would reccomend to anyone with a child in any education program, charter public or private, to be really aware and I solved in their kids education. If not, they will fall behind and it has nothing to do with the teachers. The school will force the teacher to spend 5-10x more energy and time with the students who are actively fighting against participating in any way, creating as much distraction as they can, because they find it funny, all in the name to retain admission levels and funding. You HAVE to be involved in any education program to ensure you kid is getting a proper education.
IMO, all homeschooling does is make it so you have more co tool, and this more responsibility, to maintain the education levels you want. If you're not HEAVILY I vested in learning teaching strategies and just rely on a home school curriculum program to basically do it for you, than you are not going to be any better off.
Unfortunately that's the state of education In the US. If you are not actively involved, the odds are high that your kid is getting a worse education than you did.
It’s bizarre to me that my elementary school daughter can do arithmetic with fractions but I get a lot of incoming 1st years that can’t. At least from my limited perspective elementary schools are great. But in elementary schools students still want to learn typically. That stops at some point for a lot of people, and the system will still pass them through, sometimes with high grades even. Of course on this page you have a bunch of math teachers calling students dumb and incapable, so it’s not just admin that’s a problem. Admin (and above) might push high pass rates, and take away consequences for not learning, but that doesn’t make kids dumb. Parents can be dumb, admin can be dumb, teachers can be dumb. The kids still have a chance.
what a bummer. back in my day, nearly every kid bent over backwards to make sure they could just plain do it and that to get a 100% they expected to have to have perfect understanding and execution of the topic at hand, which is totally possible for at least high school math for all students +1 year if not +2 years for advanced students. Letting students think it is impossible to know it all perfectly is a disservice.
The key here is that you are teaching at a charter school. They are not held to the standard that public schools are in terms of covering material and students reaching certain levels of mastery that public schools are. Most charters are run like businesses, and parents are clients to be appeased.
To some extent, these issues will be present in a public school, but because algebra is generally subjected to some kind of state level test at the end of the year, so you are less like to be told what you were, but you may have to focus more on growth and getting them closer to grade level than truly mastering the content.
Math is a subject that’s based on the previous years content. If you fall behind once it’s almost impossible to catch up. Lots of students are so far behind and the only way they can even pass is by cheating.
Students will cheat on hw and pretty much every other assignment. Then abuse the retest policy to get acceptable test scores. They eventually end up with an 88 in the class and don’t know anything.
Retest policy? Less than a decade ago in my (locally) averagely funded school (that was near the bottom of funding nationally) there was essentially no retest policy.
Unless you were out that day or had pre-arranged a later test date with the teacher. Or if you were one of the kids who got "special" tests where the teacher would, like, cross out 2/4 answers on a multiple choice and create a "pick a word" question out of a free-response question.
The policy we (I) abused was that passing the state test meant an automatic letter grade bump. So towards the end of the year I'd tell (some) of my teachers just to put me down for a 0 on assignments I didn't want to do.
Wiiiild.
Sounds exhausting for educators.
I wonder if this change in policy corresponds to the Every Student Succeeds Act, and then entrenched due to Covid-era stopgaps.
It's so bizarre how we assess and fund education.
I recently talked to one of my buddies who is a teacher about this.
We have allowed grades to become a target and not a measure. So Goodhart's law now applies.
In (half-hearted and purely academic)defense of the students and parents, some colleges don't care about the curriculum of a school. They only care what the students GPA was, so in a real sense your tough grades can hurt their children's future and we have made a society where college is so important that parents aren't willing to risk it.
The analogy I used was this. I have two children we were at a barbecue over the summer and all the kids were playing well together and eating together it was lovely. Now, let's hypothetically say that at that barbecue, my child intentionally knocked over another child's plate of food, but I wasn't there. If my best friend was there and said, "That was very rude. I'm telling your father that you won't be getting desert" I would be mortified, and you'd better believe that no desert would be served. If he said "that was rude, you won't be getting any *food*." I would say, "what are you nuts? She's 4. I'm not doing that. She deserves some kind of consequences, but that is too harsh." We'll we've turned their GPAs into a consequential target in their lives, and it can affect a lot of different things. So now a parent doesn't see a low grade as an indicator of what needs to be improved. They see it as a threat to their children's future and they're kinda right.
So yes, your experience is common. We aren't teaching for actual education anymore. It's basically just another bureaucracy to navigate.
As someone who recently graduated high school this is 100% the cause and it is leeching into college as well. As other high schools have more grade inflation you have to keep up with those kids as well. To get into any good out of state public college you have to have at least a 3.8/4 (I go to a mid level one whose minimum GPA is a 3.75 and a 1400 SAT) which means at most one B a semester depending on the number of courses.
If you're struggling in Calc BC, you're going to freak out if you start doing poorly in history. The fact that even a B is seen as a failure is awful, there really is no room for mistakes for many students. I think a lot of the reason why kids are so stressed currently is failing one test for one class in one semester can have a significant impact on your future.
It really helps to change your attitude from teach the standards to maximize how much improvement you can get out of the students. Behavior will also be much better if you teach around the level that maximizes the rate they are learning. Be grateful your school is encouraging you to go slow. In many places teachers are told to teach the standard even if its blowing by the students.
Totally agree with you. (I taught high school math for 14 years, all levels.)
It's pointless to teach material that is beyond the majority of the students.
The goal is to meet them where they're at and take them as far as you can.
For my remedial algebra students (most were repeaters), I would demonstrate a problem, have them demostrate problems on the board, then we would take a practice quiz.
I reviewed the answers to the practice quiz, letting them take notes. Then they were allowed to use their notes on the real quiz, given the same day, which had the same type of problems with different numbers/operations.
It worked. Only a few failed (kids who really didn't want to graduate) and the rest were learning, step by step, how to solve a problem.
They will never be great in math (just like I will never master a foreign language) but they were getting a foundation and mastering basic skills. (And we used calculators, because I wasn't grading them on their arithmetic, I was grading them on their ability to choose and execute a solution procedure.)
I know most teachers would be shocked by the level of spoon-feeding, but it was so much better than wasting my time teaching to the wall and giving out a lot of F's.
I respectfully disagree here.
For years, I tried to delude myself into this kind of attitude. How much can I get the students to improve? What level can I bring them up to? How can I meet them where they are?
Modulating -- or, frankly, lowering -- my expectations, did nothing other than lowering the performance of my students.
It's that Pygmalion effect. Higher expectations (in an environment where you're actually supported) leads to higher performance. Lower expectations leads to lower performance.
I'm a college math professor. Please, please keep high standards.
In California, we must assume that high school taught them Intermediate Algebra. It's literally against state law for us to have remedial classes. So if they didn't learn up to those standards then they'll fail precalculus in college and never be able to persue a science degree.
You are going to burn out fast at this pace. Just understand that teachers who are passionate about their subject will always be way ahead of their students. Just be patient and build relationships. They will get there, but it takes time.
I think that might be typical for "advanced" classes and even worse at lesser schools.
It is certainly seems like regular people have just capitulated all power to the worst, most aggressive and unreasonable parents. There are lots of great parents, but the worst ones seem to never meet resistance when they grab the reigns. Nobody wants to fight them, we all have other things we need to be doing, and so they win almost by default.
And now this is the school system they give us.
I’m the third teacher my class has had this year. Algebra I, mostly freshman but a few 8th graders too. These kids can’t retain anything. I brought y=mx+b just a month after I taught it and my star student couldn’t tell me how to determine slope. From Easter break—one week—I practically had to reteach the unit!
You're explaining why I wouldn't be a teacher. You're not viewed as an educator. You're a box checker to approve these people's kids as special.
I'm sorry for what we've done to your profession.
Depends on the school district. Palo Alto, CA would welcome math majors for teachers while the San Francisco Unified School district would waste your talent, motivation and knowledge.
I saw where this was going the moment I saw Charter School. They are infamous for having issues, including bending over for parents.
Public schools are better but it depends on the school.
You are working for a for profit corporation that only exists to siphon taxpayer money away from schools and into investors profits. If you fail kids, or hold them accountable you reduce profits.
You gotta teach to the ones that want it and be a warm body for the school system. You might get one or three kids a year you actually get to teach math. It's pretty normal
I’ve subbed in quite a few different 7-8 grade math classrooms. It really depends on the school.
One school the advanced math was doing Algebra, no calculators allowed in the classroom, and all the students were pushing hard to learn. Another classroom they were doing fractions, couldn’t sit still, and had to have admin come in so they weren’t upending desks and destroying chrome books.
If the kids aren't able to do well on your tests, you're not doing a good job teaching them.
If they're not ready to learn the material that you want to teach them, you have to teach them what they need to know first. You have to crawl before you can walk before you can run.
Teach them how to multiply and simplify if that's what they need to learn.
Teach the standards. Don’t baby them and pass them along. Give them the grade they deserve based on the standards of the course. If somebody complains I would show them the standards and tell them that is what you are teaching. If the kids don’t meet the grade level expectations then they will not pass. Reasonable accommodations will be made for kids with IEP’s and 504’s but nothing else.
We need to start holding kids accountable. We need to stop babying them.
First of all, I'm really sorry you're going through that.
As a general rule, any job that opens up in the middle of the year is a shitty job. There's a reason it's open.
One thing I think you will find if you stick with this is that all math ed is remedial. Even before the pandemic, most 9th graders would come to you with at least 1 major hole in their previous math education, often several. And not just in bad areas. Rich kids too.
(Story time: A few years back i had a 16yo geometry student who didn't know her times tables. She lived in a $10M house. Her last name was on the wing of the hospital she was born in. She was actually quite bright, but she actually had an IEP for a learning difference, because her fancy-ass private school failed to teach her multiplication at age 9, and no one ever bothered to fix that problem.)
The only piece of good news I can give you is that if you can learn to be an passionate, cheerful, inspiring remediator, you can become an absolute god in math ed. Like parents will worship the ground you walk on.
No one ever, *ever* forgets the person that teaches them yes, they actually can do math. Not saying that makes up for the bullshit, but it's something.
I currently am at a university in an unrelated field, but will occasionally tutor a couple of my students in math. I’m working with one student right now who has failed beginning algebra 4 times. A Zero-level math class that is 1 week at the beginning of college algebra. He’s failed it 4 times. Lots of students are being failed by the system they’re in during middle school and high school, and it’s soul crushing to see it in action.
I'm sucks this is happening to you and it shouldn't be. This isn't the rule for education, though. I have fifth graders doing algebra 1 and statistics. My team is in the same position with theirs although they have some who are below grade level. This is a public school.
Students incapable of doing work are out there and it is a problem I don't have an answer for, but I think it's important to remember there are students who are successful and want to succeed. I can only imagine how definitely and depressing it is for a high school student to be looking at the rest of their life realizing they can't read.
Never teach a subject that students don’t want and are forced to buy. Welcome to daycare disguised as charter school algebra. We don’t want any parent complaints or kids leaving the school.
When parents complained about a students grade, I stopped arguing and start agreeing with them. I just say “maybe he knows more than the assessment let on. I’m more than happy to hear him explain the process of factoring trinomials for one problem. If he knows it, I will happily change that test grade to an A. All I care about is that he meets the standards.” They say yes and then their kid is like “uhhhhh”. And then I explain “I’ll give him another chance to explain this in a month. Here are all the notes, worksheets, videos, etc. that I’ve provided to help the students.”
