Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion What does "rigorous" mean?

Our schools are making changes in curricula right now, and they keep describing it as "rigorous."

I honestly am not sure what they mean.

What is really meant by a rigorous curriculum? If we're moving to a rigorous math curriculum, does that mean the last one was what, lenient?

"You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means."

Someone has had fun writing a Wikipedia article on rigour, and in particular, the section on rigour in mathematics is OK. Suppose you spot a pattern, say, that every multiple of 3 has its digits add up to a multiple of 3. Then to use this pattern, just from having spotted it, to claim that 126981 is divisible by 3, would lack rigour, and in a rigorous mathematics curriculum, a student who did this would be penalised. To be properly rigorous one should first prove that the pattern always holds, and only then apply it. Somehow I doubt that the maths curriculum your schools are about to switch to is going to be rigorous in that sense, but you can dream...

Almost none of the words school folks use means what a parent of an unusally gifted kid would tend to think it means:
enrichment

and

challenge-level

and

tested

come to mind.

As in 'I tested her all the way to grade level so I know there is no problem with her reading. So why does she refuse to read our 1st grade primers?'

and

We provide enrichment to all our students, that's why you saw a coloring project in his homework.

and

Gifted children are motivated to work, your child isn't, so they must not be gifted. I provide 'challenge-level' work for the Math students to complete after they finish their assigned worksheets, and I've never seen your son do anything by walk by the challenge work and sniff. He just isn't motivated!

Srry for the vent, but it is mysterious
Grinity

From what I've seen around here and read, "rigorous" means "lots of homework."

You mentioned in another thread that your school district is adopting the Common Core Standards. The school may be using "rigor" in the same sense a as a document from a group promoting Common Core,

http://www.achieve.org/files/CommonCore.pdf
Out of Many, One: Toward Rigorous Common Core Standards From the Ground Up

Quoting that report,

"All students should graduate from high school prepared for the demands of postsecondary education, meaningful careers and effective citizenship.

For the first time in the history of American education, educators and policymakers are setting their sights
on reaching this goal. Achieving the goal will require states to address the twin challenges of graduating more
students and graduating them ready for college, careers and citizenship.

Achieve, Inc., the Education Trust, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the National Alliance of Business
launched the American Diploma Project (ADP) in 2001 to help states prepare all students for success. In
2004, we published a landmark report, Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma That Counts, which found
that all students, whether they are heading to college or embarking on a meaningful career, need the same
level of knowledge in the foundational subjects of English and mathematics. The ADP English and mathematics
benchmarks reflect the knowledge and skills all students should gain in high school to ensure that they are
prepared to enter and succeed in credit-bearing college courses or to gain entry-level positions in high-paying
careers that offer opportunities to advance."

I think the goals of having everyone graduate from high school and having all graduates be ready for college is unrealistic, since study at the college level requires above-average IQ, which most people do not have (by definition).

Some reformers, having noticed that students who pass Algebra II in high school are much more likely to complete college than
students who do not, want to mandate Algebra II for all high school students. Doing so creates intense pressure to water down what is called "Algebra II", because it is politically unacceptable to flunk too many people out of high school. In general, variation in intelligence make a "rigorous" curriculum for everyone impossible, but we still live in an age of what Charles Murray calls "educational romanticism".

It will feel like a Siberian winter to your child?

This is for sure what our school district means! Homework starts in K and takes roughly 45mins. By 2nd grade, DS is doing around 1.5hrs worth of homework a night. And this is doing work that isn't even difficult. It just takes that long to read each problem, and write down the answers! I shudder to think how long the other students who don't understand the concepts are taking.

I'm getting to the point of going on a homework strike. The math homework is completely silly for my DS. A full page of math problems (in which he has to show 4 different ways to get the answer for each problem) that are simply addition and subtraction! For a child who can multiply, divide and do fractions! The only worthwhile part of the homework appears to be the writing work, but sadly it doesn't appear she's taught the children HOW to do it, just simply sent home the worksheets and left it up to the parents to teach the concepts of reading analysis, summarizing, event identification and cause/effect.

:lol I like all your venting.

Bostonian, I certainly see your "correlation is not causation" on the algebra 2 -> college success metric. Indeed, few of my students in college STEM classes (in a university with rapidly increasing competitiveness for admission) have a solid understanding of the concepts contained in algebra 2.

By going through ST Math (a manifestation of CC math forced online) rigorous = tedious. That's (hopefully) not what the ed speak people are thinking.

So seriously, what are the ed speak people actually thinking when they say that one curriculum is more rigorous than another?

As a corollary, I'm going to need the ed speak responses to rigorous curricula to allow my DS to formally subject accelerate through this tedious errr, rigorous, curriculum.

epoh,

Once my daughter's math acceleration meeting (her acceleration is already in place, but the state requires we meet with the school each year to monitor her progress) we are going to encourage her to drop the ALEKS homework. It's useless, causes strife at home, and eats an hour of every weekend. At this point, it also has her learning beyond the content she's to master this year.

45 minutes of homework for a kindergartener is just plain wrong.

This thread and this thread both address the idea of watering down content so that everyone can pass a course.


IMO, "tedious" is used to hide the truth, which is that they don't want the course to be too "hard" and therefore not accessible to everyone. Who wouldn't feel bored (and unhappy) when stuck in a class addressing stuff you don't understand?

Personally, my solution would be to offer honors and basic math courses. The honors courses would be harder and would work through difficult material. The other students would do an easier course, but this fact would be acknowledged so that no one would be fooled, and the kids would get exposure to important mathematical ideas.