Somewhat related: There was a recent episode in This American Life that showed how struggling minority students actually became above average or near the top in subjects like calculus when forced to sit in classes for "advanced" students as opposed to "remedial" classes.
A number of universities (including some well known ones) have tried this - some for many years - so the data is out there. At least those universities showed that pushing struggling students even more than what you have in a typical course led to better outcomes than the remedial courses.
Different scenario than this submission, but it highlights the need to throw intuition away and focus on whether there is any data to support this.
Also, did you look into the various online schools or did you just manage the entire curriculum yourself? If so, how do you manage/track that?
Framework also seems to be expanding what "math" means.
[ X ] is really about language and culture and social justice, and no one is naturally better at it than anyone else...
Where X = singing,football,hockey,physics,running,weight-lifting,chemistry,painting,sculpting,composing,writing,design ( oh and programming ) :)
Just to show how ridiculous the statement is.
It would seem to be written by someone from the Dunning/Krueger case files.
Practically all of the math that I use on a daily basis I got before 6th grade. Everything after that was tracked towards a calculus that I don't use even as a software developer. At best it was a kind of sideways lesson in how to reason, such as geometric proofs. But I could have been taught the same lessons more pragmatically in the context of, say, interpreting statistics or basic accounting. (Debugging a general ledger error is a great exercise in reasoning, using nothing more than addition and subtraction.)
Math is about language and culture. The most important math lessons should be "How do you formulate this real-world question as a math problem?" The quality of word problems that I got in school were godawful. And to judge from the homework I saw copypasted into Quora, they haven't gotten better. (I hated watching students copypaste their homework but I hated the questions even more. They were practically begging students to think of math as a pointless exercise.)
As for social justice -- well, I'd like to think that social justice is something we can all agree to be in favor of. And math is a tool for helping figure out what social justice is. That doesn't mean we'll all agree on it, but most Internet discussions of it that I've seen appear to be less about legitimate disagreements and more about how to lie with math. I'd love to see students taught how cherry-picking works and how to build good models. We won't still agree, but at least we'll know what the legitimate differences are -- and then commence the hard but genuine problem of finding accommodations for each other.
I was never taught calculus when I was in high school, when my mind was perhaps a bit more pliable, and I really wish I was. I've mostly gotten by alright without it but it's something that bothers me as a kind of "missed opportunity" to learn.
I do think school's approach to teaching math tends to be quite dry. I think I would have appreciated more of a "discovery" based approach rather than simply solving a bunch of textbook examples. YouTube content creators have really helped open my eyes as to how some of the things I was taught about in school are actually REALLY interesting when you stop and think about it.
Lots of things are highly useful. I’m not saying drop calculus entirely, but if you have only one year of high school to go beyond trigonometry, calculus shouldn’t be the sole choice.
Having looked at that, I am skeptical of the Reason article.
Legislators should watch the movie "Stand and Deliver".
Normally I may not have thought about it, but post pandemic I’m thinking why not.
My suggestion, search for homeschool activity groups in your locality. Contact someone in one of the groups and have a conversation. Good luck.
It's all good and thanks for the info, appreciate it!!