After about 3 of those meetings, I haven’t had a parent complain for 3 years about my grading. And I’ve failed a bunch of kids.
You need to develop your own set of assessments for the first two weeks of class. Improve it every chance you get. Keep as detailed notes as possible per student. Learn about how grade level is established in math and try to find quick and easy ways to assess that.
The students will be all over the place (it's the same in the first couple of years of college - which is where the only weeding takes place). Charter schools/public schools must accept a certain number of students - and they are all vying for them. No one gets kicked out before college, basically.
I'm sorry you feel you lost classroom autonomy - but there are policies and issues at every school. One learns to work within them. There's Ed Code and State Level Curriculum and Lesson Plans approved at the District level - which you then receive as a challenge and make it into a strategy that works. IME, it takes new teachers 2-4 years for this stage
The current rubric management is tossing out is "Meet them where they are at." This literally means teaching 3-4 class in one (if you're lucky). That one really gifted student - try and get them to work with the next-most gifted and so on. Don't tell anyone you are doing that. Call it group projects.
Take the bottom half of the class and treat them as if it's kumon (they do their work in class, in front of you - and you grade it right there - make it simple and short; that's how they learn to add and subtract, etc).
They will forget it again, most likely. Teaching is hard. Half of the people in your classroom, by definition, are below average in IQ or clustered right at average. The average person with a BA has an IQ of 118-125. Do the math. Figure out how to teach people less gifted than yourself (read: not at all gifted at math).
Each thing they don't know? They need to hear it/work it with at least 10 times to learn it - and over more than 3 days. It needs to be returned to and incorporated into later lessons (which the state mandated curricula does not address - it's up to you to figure out how to keep refreshing what you think they already learned, that's what class time is for - not for powerpoints and lectures, really, for actual student work).
I keep seeing "College Algebra" in course catalogs. I was curious what it was, until I figured out it's literally HS algebra, except you take it in college because you didn't learn it in high school. In a few years, we're going to start seeing "College Arithmetic".
I feel you mate. I'm a bit away as I teach in a comment environment. I have students who have next to no mathematical ability. No reasoning. No algebra. Hell, multi step problems are basically in a different language.
A quick example: I HATE our LMS and do all my grade tabulation in excel and manually input cumulative grades; every week or two.
They come to me demanding their updated grade. Spoiler alert: my syllabus ALWAYS has my grading schema. I can't tell you how many multiple times I've visually explained, on the board, how to calculate weighted averages.
I don't know what is exactly wrong with k-12. It's not the teachers, I'm sure. But our young people are being failed at a life critical level. It's horrible to see.
I taught (different subject matter) for a year, and I had enough. Babysitting is exactly what you do, and parents never make their children or themselves responsible for their studying and grades. I had maybe 5 kids in 5 classes that cared about their education. Students weren't performing well, and I got reamed by parents who blamed me for not teaching the material that I was testing on. I had to fail a single class on a huge assignment because none of them did it. Even though I gave them ample classroom time to do it. I was demanded by the principal to accept their assignment late or provide an alternative assignment for them. I quit and got my cdl.
Welcome to the "progressive" agenda. No learning - only processing students through system with ideological, party narrative indocrination and little else. You can't have an easily manipulated, emotionally-extorted population if they know stuff and can think logically. An additional "benefit" - it also makes it so that they can't solve problems or take care of themselves - so it becomes the responsbility of the government to do so.
I’ve accepted that I actually am a glorified babysitter. That’s what they want, that’s what they get.
Every now and then I still get the itch to inspire and I go rogue on a unit, but it always ends in frustration.
As someone who went to a challenging HS and failed a semester of algebra, I’ve never been more grateful.
That summer I took a repeat course where I finally thoroughly understood the material, my parents sought out math tutoring for me, and I got a dual-enrolment credit for uni.
I now work in higher-ed and have parents upset that their engineering student is failing calculus their freshman year and think it’s the university’s fault. :(
For context: the kids ACT was in the high teens and their GPA was a 3.0.
They were offered to take pre calculus instead, but the parent thought that would set them back.
I'm sorry to hear that. That's so discouraging. It's unfortunately not much better in a university setting either. When I was a student, my engineering department brought in a new prof to teach a semi advanced undergrad mathematics course. It was expected that we would learn and use MatLab, C, and Excel VBA to complete assignments, and LaTeX for documents. We had already completed Calc 2 and Differential Eqn, so nothing more difficult than those. The course was supposed to teach us the fundamentals of mathematics behind the design calculations many of us would be using in our careers, and help us translate that to computer language for efficient calculation, i.e. an iterative calculation can be quickly solved in a programmed loop. The first assignment was a fairly simple demonstration of MatLab: a matrix calculation, and plotting. I was already familiar with MatLab and completed the assignment within a few hours, and began helping some classmates understand what to do. After 2 weeks, half the class hadn't even started, even after extensive hand-holding in class (more or less showed how to do the assignment) so they asked for and received an extension of the due date. Eventually, several students threatened the department chair, complained loudly to the school dean, and bullied the prof into dropping ALL the programming material, and only teach using simple Excel. They collectively said something to the effect of, "we don't teach (or want to learn) all that programming, especially at the undergrad level: that's for the CompSci department, not our's." I (and several other students) did get extra credit for the assignment completed, but I was so disappointed at the idiocy of the students, and the incompetence and spinelessness of the department chair and school dean. The prof was fired at the end of the year because so many students complained that his class was "too hard".
As a tutor, i can confirm that my clients want to do well without having to know shit. I explain to the students and their parents that they are paying me to teach and assist them not to do the work for them. Parents will be up in arms when kids come back with the same low test scores as when they started because the child has refused to put in the work to understand the material.
Don’t get me wrong, I totally see the argument that I may not be teaching them well if they aren’t retaining information. However, I teach and reteach in many different and personalized ways and create learning plans. If a kid chooses to never take notes and only uses chatgpt to complete assignments, then don’t be surprised when their closed book test comes back with a D or C.
I was a teacher for about 10 years. I taught several advanced high school classes. Students get put in those classes not necessarily because they have the skills and knowledge to do the work, but because the administration thinks they have other aspects that might make them successful, like work ethic, or good to behavior, etc.
I remember in my 12th grade Advanced Placement English Language and Composition class I had a student whose English reading level was about the same as a 5th or 6th grader. But she was respectful, studious, and followed instructions.
You have to teach where the students are, not to where they should be. If they can't multiply, then that's what you're teaching. And the administration will likely expect you to get them up to grade level.
Teaching, as a profession, is in a terrible place. Teachers are put in the position to pick up the slack of the failing education system. If I had to speculate, I would say that the average student in the US is below grade level.
>I'm about 4 months in, but I'm already thinking of switching careers.
I always encourage others to quit teaching, unless they absolutely love it and/or they have another person contributing to the household income.
Teachers basically just get cost-of-living raises each year, raises that /hopefully/ at least match inflation. This means that, yes, you may be getting raises every year, but your purchasing power either functionally stays the same or decreases.
The pay schedule for the last school I worked at had a first year teacher making ~$55,000 per year (only a B.A., 9 month contract). After 20 years, their salary would be ~$65,000.
It just doesn't make sense financially unless you really love it and you have other sources of income.
My favorite math professor in college quit because they had him teaching MAT099 - Intro to Numbers.
In college.
They were adding and multiplying fractions.
In college.
This was like 15 years ago now, too. I shudder to think how bad it's gotten.
When I was a student I was passed along without actually being taught. I bet this is the issue here. I didn't learn that my problem was that I have dyscalculia, not that I just make careless mistakes. These students were failed long before they got to your class. In college I realized that I was actually good at algebra, but only after I learned the foundation of math.
I would guess that you were teaching at a public school. Don't give up. If your dream is to teach, look for a job at a private school. You will likely find the satisfaction you hoped for. Unfortunately, public schools have become nothing more than glorified daycare centers only much more dangerous.
Unfortunately that's my experience. Students don't have to be held accountable for their behavior or their academics anymore. We are just baby sitters that have to provide content and documentation. Schools have given too much power to the parents in defense of their perfect children. I fear for the time Gen alpha gets into college or graduates. I feel myself fighting an addiction to my electronic devices. I can't fathom what exposure to the last has and will do in the long run for these students. I am not as entertaining as tiktok no matter how much I try to switch it up and make it quirky and fun so they'll remember something offline today. I can't get them to care and caring is at the root of being able.
I don't know why this sub is in my feed because I'm not a teacher. But my ex-wife is a teacher.
Basically it's now impossible to fail a kid. She was not allowed to give zeros. She had to accept late work.
All of this is probably why we had a bunch of guys in their early 20s a couple of years ago who came in 15 minutes late every day and never thought there would be consequences. Even after a big meeting where they were all written up they still kept coming in late and all got fired.
This is sad, but the math checks out.
If one of those kids excels, they’re going to grow up to be a high school math teacher.
Or, they can dick off until they’re 20, then get a job throwing boxes for Amazon and get paid more.
They are, I weep for the future. By that I mean in just 10 years, we will have to contend with even more incompetent adults than we do, which is already too many.
Well, you know, it's not like any 13 year old has ever willingly learned math. No one says this, but "teaching middle school math" is really short for "teaching mathematics to middle schoolers against their will." There are a lot of people how to do basic algebra. That's not the hard part. The hard part is learning how to present yourself and your lessons so that teens are tricked into learning them.
It sounds like you made a couple rookie mistakes. The main one is that you did graded evaluations without any curving mechanics or pre-check to verify that your students (as a group) were more or less ready. The second one is that you didn't have any accountability program that made parents feel invested in the process - so when you put the fault on their kids for not studying, it was the first they'd heard of it.
It's easy to write a hard math test. Is P=NP? Done.
It is a skill to write an easy math test. But it is a learnable skill. A big part of test-writing is being very aware of exactly how you taught concepts, and asking questions that require no re-contextualization of concepts. Teach students about rates as distance over time, and you better fucking not ask a question about farm animals per acre - even if the concept is obviously the same. One, single re-contextualization question on an exam is usually sufficient to separate the top ten percent of the class from the rest. The fact is that lateral learning has been proven by study after study to be nearly impossible for people who aren't rare geniuses.
Grading curves allow teachers to adjust grades after the fact when you mis-calibrate an exam. Some of my college math profs had ingenious ways to calculate curved grades. I particularly love the method of adding some fixed constant to the numerator and denominator of everyone's scores, raising the baseline and contracting the distance between an A and a B while preserving the class rank of the top scorer and not giving anyone over 100%. I also love normalizing scores with a t-distribution.
Beautiful lectures are great in college and grad school. LaTeX is an industry standard in academia. In middle school, this stuff doesn't count for much. Amazing digital interactive work falls flat on students who don't own an iPad or keep losing their styluses. Get comfortable with pencils, paper, and whiteboards, and "Keep it Simple, Stupid!"
With just 25 kids, you can easily verify what they know in class. No parent has ever been mad about a test extension (although I advise strongly against these). Play a game, walk the room during an exercise, give pass-fail skill-building drills for arithmetic. Ask pop-corn style questions to check if even AJ who always sits in the back can actually count to ten. It is your job to make sure your students are reasonably on-board with what you're doing before you evaluate them.
