My eldest attends a charter school. The advertisements present the school as being big into math and science.
They offer geometry in 8th grade. During the first half of the year, the teacher only finished a third of the textbook. She has to finish the course by the end of the academic year, and so on the first day back after the break, she announced that they'd be skipping most of the right triangle chapter and that they wouldn't be doing any more proofs. The proofs were already watered down as it was (the book provided the steps and the kids just had to fill in the theorems or postulates), but now they're completely gone.
I thought the proofs were a huge part of geometry. I thought that they were a critical step in teaching students how mathematics works.
I suppose I shouldn't care too much about this, because they decided to let my son study independently (this is why it's only a small vent). He uses an excellent old textbook, not the poor-quality one his school uses. So things are about as good as they can get for him in this school.
Yet I'm watching this situation unfold and thinking that it's emblematic of our entire public education system. The other kids in his class are being cheated. It is so painful to watch. We water down the textbooks to make the material "accessible" and when it's still too much, we just skip stuff and pretend that the kids are still learning geometry. Then these kids get to college and wonder why they get stuck in remedial classes or wonder why college-level material is too hard for them.
And no one cares about the gifted kids, because as DS's teacher says, "there's no such thing as a mathy mind."