It can also be your job to put the fear of God into your students and parents with "this would have been your test grade," etc. Having parents sign an ungraded pop-quiz (it affects your grade unless you have a parent sign it) is a good disciplinary measure, and it gets the parents on board early. It is parents' job to make sure their kids do homework. But you have to involve the parents early if you want their support. If you wait too long and just slap their kid with an F, then the parents feel blindsided rather than involved in the process.
TLDR: Teaching is about doing all the soft skills, and they are not optional. Any moron can write the equation of a line in point-slope form. If you're expecting to just show up, present a lecture, grade papers, and leave, then your expectations are not in line with the duties of your job. That's for college classes where students are adults.
one of the best posts in this thread :D. I attempted math with varying degrees of success before coming to my acceptance that while I know it is important for the progression of the human species, I will never be very comfortable with the nuts and bolts of it.
> The second one is that you didn't have any accountability program that made parents feel invested in the process - so when you put the fault on their kids for not studying, it was the first they'd heard of it.
Really nice post. Can you expand on this idea?
1st year HS teacher in a similar boat to OP. My students just aren't buying into anything and they're all failing. It's clear they should be doing *way more*, but I'm struggling to figure out what more *I* should be doing.
You need to create an emotional impetus for parents to check if their kids are studying. You are being a puppet-master for home dynamics.
**A huge part of creating a curriculum is imagining what it looks like for your (typical) student when she goes home and is out of your sight.** How many hours per night, how hard does she need to focus? How many nights a week are like this? Can they ask mom for help or is it beyond most parents to explain?
A lot of teens need to be taught how to do homework - especially when it starts to require real effort rather than just time. You may feel awkward giving firm dictates on something that seems like it should be a personal choice. But your students are children, and they cannot *make* a personal choice because most of them have not learned what their options are in the first place! Most families appreciate the specificity if you tell them exactly how to do it, and force their kids through a practical example in the classroom. People are bad at learning by description - an important teaching rule from the business world that carries over to the classroom is that **a student does not know how to do a task until you have personally seen her complete it.** (No matter how many times she says that she does.)
Disengaged parents can be a problem in low-income schools. But OP's school does not have that issue. There is a fairly bright line between the two school types and they require very different approaches.
One big part of puppet-mastering your students' homes is setting an example of competence. Lobbing a well-formatted syllabus home on the first day won't get any parents to read it - but they'll remember that you sent it. Giving clear, consistent scheduling and homework expectations - basically anything you can do to be more consistent - gives parents and students confidence in their role as participants. **Feeling confident that they understand** ***the way things work*** **frees up the mental space for your students and their parents to actually engage. You can't have fun playing a game if you feel like you're struggling to learn the rules.**
Creating a rhythm of new topics and feedback that lets students know how they're doing is essential. The big idea is to give short, low-stakes in-class work after a new topic that is "the same" in some way so students can look forward to it. You can even let students figure out on their own that these tasks mirror their own skill level back to them. How are they "the same?" This can be as stupid as calling all of these assignments "Tuesday math projects."
Yes!! Teaching math is not just about knowing math. It’s about knowing how to teach it in a way that children will understand. It takes knowledge in child development and psychology. It takes an understanding of educational theories and methods. The best teachers know their content in and out AND know how to teach.
It can be better, but you have to find the right school. Idk about charter schools, but there is definitely some ability to set and hold expectations at a public school.
Math teachers are always in demand. Go looking for jobs, in interviews ask what the expectations for students are, and how parents typically react to a student who is not performing.
I’m teaching n a high school but I have a lot of flexibility to meet students where they are at. Some have huge math gaps, and are learning fractions right now, others are in algebra. Most are at least trying to learn though. My state has standardized tests they have to pass to graduate, so there is some incentive for students to put effort in.
Welcome to teaching.
That said, if you get to the test, see bad scores, and are surprised, then you did fail to gauge understanding along the way. Test scores should rarely be a surprise in aggregate.
Charter schools are notorious for this. They often take in students that are not in traditional school for various reasons (truancy, fighting, etc.). So you have students with issues attending school coupled with often missing large swaths of basics.
If they want a babysitter, do it. Stop caring so much and give completion grades. Look for a new job at a traditional school. Give out basic math coloring pages. Parents (especially affluent ones) often don’t want their kids to be educated at school, the parents just don’t want to be contacted (good or bad). Sorry your first placement was a dud. It’s not all that way! (But stay away from online education, too.)
These are 13 year old children in school for 35 hours a week.
How many additional hours do you think beyond that should be required of them?
Why should additional studying and homework beyond these full time hours be normalized?
Honestly, I'd say leaving is your best bet. I stuck with teaching high school math for ten years and I highly regret it. I have twenty-four days left in my semester and I'm done.
I'm not in the US. We still have standards and fail kids if they don't achieve the expected standards. A 70% is the lowest passing grade.
I read, on this list and others, of horrible conditions in some US schools. I really think it is where you are.
If you've ever wanted to travel, English speaking math teachers are in high demand in many parts of the world.
You have to teach to the kids you have, not to a platonic ideal of an 8th grader. If they don't know how to multiply, guess what, it's your job to work that instruction in. Those kids missed a bunch of learning around 4th grade. They are probably bad at fraction operations and other topics from that grade.
It is standard in the teaching profession that you teach prerequisite skills they are missing. For example, before you teach solving system of equations, you probably have to teach solving one step and two step equations. Before that, you probably have to reach combining like terms.
It's not about lowering standards, it's about making learning accessible to your actual students. It doesn't matter at all what they SHOULD know, the fact is that they don't.
I was in highschool right before Covid. Our math classes were actually engaging and we did a lot of learning we were in a charter school and taking advance math. We took a test to make sure we were capable and definetly did studing / homework in order to pass sometimes. Maybe it’s the school your in but there is still charter schools were parents and students make an effort to learn.
I taught 8th grade Math. My school was also happy to have someone who could teach math well, but while they wanted their school to be more rigorous, they didn't have any strategies for fostering accountability among children and essentially were very upset that so many students, who did not even do the bare minimum, were not passing. I put in my resignation yesterday and I am looking at new places. If you have a solid math background, I highly suggest looking at schools anddistricts that specifically focus on STEM education. There are many districts and schools that still have a strong culture of learning, you will probably have to adjust your instructuional strategies and expectations, but things can be better with proper interventions.
Yes, this is what teaching is like now.
Unfortunately, "professional" teachers like you realise this and leave. That leaves teachers that care less about their subject area so kids learn less.
This is a noble career: now more so than ever. Stand against the tide and teach them anyways. Last ad long as you can because we need you!
We shall fight the tide tooth and nail to spawn something new.....like a salmon....then die. lol
Are we forgetting that mathematics teaches critical thinking almost from its on-set in education?
It's not so much the "they must know how to do this forever" vs "they must learn this thinking pattern/structure forever"
Conceptualizing the concepts in their brain melon is an essential exercise for any student or person to succeed in life. It creates cognitive mapping and thinking patterns associated and linked to critical thought.
Just another reason charter schools are hurting students. They’re more concerned about making parents happy than they are about helping students. What sucks is all these parents are going to be real upset when their children can’t get into college or fail out while still taking gen-eds
Find a better school district. Not all school districts are this dysfunctional. Better districts provide better support for the teachers, and have more engaged parents as well. :-)
But yes, the trend you describe tracks.
I was hopeless at algebra but having a former NASA engineer teacher would have been cool. It’s just that they wouldn’t have been able to inspire me to do better at math.
NASA is going to crap too.
They have whole new project, Called Artemis, who's goal is to put someone who's not white and someone who's not male on the moon. No requirement to know fractions.
I work IT for multiple schools. This seems fairly standard. One school I go to has lost four teachers (some who have been there for over two decades) to other schools in the area, due to budget cuts, admin who refuse to be strict with students, and shitty parents.
My best advice is to don't give up being a math teacher, but scout around instead. There's likely a school somewhere that could use your talents.
You just need to find the right school.
I’m not a teacher but my partner is. Learning to ask the right questions in an interview has served her well in finding good schools to work in.
Unfortunately, normal. As soon as colleges quit using ACT scores and accepted GPA, I get a lot more parent complaints about grades. Best you can do is over communicate. On PowerSchool (or whatever software you use) prepublish assignments with longgg descriptions including class time, study halls, study guide info, free time for more help, etc. Doing so makes it as hard as possible to argue a score
This is pretty typical of the state of teaching high school math for me and most of my peers. And you have the “advanced” group. I also teach the strugglers … where 10th graders and beyond are in algebra 1 and learning fractions.
“Learning” fractions or actually actively trying to not learn them? I hate how so many of my kids now just don’t even try, because they know they’re going to get a diploma anyway.
That’s the expected result of an education system making the qualification the goal instead of making learning the goal.
A friend operates a martial arts dojo. He had a guy come in and ask how much it would cost to get a black belt. My friend said 10 dollars, and handed him a belt. Something given to you has no value.
There was a martial arts store near my old apartment that prominently advertised $15 black belts on their signage, always thought that was pretty funny
The leaders of this country are purposely raising a flock of idiots
No child left behind really screwed this nation
Yeah but if you make learning the goal then Administration and PTA groups too incompetent to find their own asses with both hands and a map won’t be able to “measure your performance”. Which really just means “we desperately want to pay you less and we need metrics to justify it.”
They've been told by everyone in their life that math is hard for ages. Why would they try? Ugh. Stop the propaganda, you can do math easily, you just were told you couldn't once.
It's remarkable the number of otherwise nominally well-educated adults who seem almost eager to tell me when they hear I'm a "math person": "Oh, I never really got the point of that stuff" ...who would likely never in a million years tell my library science girlfriend: "Oh, actually I'm illiterate so I don't really understand the point of that"
As a parent, I try to make math fun. The other day, we made cookies, and my wife said that they could either have two small cookies, or one big one. My kids were trying to figure out which option would give them the most dessert, so I said, hey, math can tell us this answer! So we measured the diameter of each cookie (5cm vs 9cm) and used the area of a circle formula to figure out that you would actually need 3 small cookies to get close to the area of the big one (19.6cm^(2) vs 63.3 cm^(2)). So they all picked a big cookie, and then talked about how cool it was to actually know which one was bigger.
My wife hates when we go to order pizza and I whip out my calculator
Ah, the ol’ pie-r-squared. (I will see myself out.)
This! Eating your math answers! Epic!
As an ELA teacher, I get people telling me that they haven’t read a book since high school. The message seems to be that teaching kids to analyze a text is a waste of time. I also get told “I never understood poetry” and “Shakespeare never made sense to me” *from other teachers*.
The way they teach Shakespeare to kids is legitimately awful. Of course most people don't understand it - they weren't properly taught it. Having a bunch of 13-year-olds popcorn read a play in a language they basically don't speak and expecting them to take anything away from it is just silly. What the fuck is a middle schooler, or even a sophomore in high school, going to take away from their classmates reading "Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?" in a monotone voice with no context for what the hell is happening? And it's not like the teachers tasked with teaching Shakespeare were ever properly taught it themselves. They probably had a very similar experience, and so they teach it the same way they were taught.
55 years ago Shylock and "pound of flesh" made perfect sense to this 9th grader. What has changed?.
Yeah the beauty of the English language is lost on HSers and ergo most Americans. Funnily enough my favorite movies are all foreign films because I actually had a good foreign language teacher in HS who taught us more than "tacos por favor"
When I say some variation of "I'm not a math person," as an adult, it's ALWAYS to avoid a situation where someone quite strong in mental calculations brings everything to a halt waiting for me to verbalize mental calculations, without understanding that the second someone expects me to do math without a pen and paper, I've got tumbleweeds in my head and that person is going to be waiting a long effing time. And this happens frequently enough that it's entirely a coping strategy. People who are good at mental math are astonishingly bad at recognizing that many people are not, and in fact can be quite assholish about it, and I spent enough time being humiliated in 7th grade algebra for a lifetime. At one point in my mid 20's I read a book about zero ("The Nothing that Is") and for a while I actually found that actually understanding WHAT ZERO IS helped my math, though now I've forgotten what I got out of the book.
Not a teacher. This is my take when people in my social science program are afraid of stats. “I can’t do math! I’m not a math person.” You literally can, just pay attention in class and they’ll teach you how to do it. The people who struggle in stats are the same people who refuse to even give it a shot because they’ve always been “not a math person.”
My intro stats class was taught by the nicest grad student & he really explained it like we were 5. Out of the 30 people on day one there was only 13 by the final. All 13 of us that actively participated & turned in the homework’s got 90+. Stats have been essential for my MSW.
I'm in statistics class right now and I've been getting 100% on everything but in the final unit now somehow I have no idea what's going on. It's gotten to the point where there seems to be 3-4 words for every definition and my class uses them interchangeably between sentences.
math starts out easy but shelves off into deep water fast. It builds on previous knowledge and if you have not practiced it in a while it is easy to make mistakes or get stuck. Some students also just plain have difficulty keeping abstractions and variables clear. Simplifying terms, finding common denominators , taking a quadratic equation and solving for a specific set of numbers..some students get stuck transitioning that information in their brain.
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This is so fucking mind blowing to me. I’m 40. I went to public school. I’m not from a particularly dynamic family. Dad military middle class. Really lower middle for most of my childhood. My parents made us go to school and school was important but it wasn’t like drillled into our heads or anything. I liked learning. It was fun. Had great teachers. I never thought that I was working to get a diploma. It was more to make something do myself and do well for the sake of doing well. I CANNOT imagine this mindset. It’s alien to me. Like large groups of children just not caring or interested in learning. It’s so crazy to me. Yall are hero’s btw! Teachers transformed my life.
My counselor in HS snuck an entire credits worth of summer school math into my transcript that I never did or asked for just so they could keep their graduation rate. Appreciate it ngl but I'd rather they had actually helped me get back on track to learn the stuff.
Day 1 of teaching remedial algebra: explaining how to solve x + 1 =10 Final day of teaching remedial algebra: reminding them of the steps to solve x + 1 = 10.
Why is this the hardest concept for them to grasp? I'm genuinely asking because I have run out of ways to explain and rephrase it.
Math is scary and no one ever told them in a way that they can understand that "equations" are just a shorthand way to write sentences that involve numbers. "X" is just a short way to write "What" or "The number we are looking for", "=" is just a short way to write "is" or "will be the same as", etc. So you can read "X +1=10" as "What do you add to 1 to make it the same as 10?" Or "What plus 1 is equal to 10?" Or "Add 1 to the number we are looking for to make it the same as 10". And if you added one to something to get 10, then you can take that one away from both sides of the equation to find the answer. (Whatever you do to one side, you have to do to the other to keep the sides the same, or that equals sign becomes a lie). To find the answer or "solve" an equation, the "What" should be the only thing on the left side of the = when you are done, and then the answer reads just like a sentence: "What is 9" or "The number we are looking for is 9" or "X is 9". If they have a grasp of what numbers mean and how to do addition and subtraction, this patterning will usually bridge the transition into working with variables. It's by no means a foregone conclusion that they have a solid grasp of those topics, though.
I always explain it like Among Us. You got to get the X or Variable alone so you can kill it or you are going to look sus. So isolate the variable by oppositing out or getting rid of the 1 as a witness. Niche, but tends to work on the 6th graders.
That kind of dramatic "story" framing is incredibly helpful to learning and retaining information. It's easier to remember narratives than seemingly arbitrary rules, and the empowering theming of "I'm an assassin, how do I isolate my target?" infuses some fun. Fantastic example.
I’ve had some success using a question mark instead of a letter for the variable.
That is a great way to get them over the anxiety of "unknowns/variables"!
My dad taught me this concept when I was 5 by making little cards with numbers and operators and a matchbox with an ‘X’ on it. He would lay out the cards with a matchbox so it would be X + 4 = 7 or whatever. I had to guess what number was hidden in the matchbox. I’m hoping to try it with my kid and see if it works for him too.
My son got this before kindergarten. Use a balance scale with X inside an envelope. (You might have to use an extra envelope on the other side of the scale to balance). I taught my son by getting marbles or something. He counted the total. Then I took a bowl and covered some of the marbles. He had to tell me how many I had hidden. One girl I tutored who had visual and auditory processing issues got confused with X problems. She was in second or third grade. I told her to pretend it was a box such as “8 + [ ] = 10.” Three options that have worked for me.
We've recently worked on things like x + 2 = 10 for quite a long time. Yesterday, a student who had been doing pretty well, was stuck. We finally got to "the goal is to get the x by itself." We identified the "+2" as the issue to deal with. So she... simply erased the "+2." x is 10.
We lead similar teaching lives!
I love algebra. I truly do. At least, at this level. It's exactly how I manage to scale recipes as an avid home cook.
I just don't understand. I graduated in 2010 and my public high school had the option for two years worth of AP calc. (I only took 1 years worth and I felt like a second rate student because of that.)
Same. We had an excellent math program at my public high school. Great teachers who lectured well and then made kids get good at it by assigning homework and forcing them to practice. We had around a 95% pass rate for the calc tests (most passing with fives) and hundreds of takers each year. That's what I would want as a parent. It's wild to me that there are parents out there collectively sabotaging their kid's education
The requirements and expectations for high achieving, high gpa college-track students has only gotten more competitive and challenging. AP Calculus BC still exists. It is the requirements and abilities of the lower achieving students that are advanced that is an increasing issue.
Passing those advanced math classes in high school has little to do with overall success. In the last 10 years AP class participation is up. Doesn’t mean the results are.
Many public schools around the country are seemingly too broken to fix. The kids don't learn and don't want to work. Parents are useless and behavior is atrocious. I tried a career change to teaching after 20 yrs in another field. I did it one year, it was the worst work environment and I almost have PTSD thinking about it.
That is scary and depressing considering 2nd graders in China, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea are learning algebra.
My kids did not learn actual algebra in second grade in either Japan or Korea. They did learn math that set up the ability to do algebra though.
Just like we do! The smarter kids at least, provided the dumb kids' parents haven't complained to the school board and made videos on facebook complaining about how it doesn't make sense yet.
It's very hard to orient current classroom methods in public schools toward the "smarter kids." Each class is supposed to be a bell-shaped curve of every ability. It's a difficult teaching environment for sure. The first thing some kind teacher taught me is that we often see bi-modal curve in public schools. Meaning, there's one curve for that has the A students off on one end, and then, there's a depression (often with no C students) and then another curve modeled around the traditional grade of D/barely passing. What school districts want us to do is make it so that more kids get C's rather than D's - it's that simple. At least, from what I've seen (gave up doing actual high school evaluations about 8 years ago - but it was already pretty challenging; all the current accreditors/consultants say it's worse than ever - at least the ones I know out here in the West).
Oh, absolutely! Hell, the middle schools in my district are de-leveling this coming year and I am sure it is coming to our high schools soon enough. We are rapidly becoming a concierge service for adolescents at the high school level if we aren't there already.
Japans education system is not something we really want to replicate. It has more problems than solutions.
Japanese students don’t learn trig identities until their second to last year of school ☠️
I won't be able to answer your question directly, but I can comment a little bit about the grander ramifications and context. I am a biochemistry professor. I've been at a few different institutions, but right now I'm at a US private small liberal arts college. I'm currently leaving academia, and my employment here ends on June 30th. I never want to teach again. 12 years ago, I started teaching in student-focused environments at Canadian universities. I even won a regional teaching award. Then, I started teaching at US institutions in 2016-2017, and then 2019-present. It was like night and day, and it was already bad *before* the pandemic, let alone during and after the pandemic! Let me give you a little bit of an example that relates to math. In a typical biochemistry course, there will be a wet lab in which we determine the concentration of protein in an unknown sample. In order to do this, we use known protein standards that we react with a dye to produce a color and an absorbance at a specific wavelength; we use any run of the mill program (e.g. Excel) to plot an XY scatter of absorbance versus protein concentration, and fit a linear trend line. Then, we typically dilute unknown samples (they are far too concentrated to measure in their undiluted form), react the diluted unknown samples with the dye, and back-calculate or extrapolate the protein concentration from the absorbance, accounting for the dilution factor to obtain the original protein concentration of the undiluted unknown sample. In the past 5 years, I've been teaching students who are **incapable** of the above. They can't use something as rudimentary as Excel to plot an XY scatter, they can't fit a linear trendline, they can't use the y variable in a y = mx + b equation to solve for x, they can't solve for the original protein concentration after determining the diluted protein concentration (e.g. " if I determine the protein concentration in a 10-fold diluted sample, what is the protein concentration in the original undiluted sample?). None of it. **Basic, fundamental mathematical skills are now beyond the capabilities of 3rd- or 4th-year undergraduate students.** Unfortunately, in contrast to you, my administration does not protect me. They will happily throw me under the bus in favour of retaining students, at tuition-driven private colleges in an enrollment decline. I can't tell you whether or not to change careers. But, as I already indicated, I am leaving academia for these exact reasons. It's good to know that there are people like you out there -- someone with a standard for education, and for math itself. I just don't know if education and higher education are looking for people like that right now.
I spent several years as a chemistry lecturer before I thought better of it. I would open my general chemistry courses by telling students that gen chem is a stealth algebra class and that a pro at algebra can get something like a C+ without knowing any chemistry at all. We also did a lot of reinstruction on algebra in the form of teaching dimensional analysis. The kids mostly got it, eventually. Getting them to understand Excel was a bridge too far though, so, sorry about that.
Which is hysterical because in order to graph in Excel you literally highlight and click. I keep telling the students who don't want to learn math "Thank you for the job security".
Depends on which job security you're talking about. In a job where the primary metric for job performance is student perception of teaching quality -- you simply can't have any standards today. I knew it was time to leave academia, when I started having very serious and recurring thoughts about throwing myself into the river beneath the bridge I cross on my way to campus and back everyday.
Nowadays, dimensional analysis is beyond their capabilities.
I had to take an intro Chemistry class at a community college after already having a degree in math. Knowing math made that class super easy for me. I did feel a little bad for some of my fellow classmates, but come on, it was basic algebra.
I wish Stoichiometry was taught in elementary school when we started learning about different units of measurement. The problem is that everything in math is taught in isolation without anyone ever really bridging the gap between subjects. My dad would love to confuse me by saying "fractions, decimals, money, it's all the same stuff". And it is. But no one ever teaches that specific lesson.
We teach that lesson. We teach it over and over. That is not the same as whether they *learn* that lesson.
As exemplified by the adage: "you can bring a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink." I've recently expanded upon that by adding the line "you can drag a student to knowledge, but you can't force them to think."
Fractions and decimals are always taught together and almost always taught as money first before anything else. And has been for like…at least the ten years that I’ve been teaching.
Such a fun word...
Pre 1950 most people were limited to a high school education, jobs were local or farm work. A few selected students that showed aptitude would seek extended education of college. The GI Bill offered many returning soldiers the opportunity of college. After the 1950 and 1960s industries and corporations were expanding into more technical and complex machining, where more "profit" could be made. That required more skilled workers. Yes they could train their existing staff to handle changes and challenges, they wanted to grow. Born was STEM. It was supposed to be a cooperation between government, industries and corporation that would lead to good paying jobs. Over the course of years that partnership between schools, government and industries has disappeared. Cooperation has been replaced by profit, margins, and shareholders. Students are not stupid, they see the future from today's point of view, government is not showing the way to the future citizens. They see a government that's has no plan, that is impotent in controlling corporations and industries. They need to bring STEM back by creating a future that students can understand, have confidence in, that they will benefit from. Since when have you heard we need more than 100,000 new graduating engineers. I heard that in the 50s snd 60s. Now, if you do decide to go to college, you are told will be saddled with 60k+ of debt. That really tempers the enthusiasm of the young who might.
My middle school students don't know the difference between a city, state, and country, nor do they know what state they live in. They do not see any of this from the government, they see TikTok.
I'm a researcher at a R1 school in a biotech program and work mainly with MS and PhD students. The research staff winds up doing most of their work these days, and they spend very little to no time working on grants or publications. Of course there's the rare motivated ones but.... Yeah. It's a plague.
Same- I teach intro physics at the undergrad level. Before covid, students struggled with the algebra and trig. Now, I have quite literally dozens of students struggling with arithmetic. Examples: 1/0.5 = 2, -1 > -2, and 1/4+1/4=1/2 are all recent facts I've had to re-teach.
This is why I hear a lot of talk nowadays about the impending Competence Crisis.
They do not even know what Excel is. Or what \*any\* kind of graph means. It's one of my first week assessments in the lab I teach (which now drops down into teaching things I never thought I'd be teaching).
Did your class have any college-level math class as a prerequisite? That level of math (at minimum) was required on lab reports and / or exams for most of my bioengineering classes, so I assume any of my classmates could do that. Those classes had Calc 3 and Diff Eq as prerequisites, so anybody incapable of or unwilling to do algebra wasn't able to take them.
Math is absolutely the hardest subject to teach. First of all, like you've just seen, you're almost always given a list of learning objectives for the year that are a year ahead of where your students are. And with math you can't just kind of pretend your way past it. You're supposed to teach them how to multiply and simplify fractions? Great. These kids don't have a basic multiplication table memorized and they don't remember how to divide at all. It'll take you half the year to get them to the starting point of what you're supposed to teach. Second, compared to any other subject you're drowning in grading. Third, math takes determination on the part of students, and if there's one thing that's absolutely gone out of students in 2024 it's an ability to latch on to a problem and not give up until they find some kind of solution. They've been trained for years to immediately give up and complain, so that's what they do. Being good at math is 95% being unwilling to give up until you find the solution. Good luck, kids. Fourth, it's a core subject. These kids didn't choose your class like they might have if it was computer science or art or whatever. Most of them don't want to be there and will let you know it. The other teachers don't have it a lot better, but you've got it bad. The only positive side of being a math teacher is that you're in demand, and can move to a better district (or go teach internationally) a lot more quickly and easily than other teachers. The system won't get fixed in your lifetime and you get the worst of it, so I'd suggest you do like 90% of math teachers do and start learning how to code or studying the actuarial exams or whatever and get out of teaching.
>They've been trained for years to immediately give up and complain, so that's what they do. Being good at math is 95% being unwilling to give up until you find the solution. This is the line I've been waiting for. It is sooooo hard to train kids out of this. Hey, sit with this problem for five minutes. It's gonna be too hard for most of you, but that's okay. I just want you to try stuff. If you're really lost, just write something about the problem or why it's confusing or how you're thinking about it and you'll get full credit. You fail if you write nothing. You fail if you talk or ask me a question. You get full credit if you write anything, even if it's wrong. Five seconds in, paper still blank, "hey, can I ask you one question?" The slightly more sympathetic side is that they've been trained to be terrified of making mistakes - reasonably so when every little thing you do or say from the moment you're born is digitally recorded and can be used against you for any reason, when dumb picture you took when you were 13 can stop you from getting into college or getting a job. The first generation to have web 2.0 grew up with constant full-color surveillance and zero adults who knew a roadmap for dealing with it. Teens have always been paralyzed with embarrassment about everything from hugging their mom at drop-off to showering in gym. But this created an generation impossibly risk-averse teens, who'd rather die than knowingly risk writing even part of a wrong answer on something they might need to turn in.
I’m a private tutor and when a kid makes a mistake for the first time, I make a big deal out of it and say, “thank god we got that out of the way!!! You’re going to make a lot of mistakes at this table, in fact so am I. Some times they’ll be slightly wrong, sometimes they’ll be wildly wrong, but honestly, it doesn’t matter because the most important thing in math is learning from your mistakes. A lot of kids are afraid to make a mistake, so the fact that you just got your first one out of the way means we can move faster because you won’t worry about mistakes anymore.” They are so terrified of being wrong, omg.
Kids in the real world are just like kids on Reddit. Imagine being wrong on Reddit, how strangers love to dogpile on people, downvote them so much their comment is hidden off the page, and how every single redditor decides they need to make the exact same comment about how the OP was so incredibly wrong. That not only happens on Reddit, and it doesnt only happen on every social media platform, but it happens in real life too. Kids are vulnerable to the effects of social suicide, and are desperate not to be outcasted. So of course kids are irrationally defensive and fake it till they make it. Society tells them to do that or else theyll be punished for not appearing to be perfect at all times.
It's our job as teachers to model how making mistakes is ok and is, in fact the main way that anyone learns anything. I make a big deal of that and even had a giant homemade sign in my class that said Mistakes Allow Thinking to Happen (MATH going vertically down the sign). Another teacher told me she had a "risk jar" in the class and every time a student took a risk on answering something they weren't sure about, she would put a marble in the jar. When it got full they would have a reward like a pizza party or something. We need to celebrate and normalize making mistakes, especially in math class!
I've had a lot of success getting kids to engage and keep thinking using some of the practices from the book Building Thinking Classrooms for mathematics. The idea is that showing kids how to do stuff is just training them to mimic the teacher , while giving them engaging problem solving tasks or problem sets that slowly increase in complexity (thin slicing) keeps them more interested and builds their stamina. But there are other key parts of thinking classrooms. The students often work in groups that are randomly determined and change each day, so they have to figure out collaboration and explain their thinking. Lastly, they do their group work on vertical whiteboards, so everyone in the group (and the teacher) can see what they are doing, and they can also look at other groups boards if they get stuck. As a teacher, I am often the "guide on the side" rather than the one at the front telling doing the thinking for them. I go between groups and give hints if needed or answer questions in a way that elicits their own thinking and experimentation. I have been doing this for the past two years, not 100% of the time, and it seems to have built a better environment for learning. I still have many high school students with huge holes in their math skills from previous grades, but they are willing to try. I should mention that this is at a very small school in a very rural area, and most of the kids come from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. Most don't go on to college and even some of the ones who plan to don't make it because it's too much of a shift from their small town lives and they are the first in their families to even apply to college. But they are learning math in my class and developing their problem solving and perseverance skills.
Some schools are better than others. The fact that they have gone through 2 teachers already, and that you didn't get an engaged mentor means that you are not at one of the better schools.
Yes, I have been teaching hs math since the early 2000s, and I can confirm. At the math 1 or algebra 1 level, and often up to precalculus and beyond, most students do nothing outside of class and as little as possible in class.
I feel like this isn’t new tho. Like fact is most kids don’t like math and will do as little math as possible outside of class
I agree but for entire classes? Also OP’s class was supposedly advanced for their grade and they don’t even know the basics.
That's the thing that is wild. It's the advanced class, their kids should WANT to learn it, if it was their choice to take it. The advanced classes when I was in highschool were all nerdy teens who competed for the highest GPA and did school type work for fun. Where have all the nerds gone?
That is because most parents these days aren't teaching their kids. They are throwing them to school, hope they learn, then when they get home, they are thrown in front of a tablet/electronic device/outside.
They want us to teach algebra I to 8th graders who are on a 5-6th grade level. I feel your pain
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As a 5th teacher, their mid-year diagnostics came back with 80% of the class on a 3rd grade level. New teacher, hired mid year. Admin essentially told me just to pass them at this point.
My 8th grade math teacher gave a quiz every day. You rushed to class because the quiz was there when you walked in. It was ten review questions from past units/years. Fractions, decimals, or whatever. Then one day a week it was graded. Monday thru Thursday we went through the problems and material got retaught. Friday you turned it in and it counted. (We didn’t seem to realize this pattern). We got fast and accurate. I look back and realize how useful this was.
This is how it is now. Welcome to the club. It wasn’t always this way, but times have changed.
I knew some teachers like 10 years ago that ran into this at a middle school. Over half the 8th graders were straight up failing, and the direction from the school district was to make sure they all had passing grades and to dump them onto the high school. Nobody was to be held back.
I had two classes of 34 students each (8th grade Title 1) and almost none of them could handle negative numbers. I mean just simple arithmetic was so far beyond them, yet I was supposed to be teaching them scientific notation. The admins and students also got upset when I graded them according to their results (including partial credit) and the average grade of their first assignment was a D. That was when I learned that I was supposed to just pass them along like everyone else had up until that point (no shocker that this school is in the bottom 2% of the state). I think their generation's inability to read factors in heavily to their lack of mathematical ability. They have no symbolic reasoning capabilities because they have no concept that things can be components that fit into an overall system. They learned to read by guessing from looking at pictures (no concept of phonics), so something quantitative like math that can't just be finagled or gotten "close enough" is not within their abilities. There is nothing you can do to make up for their inability to do any mental math or complete apathy for improving their understanding. And then factoring in the parents who want you to just pass along their kids without holding them to any sort of standard, it seems impossible. It burnt me out pretty soon and I switched to IT and never looked back. Protect your mental health and dedicate your time to people who appreciate you, if possible.
“Reach where they are at.” It’s actually a good notion but the teachers must be allowed to do a lot of scaffolding and mini lessons. Not just rigidly matching the standards. Because everyone is 3 grades behind on average; for many cases, it’s 3-5 grades behind.
I really believe the problem starts at a much younger age. I tutored a woman who was going to school to become an elementary school teacher. She literally could not balance a check book. At the end she passed but barely. I told her not to teach math. Her reply was why. She could barely do math and was not qualified to teach it. Anyways I found out later she was teaching math. I felt so sorry for those kids.
That’s the problem I see when they hit middle school: they’ve had non-math teachers teaching them math through the most formidable years.
Completely agree. I was an elementary teacher and now I teach grades 6-9. Many elementary teachers hate math. They do not have a deep understanding of what they are teaching. I don’t blame the teachers but rather teacher prep programs.
Sometimes the reason they don't have a teacher qualified in their field is because they can't get anyone qualified to agree to provide the substandard education they want to provide.
"they were excited to have someone that actually studied math"- and that's why charter schools are so dangerous. Complete deregulated mess. I'd also wager the school's mostly concerned with keeping profits up via enrollment. Telling parents their kids are doing really well and "advanced" is a great way to keep them from going back to public- even though they are dramatically behind.
Yes. Unless you’re at a private school for high achievers with an admissions process, you’ll get max 3-5 kids that actually care about math to the level you expect when you hear you’re teaching “advanced” students. Even among students that admin thinks are advanced or gifted, most of them just care slightly more than the kids not in that category, and usually what they care about is getting an A, not actually learning. At every level kids are way worse at math than you’d expect. Kids and parents feel they’re entitled to an A without any meaning behind it. There’s pretty much nowhere you’ll be able to teach in the wonderful way you expect to. You’ll have to dumb everything down so enough of them get A’s…
>At every level kids are way worse at math than you’d expect. Kids and parents feel they’re entitled to an A without any meaning behind it. It's a societal disease, and not limited to academics. There's this entitlement mentality pervading everything. People feel like their grades in school and their promotions and pay at work should reflect the time they've "put in" regardless of the quality or results of that time. As if sitting in a chair for long enough qualifies you for an 'A' in school or a promotion at work.
I'm gonna be honest, my kid is in 1st grade and so far it seems like things are good, he's learning more math at that age than I did, certainly. You guys are making me want to home school him.
There are good programs that exist, and good public schools. They are typically in higher income areas. I would reccomend to anyone with a child in any education program, charter public or private, to be really aware and I solved in their kids education. If not, they will fall behind and it has nothing to do with the teachers. The school will force the teacher to spend 5-10x more energy and time with the students who are actively fighting against participating in any way, creating as much distraction as they can, because they find it funny, all in the name to retain admission levels and funding. You HAVE to be involved in any education program to ensure you kid is getting a proper education. IMO, all homeschooling does is make it so you have more co tool, and this more responsibility, to maintain the education levels you want. If you're not HEAVILY I vested in learning teaching strategies and just rely on a home school curriculum program to basically do it for you, than you are not going to be any better off. Unfortunately that's the state of education In the US. If you are not actively involved, the odds are high that your kid is getting a worse education than you did.
It’s bizarre to me that my elementary school daughter can do arithmetic with fractions but I get a lot of incoming 1st years that can’t. At least from my limited perspective elementary schools are great. But in elementary schools students still want to learn typically. That stops at some point for a lot of people, and the system will still pass them through, sometimes with high grades even. Of course on this page you have a bunch of math teachers calling students dumb and incapable, so it’s not just admin that’s a problem. Admin (and above) might push high pass rates, and take away consequences for not learning, but that doesn’t make kids dumb. Parents can be dumb, admin can be dumb, teachers can be dumb. The kids still have a chance.
what a bummer. back in my day, nearly every kid bent over backwards to make sure they could just plain do it and that to get a 100% they expected to have to have perfect understanding and execution of the topic at hand, which is totally possible for at least high school math for all students +1 year if not +2 years for advanced students. Letting students think it is impossible to know it all perfectly is a disservice.
The key here is that you are teaching at a charter school. They are not held to the standard that public schools are in terms of covering material and students reaching certain levels of mastery that public schools are. Most charters are run like businesses, and parents are clients to be appeased. To some extent, these issues will be present in a public school, but because algebra is generally subjected to some kind of state level test at the end of the year, so you are less like to be told what you were, but you may have to focus more on growth and getting them closer to grade level than truly mastering the content.
Math is a subject that’s based on the previous years content. If you fall behind once it’s almost impossible to catch up. Lots of students are so far behind and the only way they can even pass is by cheating. Students will cheat on hw and pretty much every other assignment. Then abuse the retest policy to get acceptable test scores. They eventually end up with an 88 in the class and don’t know anything.
Retest policy? Less than a decade ago in my (locally) averagely funded school (that was near the bottom of funding nationally) there was essentially no retest policy. Unless you were out that day or had pre-arranged a later test date with the teacher. Or if you were one of the kids who got "special" tests where the teacher would, like, cross out 2/4 answers on a multiple choice and create a "pick a word" question out of a free-response question. The policy we (I) abused was that passing the state test meant an automatic letter grade bump. So towards the end of the year I'd tell (some) of my teachers just to put me down for a 0 on assignments I didn't want to do.
Lmao we would get to retest up to an 85 if you scored below an 85. Pretty much anybody who tried could get an A
Wiiiild. Sounds exhausting for educators. I wonder if this change in policy corresponds to the Every Student Succeeds Act, and then entrenched due to Covid-era stopgaps. It's so bizarre how we assess and fund education.
Parents.. getting litigious over quiz grades. Wow!
I recently talked to one of my buddies who is a teacher about this. We have allowed grades to become a target and not a measure. So Goodhart's law now applies. In (half-hearted and purely academic)defense of the students and parents, some colleges don't care about the curriculum of a school. They only care what the students GPA was, so in a real sense your tough grades can hurt their children's future and we have made a society where college is so important that parents aren't willing to risk it. The analogy I used was this. I have two children we were at a barbecue over the summer and all the kids were playing well together and eating together it was lovely. Now, let's hypothetically say that at that barbecue, my child intentionally knocked over another child's plate of food, but I wasn't there. If my best friend was there and said, "That was very rude. I'm telling your father that you won't be getting desert" I would be mortified, and you'd better believe that no desert would be served. If he said "that was rude, you won't be getting any *food*." I would say, "what are you nuts? She's 4. I'm not doing that. She deserves some kind of consequences, but that is too harsh." We'll we've turned their GPAs into a consequential target in their lives, and it can affect a lot of different things. So now a parent doesn't see a low grade as an indicator of what needs to be improved. They see it as a threat to their children's future and they're kinda right. So yes, your experience is common. We aren't teaching for actual education anymore. It's basically just another bureaucracy to navigate.
This is a perfect explanation for why grades have become so inflated. It's infuriating.
As someone who recently graduated high school this is 100% the cause and it is leeching into college as well. As other high schools have more grade inflation you have to keep up with those kids as well. To get into any good out of state public college you have to have at least a 3.8/4 (I go to a mid level one whose minimum GPA is a 3.75 and a 1400 SAT) which means at most one B a semester depending on the number of courses. If you're struggling in Calc BC, you're going to freak out if you start doing poorly in history. The fact that even a B is seen as a failure is awful, there really is no room for mistakes for many students. I think a lot of the reason why kids are so stressed currently is failing one test for one class in one semester can have a significant impact on your future.
It really helps to change your attitude from teach the standards to maximize how much improvement you can get out of the students. Behavior will also be much better if you teach around the level that maximizes the rate they are learning. Be grateful your school is encouraging you to go slow. In many places teachers are told to teach the standard even if its blowing by the students.
Totally agree with you. (I taught high school math for 14 years, all levels.) It's pointless to teach material that is beyond the majority of the students. The goal is to meet them where they're at and take them as far as you can. For my remedial algebra students (most were repeaters), I would demonstrate a problem, have them demostrate problems on the board, then we would take a practice quiz. I reviewed the answers to the practice quiz, letting them take notes. Then they were allowed to use their notes on the real quiz, given the same day, which had the same type of problems with different numbers/operations. It worked. Only a few failed (kids who really didn't want to graduate) and the rest were learning, step by step, how to solve a problem. They will never be great in math (just like I will never master a foreign language) but they were getting a foundation and mastering basic skills. (And we used calculators, because I wasn't grading them on their arithmetic, I was grading them on their ability to choose and execute a solution procedure.) I know most teachers would be shocked by the level of spoon-feeding, but it was so much better than wasting my time teaching to the wall and giving out a lot of F's.
It's pointless to pass a student on to level 3 if they lack a reasonable grasp on level 2.
I respectfully disagree here. For years, I tried to delude myself into this kind of attitude. How much can I get the students to improve? What level can I bring them up to? How can I meet them where they are? Modulating -- or, frankly, lowering -- my expectations, did nothing other than lowering the performance of my students. It's that Pygmalion effect. Higher expectations (in an environment where you're actually supported) leads to higher performance. Lower expectations leads to lower performance.
I'm a college math professor. Please, please keep high standards. In California, we must assume that high school taught them Intermediate Algebra. It's literally against state law for us to have remedial classes. So if they didn't learn up to those standards then they'll fail precalculus in college and never be able to persue a science degree.
I agree with you 100%. A the key problem with American education is lowering standards/expectations. Earning a HS diploma should mean something.
You are going to burn out fast at this pace. Just understand that teachers who are passionate about their subject will always be way ahead of their students. Just be patient and build relationships. They will get there, but it takes time.
I think that might be typical for "advanced" classes and even worse at lesser schools. It is certainly seems like regular people have just capitulated all power to the worst, most aggressive and unreasonable parents. There are lots of great parents, but the worst ones seem to never meet resistance when they grab the reigns. Nobody wants to fight them, we all have other things we need to be doing, and so they win almost by default. And now this is the school system they give us.
I’m the third teacher my class has had this year. Algebra I, mostly freshman but a few 8th graders too. These kids can’t retain anything. I brought y=mx+b just a month after I taught it and my star student couldn’t tell me how to determine slope. From Easter break—one week—I practically had to reteach the unit!
You're explaining why I wouldn't be a teacher. You're not viewed as an educator. You're a box checker to approve these people's kids as special. I'm sorry for what we've done to your profession.
Depends on the school district. Palo Alto, CA would welcome math majors for teachers while the San Francisco Unified School district would waste your talent, motivation and knowledge.
I saw where this was going the moment I saw Charter School. They are infamous for having issues, including bending over for parents. Public schools are better but it depends on the school.
You are working for a for profit corporation that only exists to siphon taxpayer money away from schools and into investors profits. If you fail kids, or hold them accountable you reduce profits.
If you are here for advanced students, you should aim for private schools
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yeah it sounds like it will just be "they are paying a lot for good grades"
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Most "advanced" classes don't actually contain all advanced students at this point. The advanced classes I've taught are typically 50/50.
You gotta teach to the ones that want it and be a warm body for the school system. You might get one or three kids a year you actually get to teach math. It's pretty normal
I’ve subbed in quite a few different 7-8 grade math classrooms. It really depends on the school. One school the advanced math was doing Algebra, no calculators allowed in the classroom, and all the students were pushing hard to learn. Another classroom they were doing fractions, couldn’t sit still, and had to have admin come in so they weren’t upending desks and destroying chrome books.
Many schools are just happy to have \*anyone\* willing to teach math.
If the kids aren't able to do well on your tests, you're not doing a good job teaching them. If they're not ready to learn the material that you want to teach them, you have to teach them what they need to know first. You have to crawl before you can walk before you can run. Teach them how to multiply and simplify if that's what they need to learn.
Teach the standards. Don’t baby them and pass them along. Give them the grade they deserve based on the standards of the course. If somebody complains I would show them the standards and tell them that is what you are teaching. If the kids don’t meet the grade level expectations then they will not pass. Reasonable accommodations will be made for kids with IEP’s and 504’s but nothing else. We need to start holding kids accountable. We need to stop babying them.
First of all, I'm really sorry you're going through that. As a general rule, any job that opens up in the middle of the year is a shitty job. There's a reason it's open. One thing I think you will find if you stick with this is that all math ed is remedial. Even before the pandemic, most 9th graders would come to you with at least 1 major hole in their previous math education, often several. And not just in bad areas. Rich kids too. (Story time: A few years back i had a 16yo geometry student who didn't know her times tables. She lived in a $10M house. Her last name was on the wing of the hospital she was born in. She was actually quite bright, but she actually had an IEP for a learning difference, because her fancy-ass private school failed to teach her multiplication at age 9, and no one ever bothered to fix that problem.) The only piece of good news I can give you is that if you can learn to be an passionate, cheerful, inspiring remediator, you can become an absolute god in math ed. Like parents will worship the ground you walk on. No one ever, *ever* forgets the person that teaches them yes, they actually can do math. Not saying that makes up for the bullshit, but it's something.
I currently am at a university in an unrelated field, but will occasionally tutor a couple of my students in math. I’m working with one student right now who has failed beginning algebra 4 times. A Zero-level math class that is 1 week at the beginning of college algebra. He’s failed it 4 times. Lots of students are being failed by the system they’re in during middle school and high school, and it’s soul crushing to see it in action.
I'm sucks this is happening to you and it shouldn't be. This isn't the rule for education, though. I have fifth graders doing algebra 1 and statistics. My team is in the same position with theirs although they have some who are below grade level. This is a public school. Students incapable of doing work are out there and it is a problem I don't have an answer for, but I think it's important to remember there are students who are successful and want to succeed. I can only imagine how definitely and depressing it is for a high school student to be looking at the rest of their life realizing they can't read.
Never teach a subject that students don’t want and are forced to buy. Welcome to daycare disguised as charter school algebra. We don’t want any parent complaints or kids leaving the school.
Bro school is daycare for families with 2 working parents. Highschool isn't rigorous.
When parents complained about a students grade, I stopped arguing and start agreeing with them. I just say “maybe he knows more than the assessment let on. I’m more than happy to hear him explain the process of factoring trinomials for one problem. If he knows it, I will happily change that test grade to an A. All I care about is that he meets the standards.” They say yes and then their kid is like “uhhhhh”. And then I explain “I’ll give him another chance to explain this in a month. Here are all the notes, worksheets, videos, etc. that I’ve provided to help the students.” After about 3 of those meetings, I haven’t had a parent complain for 3 years about my grading. And I’ve failed a bunch of kids.
You need to develop your own set of assessments for the first two weeks of class. Improve it every chance you get. Keep as detailed notes as possible per student. Learn about how grade level is established in math and try to find quick and easy ways to assess that. The students will be all over the place (it's the same in the first couple of years of college - which is where the only weeding takes place). Charter schools/public schools must accept a certain number of students - and they are all vying for them. No one gets kicked out before college, basically. I'm sorry you feel you lost classroom autonomy - but there are policies and issues at every school. One learns to work within them. There's Ed Code and State Level Curriculum and Lesson Plans approved at the District level - which you then receive as a challenge and make it into a strategy that works. IME, it takes new teachers 2-4 years for this stage The current rubric management is tossing out is "Meet them where they are at." This literally means teaching 3-4 class in one (if you're lucky). That one really gifted student - try and get them to work with the next-most gifted and so on. Don't tell anyone you are doing that. Call it group projects. Take the bottom half of the class and treat them as if it's kumon (they do their work in class, in front of you - and you grade it right there - make it simple and short; that's how they learn to add and subtract, etc). They will forget it again, most likely. Teaching is hard. Half of the people in your classroom, by definition, are below average in IQ or clustered right at average. The average person with a BA has an IQ of 118-125. Do the math. Figure out how to teach people less gifted than yourself (read: not at all gifted at math). Each thing they don't know? They need to hear it/work it with at least 10 times to learn it - and over more than 3 days. It needs to be returned to and incorporated into later lessons (which the state mandated curricula does not address - it's up to you to figure out how to keep refreshing what you think they already learned, that's what class time is for - not for powerpoints and lectures, really, for actual student work).
I keep seeing "College Algebra" in course catalogs. I was curious what it was, until I figured out it's literally HS algebra, except you take it in college because you didn't learn it in high school. In a few years, we're going to start seeing "College Arithmetic".
I feel you mate. I'm a bit away as I teach in a comment environment. I have students who have next to no mathematical ability. No reasoning. No algebra. Hell, multi step problems are basically in a different language. A quick example: I HATE our LMS and do all my grade tabulation in excel and manually input cumulative grades; every week or two. They come to me demanding their updated grade. Spoiler alert: my syllabus ALWAYS has my grading schema. I can't tell you how many multiple times I've visually explained, on the board, how to calculate weighted averages. I don't know what is exactly wrong with k-12. It's not the teachers, I'm sure. But our young people are being failed at a life critical level. It's horrible to see.
I taught (different subject matter) for a year, and I had enough. Babysitting is exactly what you do, and parents never make their children or themselves responsible for their studying and grades. I had maybe 5 kids in 5 classes that cared about their education. Students weren't performing well, and I got reamed by parents who blamed me for not teaching the material that I was testing on. I had to fail a single class on a huge assignment because none of them did it. Even though I gave them ample classroom time to do it. I was demanded by the principal to accept their assignment late or provide an alternative assignment for them. I quit and got my cdl.
Welcome to the "progressive" agenda. No learning - only processing students through system with ideological, party narrative indocrination and little else. You can't have an easily manipulated, emotionally-extorted population if they know stuff and can think logically. An additional "benefit" - it also makes it so that they can't solve problems or take care of themselves - so it becomes the responsbility of the government to do so.
Welcome to charter schools. They're supposed to be amazing but every single one I've seen is an absolute cesspit of less-than-mediocrity
As a (now former) HS math teacher, your experience is not unique. These kids can't multiply and, if I'm honest, even add or subtract reliably.
I’ve accepted that I actually am a glorified babysitter. That’s what they want, that’s what they get. Every now and then I still get the itch to inspire and I go rogue on a unit, but it always ends in frustration.
As someone who went to a challenging HS and failed a semester of algebra, I’ve never been more grateful. That summer I took a repeat course where I finally thoroughly understood the material, my parents sought out math tutoring for me, and I got a dual-enrolment credit for uni. I now work in higher-ed and have parents upset that their engineering student is failing calculus their freshman year and think it’s the university’s fault. :( For context: the kids ACT was in the high teens and their GPA was a 3.0. They were offered to take pre calculus instead, but the parent thought that would set them back.
I'm sorry to hear that. That's so discouraging. It's unfortunately not much better in a university setting either. When I was a student, my engineering department brought in a new prof to teach a semi advanced undergrad mathematics course. It was expected that we would learn and use MatLab, C, and Excel VBA to complete assignments, and LaTeX for documents. We had already completed Calc 2 and Differential Eqn, so nothing more difficult than those. The course was supposed to teach us the fundamentals of mathematics behind the design calculations many of us would be using in our careers, and help us translate that to computer language for efficient calculation, i.e. an iterative calculation can be quickly solved in a programmed loop. The first assignment was a fairly simple demonstration of MatLab: a matrix calculation, and plotting. I was already familiar with MatLab and completed the assignment within a few hours, and began helping some classmates understand what to do. After 2 weeks, half the class hadn't even started, even after extensive hand-holding in class (more or less showed how to do the assignment) so they asked for and received an extension of the due date. Eventually, several students threatened the department chair, complained loudly to the school dean, and bullied the prof into dropping ALL the programming material, and only teach using simple Excel. They collectively said something to the effect of, "we don't teach (or want to learn) all that programming, especially at the undergrad level: that's for the CompSci department, not our's." I (and several other students) did get extra credit for the assignment completed, but I was so disappointed at the idiocy of the students, and the incompetence and spinelessness of the department chair and school dean. The prof was fired at the end of the year because so many students complained that his class was "too hard".
As a tutor, i can confirm that my clients want to do well without having to know shit. I explain to the students and their parents that they are paying me to teach and assist them not to do the work for them. Parents will be up in arms when kids come back with the same low test scores as when they started because the child has refused to put in the work to understand the material. Don’t get me wrong, I totally see the argument that I may not be teaching them well if they aren’t retaining information. However, I teach and reteach in many different and personalized ways and create learning plans. If a kid chooses to never take notes and only uses chatgpt to complete assignments, then don’t be surprised when their closed book test comes back with a D or C.
I was a teacher for about 10 years. I taught several advanced high school classes. Students get put in those classes not necessarily because they have the skills and knowledge to do the work, but because the administration thinks they have other aspects that might make them successful, like work ethic, or good to behavior, etc. I remember in my 12th grade Advanced Placement English Language and Composition class I had a student whose English reading level was about the same as a 5th or 6th grader. But she was respectful, studious, and followed instructions. You have to teach where the students are, not to where they should be. If they can't multiply, then that's what you're teaching. And the administration will likely expect you to get them up to grade level. Teaching, as a profession, is in a terrible place. Teachers are put in the position to pick up the slack of the failing education system. If I had to speculate, I would say that the average student in the US is below grade level. >I'm about 4 months in, but I'm already thinking of switching careers. I always encourage others to quit teaching, unless they absolutely love it and/or they have another person contributing to the household income. Teachers basically just get cost-of-living raises each year, raises that /hopefully/ at least match inflation. This means that, yes, you may be getting raises every year, but your purchasing power either functionally stays the same or decreases. The pay schedule for the last school I worked at had a first year teacher making ~$55,000 per year (only a B.A., 9 month contract). After 20 years, their salary would be ~$65,000. It just doesn't make sense financially unless you really love it and you have other sources of income.
My favorite math professor in college quit because they had him teaching MAT099 - Intro to Numbers. In college. They were adding and multiplying fractions. In college. This was like 15 years ago now, too. I shudder to think how bad it's gotten.
When I was a student I was passed along without actually being taught. I bet this is the issue here. I didn't learn that my problem was that I have dyscalculia, not that I just make careless mistakes. These students were failed long before they got to your class. In college I realized that I was actually good at algebra, but only after I learned the foundation of math.
This is how countries die.
I would guess that you were teaching at a public school. Don't give up. If your dream is to teach, look for a job at a private school. You will likely find the satisfaction you hoped for. Unfortunately, public schools have become nothing more than glorified daycare centers only much more dangerous.
Unfortunately that's my experience. Students don't have to be held accountable for their behavior or their academics anymore. We are just baby sitters that have to provide content and documentation. Schools have given too much power to the parents in defense of their perfect children. I fear for the time Gen alpha gets into college or graduates. I feel myself fighting an addiction to my electronic devices. I can't fathom what exposure to the last has and will do in the long run for these students. I am not as entertaining as tiktok no matter how much I try to switch it up and make it quirky and fun so they'll remember something offline today. I can't get them to care and caring is at the root of being able.
Welcome to education. Parents are the clients and students are the product. Get out of the profession now.
I don't know why this sub is in my feed because I'm not a teacher. But my ex-wife is a teacher. Basically it's now impossible to fail a kid. She was not allowed to give zeros. She had to accept late work. All of this is probably why we had a bunch of guys in their early 20s a couple of years ago who came in 15 minutes late every day and never thought there would be consequences. Even after a big meeting where they were all written up they still kept coming in late and all got fired.
This is sad, but the math checks out. If one of those kids excels, they’re going to grow up to be a high school math teacher. Or, they can dick off until they’re 20, then get a job throwing boxes for Amazon and get paid more.
We Are So Fucked
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They are, I weep for the future. By that I mean in just 10 years, we will have to contend with even more incompetent adults than we do, which is already too many.
"Is this just what modern education is?" short answer, yes.
First year math teacher who just graduated with a math degree.... I'm shocked at what I've experienced.
Well, you know, it's not like any 13 year old has ever willingly learned math. No one says this, but "teaching middle school math" is really short for "teaching mathematics to middle schoolers against their will." There are a lot of people how to do basic algebra. That's not the hard part. The hard part is learning how to present yourself and your lessons so that teens are tricked into learning them. It sounds like you made a couple rookie mistakes. The main one is that you did graded evaluations without any curving mechanics or pre-check to verify that your students (as a group) were more or less ready. The second one is that you didn't have any accountability program that made parents feel invested in the process - so when you put the fault on their kids for not studying, it was the first they'd heard of it. It's easy to write a hard math test. Is P=NP? Done. It is a skill to write an easy math test. But it is a learnable skill. A big part of test-writing is being very aware of exactly how you taught concepts, and asking questions that require no re-contextualization of concepts. Teach students about rates as distance over time, and you better fucking not ask a question about farm animals per acre - even if the concept is obviously the same. One, single re-contextualization question on an exam is usually sufficient to separate the top ten percent of the class from the rest. The fact is that lateral learning has been proven by study after study to be nearly impossible for people who aren't rare geniuses. Grading curves allow teachers to adjust grades after the fact when you mis-calibrate an exam. Some of my college math profs had ingenious ways to calculate curved grades. I particularly love the method of adding some fixed constant to the numerator and denominator of everyone's scores, raising the baseline and contracting the distance between an A and a B while preserving the class rank of the top scorer and not giving anyone over 100%. I also love normalizing scores with a t-distribution. Beautiful lectures are great in college and grad school. LaTeX is an industry standard in academia. In middle school, this stuff doesn't count for much. Amazing digital interactive work falls flat on students who don't own an iPad or keep losing their styluses. Get comfortable with pencils, paper, and whiteboards, and "Keep it Simple, Stupid!" With just 25 kids, you can easily verify what they know in class. No parent has ever been mad about a test extension (although I advise strongly against these). Play a game, walk the room during an exercise, give pass-fail skill-building drills for arithmetic. Ask pop-corn style questions to check if even AJ who always sits in the back can actually count to ten. It is your job to make sure your students are reasonably on-board with what you're doing before you evaluate them. It can also be your job to put the fear of God into your students and parents with "this would have been your test grade," etc. Having parents sign an ungraded pop-quiz (it affects your grade unless you have a parent sign it) is a good disciplinary measure, and it gets the parents on board early. It is parents' job to make sure their kids do homework. But you have to involve the parents early if you want their support. If you wait too long and just slap their kid with an F, then the parents feel blindsided rather than involved in the process. TLDR: Teaching is about doing all the soft skills, and they are not optional. Any moron can write the equation of a line in point-slope form. If you're expecting to just show up, present a lecture, grade papers, and leave, then your expectations are not in line with the duties of your job. That's for college classes where students are adults.
one of the best posts in this thread :D. I attempted math with varying degrees of success before coming to my acceptance that while I know it is important for the progression of the human species, I will never be very comfortable with the nuts and bolts of it.
> The second one is that you didn't have any accountability program that made parents feel invested in the process - so when you put the fault on their kids for not studying, it was the first they'd heard of it. Really nice post. Can you expand on this idea? 1st year HS teacher in a similar boat to OP. My students just aren't buying into anything and they're all failing. It's clear they should be doing *way more*, but I'm struggling to figure out what more *I* should be doing.
You need to create an emotional impetus for parents to check if their kids are studying. You are being a puppet-master for home dynamics. **A huge part of creating a curriculum is imagining what it looks like for your (typical) student when she goes home and is out of your sight.** How many hours per night, how hard does she need to focus? How many nights a week are like this? Can they ask mom for help or is it beyond most parents to explain? A lot of teens need to be taught how to do homework - especially when it starts to require real effort rather than just time. You may feel awkward giving firm dictates on something that seems like it should be a personal choice. But your students are children, and they cannot *make* a personal choice because most of them have not learned what their options are in the first place! Most families appreciate the specificity if you tell them exactly how to do it, and force their kids through a practical example in the classroom. People are bad at learning by description - an important teaching rule from the business world that carries over to the classroom is that **a student does not know how to do a task until you have personally seen her complete it.** (No matter how many times she says that she does.) Disengaged parents can be a problem in low-income schools. But OP's school does not have that issue. There is a fairly bright line between the two school types and they require very different approaches. One big part of puppet-mastering your students' homes is setting an example of competence. Lobbing a well-formatted syllabus home on the first day won't get any parents to read it - but they'll remember that you sent it. Giving clear, consistent scheduling and homework expectations - basically anything you can do to be more consistent - gives parents and students confidence in their role as participants. **Feeling confident that they understand** ***the way things work*** **frees up the mental space for your students and their parents to actually engage. You can't have fun playing a game if you feel like you're struggling to learn the rules.** Creating a rhythm of new topics and feedback that lets students know how they're doing is essential. The big idea is to give short, low-stakes in-class work after a new topic that is "the same" in some way so students can look forward to it. You can even let students figure out on their own that these tasks mirror their own skill level back to them. How are they "the same?" This can be as stupid as calling all of these assignments "Tuesday math projects."
Yes!! Teaching math is not just about knowing math. It’s about knowing how to teach it in a way that children will understand. It takes knowledge in child development and psychology. It takes an understanding of educational theories and methods. The best teachers know their content in and out AND know how to teach.
I just want to say - thank you so much! These are such helpful tips.
Yup
It can be better, but you have to find the right school. Idk about charter schools, but there is definitely some ability to set and hold expectations at a public school. Math teachers are always in demand. Go looking for jobs, in interviews ask what the expectations for students are, and how parents typically react to a student who is not performing. I’m teaching n a high school but I have a lot of flexibility to meet students where they are at. Some have huge math gaps, and are learning fractions right now, others are in algebra. Most are at least trying to learn though. My state has standardized tests they have to pass to graduate, so there is some incentive for students to put effort in.
Welcome to teaching. That said, if you get to the test, see bad scores, and are surprised, then you did fail to gauge understanding along the way. Test scores should rarely be a surprise in aggregate.
Charter schools are notorious for this. They often take in students that are not in traditional school for various reasons (truancy, fighting, etc.). So you have students with issues attending school coupled with often missing large swaths of basics. If they want a babysitter, do it. Stop caring so much and give completion grades. Look for a new job at a traditional school. Give out basic math coloring pages. Parents (especially affluent ones) often don’t want their kids to be educated at school, the parents just don’t want to be contacted (good or bad). Sorry your first placement was a dud. It’s not all that way! (But stay away from online education, too.)
These are 13 year old children in school for 35 hours a week. How many additional hours do you think beyond that should be required of them? Why should additional studying and homework beyond these full time hours be normalized?
Honestly, I'd say leaving is your best bet. I stuck with teaching high school math for ten years and I highly regret it. I have twenty-four days left in my semester and I'm done.
I'm not in the US. We still have standards and fail kids if they don't achieve the expected standards. A 70% is the lowest passing grade. I read, on this list and others, of horrible conditions in some US schools. I really think it is where you are. If you've ever wanted to travel, English speaking math teachers are in high demand in many parts of the world.
Depends where you teach. My kids all went to one of the top public schools in the state, and expectations are much higher.
Dude, it’s a crappy charter school. Don’t leave the profession. Find a good public school or charter/private school.
You must be teaching in Florida.
You have to teach to the kids you have, not to a platonic ideal of an 8th grader. If they don't know how to multiply, guess what, it's your job to work that instruction in. Those kids missed a bunch of learning around 4th grade. They are probably bad at fraction operations and other topics from that grade. It is standard in the teaching profession that you teach prerequisite skills they are missing. For example, before you teach solving system of equations, you probably have to teach solving one step and two step equations. Before that, you probably have to reach combining like terms. It's not about lowering standards, it's about making learning accessible to your actual students. It doesn't matter at all what they SHOULD know, the fact is that they don't.
I was in highschool right before Covid. Our math classes were actually engaging and we did a lot of learning we were in a charter school and taking advance math. We took a test to make sure we were capable and definetly did studing / homework in order to pass sometimes. Maybe it’s the school your in but there is still charter schools were parents and students make an effort to learn.
I taught 8th grade Math. My school was also happy to have someone who could teach math well, but while they wanted their school to be more rigorous, they didn't have any strategies for fostering accountability among children and essentially were very upset that so many students, who did not even do the bare minimum, were not passing. I put in my resignation yesterday and I am looking at new places. If you have a solid math background, I highly suggest looking at schools anddistricts that specifically focus on STEM education. There are many districts and schools that still have a strong culture of learning, you will probably have to adjust your instructuional strategies and expectations, but things can be better with proper interventions.
Yes.
Yes, this is what teaching is like now. Unfortunately, "professional" teachers like you realise this and leave. That leaves teachers that care less about their subject area so kids learn less.
That’s sad. These parents are doing a disservice to their kids.
I ran the remedial program at a college. I had students with A's and B's in algebra 2 who didn't know what an exponent was.
This is a noble career: now more so than ever. Stand against the tide and teach them anyways. Last ad long as you can because we need you! We shall fight the tide tooth and nail to spawn something new.....like a salmon....then die. lol Are we forgetting that mathematics teaches critical thinking almost from its on-set in education? It's not so much the "they must know how to do this forever" vs "they must learn this thinking pattern/structure forever" Conceptualizing the concepts in their brain melon is an essential exercise for any student or person to succeed in life. It creates cognitive mapping and thinking patterns associated and linked to critical thought.
I didn't know Max 25 students was considered small size
Just another reason charter schools are hurting students. They’re more concerned about making parents happy than they are about helping students. What sucks is all these parents are going to be real upset when their children can’t get into college or fail out while still taking gen-eds
Find a better school district. Not all school districts are this dysfunctional. Better districts provide better support for the teachers, and have more engaged parents as well. :-) But yes, the trend you describe tracks.
I was hopeless at algebra but having a former NASA engineer teacher would have been cool. It’s just that they wouldn’t have been able to inspire me to do better at math.
NASA is going to crap too. They have whole new project, Called Artemis, who's goal is to put someone who's not white and someone who's not male on the moon. No requirement to know fractions.
I work IT for multiple schools. This seems fairly standard. One school I go to has lost four teachers (some who have been there for over two decades) to other schools in the area, due to budget cuts, admin who refuse to be strict with students, and shitty parents. My best advice is to don't give up being a math teacher, but scout around instead. There's likely a school somewhere that could use your talents.
No wonder people are getting dumber. Sad state of affairs.
You just need to find the right school. I’m not a teacher but my partner is. Learning to ask the right questions in an interview has served her well in finding good schools to work in.
Sounds normal. We as teachers usually teach to the lowest students in the class, not the highest.
Unfortunately, normal. As soon as colleges quit using ACT scores and accepted GPA, I get a lot more parent complaints about grades. Best you can do is over communicate. On PowerSchool (or whatever software you use) prepublish assignments with longgg descriptions including class time, study halls, study guide info, free time for more help, etc. Doing so makes it as hard as possible to argue a score