I am not suggesting that we all need to have calculus at our fingertips. I don't use it on the reg. I also don't apply Avogadro's Law s or remember various details about the Treaty of Versailles on a regular basis.

But learning about those things is part of being a well-educated person who can interpret the modern world and function in it.

I obviously agree that not all high school students take Calculus. But as you note, that doesn't imply that calculus classes are unavailable to students who are ready for calculus.

Just a minor and tangential point, but areas under some curves are pretty hard to calculate, even for PhDs. Differentiation is a science; integration, beyond trivial cases of anti-differentiation, is an art.

I was going to quibble about this but I forget if HS calc does both integral calc and differential.

Yeah that’s what I mean. Every school has AP calc though that isn’t “standard,” like every school has band but not every kid takes band class.

I'm saying that anti-differentiation as a method of integration is only really applicable to rational and exponential/logarithmic (and hence trig) functions. Trying to find the area under the curve of other functions requires novel approaches and out-of-the box thinking, whereas differentiation can always be done with a "paint by numbers" approach - there is little that can't be differentiated with repeated applications of the chain rule.

As an example, the normal distribution doesn't lend itself to anti-differentiation approaches, and the curve has a fairly simple definition: e^-(x^2). This function has no elementary antiderivative, and finding the area under the curve requires a novel approach (first done by Gauss, hence it's sometimes called the Gaussian distribution).

The area under this curve is root(pi) btw, but in the usual normal distribution formula there is a coefficient which normalises it to 1.

I was talking about the basic concept that you learn in your first calculus class. I'm sure there is all manner of complexity in higher level math courses.

There’s 2 different but related problems here. Finding the antiderivative of a function and finding the area under the curve of a function. The former is in general, not possible with elementary functions and Louiville proved the conditions for when you can do it. Finding the area under a curve is in general always possible with basic numerical methods to some set precision. None of that is really covered in high school unless you went to Bronx Science or one of those Palo Alto prep academies.

I know, but everyone else went with it like "obviously, I can find areas under curves, not like these uneducated heathens". I was just defending the integrity (tee hee) of the areas, noting that they are usually not that easy.

Ah, you took the bait. First time I've seen you post in months!

Alright, alright, I meant finding the closed form for the area, not the actual numerical value. I'm used to maths challenge problems, not real world applications, remember?

****, I think we broke e d'a. Anyone got a soldering iron?

I’ve been posting. Maybe not that much but still here.

AP is not standard path


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Well at least somebody is doing something. Not long ago a non-stupid person told me he didn't really "get" why/how "x" could mean 29 in one sentence and "headExplode" in another. Like I said, at least somebody is doing something. Estimates have us falling short 100K electrical engineers in the near future. That's probably more than we have in all our engineering schools put together.

Mathematics Framework FAQs
https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/mathfwfaqs.asp

Aside from the politard cherry-picking, seems interesting. Awful lot of "recent study indicates..." sort of justifications for a state-wide rollout but just skimmed through a couple sections.

Plenty of rural high schools straight up don't offer calculus for a mix of practical and cultural reasons.

I suspect most people can go by without learning Calculus. That isn't really where I was going with my complaint, although if you think it is important for the reasons you outlined fair enough. My complaint is that the direct consequence of these progressive law changes are invariably going to be less public school students (especially black and brown) choosing career trajectories that involve higher math skills, because they will be less likely to have those skills. So in the name of equity we are making things less equitable. And this is a common theme with 21st century progressivism.

As far as I can tell, the direct outcome of progressive tweaks to math curriculum has been cratering math scores. The problem ins't that progress isn't something to strive for. The problem is the ideas being proposed and tested are just bad. This is something that Matt Yglesias his written about a lot. During the Obama administration there was a sharp focus on trying to achieve equity by raising educational attainment in the black/brown community. And it was a mixed bag results wise. But the progressives of today seem to have just waived the white flag, and seem to be going full Harrison Bergeron, which is trying to achieve equity by lowering educational opportunity for everyone.

For example, pushing Algebra back to 9th grade was instituted in San Francisco in 2014. And all it did was increase racial inequity and cause the already low black/Hispanic math competency rates to be lower. And this was pre Covid lockdowns, where of course San Fran had pretty much the longest lockdowns in the nation, so things have only gotten worse. And now the state is essentially going to enact similar reforms (that luckily have been watered down because of intense pushback, so hopefully wont be as bad) that should expect similar results.


https://calmatters.org/education/202...rancisco-math/
Schools with high proportions of Black and Latino students have fared far worse on standardized tests.

O’Connell High School enrolled the highest percentage of Black students among the district’s comprehensive high schools in the 2018-19 school year. In the 2014-15 school year, based on standardized tests, a mere 6% of the school’s Black students met math standards. As bad as that sounds, it got worse after the district changed the way it taught math. In the 2018-19 school year, that number dropped to 0%.

Willie Brown Middle School had the highest percentage of Black enrollment that same year among middle schools. Since it opened in 2015, the percentage of students meeting math standards dropped from 14% to 7.8% in 2019. The percentage of Black students meeting standards remained below 4% during all four of those years in between. In the 2018-19 school year, only 1.5% of the school’s 84 Black students met math standards.

At James Lick Middle, nearly three-quarters of its 568 students were Latino in the 2018-19 school year, making it the school with the largest share of Latino students in the district. That year, however, only 7% of Latino students met math standards, a five-year low. Meanwhile, 18.16% met English Language Arts standards, a five-year high for the school’s Latino students.

At Presidio and Roosevelt Middle Schools, the two middle schools with the highest percentages of white students, test scores saw significant improvement. The percentage of Black and Latino students meeting standards increased by double digits at both schools.

And not all calculus classes are AP.

Really? I thought all high school calculus classes were AP.

The UC systems have really watered down the standards to get in, so it is entirely possible if you have the right melanin concentration you could get into UCLA or UCSD engineering program without taking Calculus in high school. But you would quickly find out you are literally years behind your peers from private schools or countries like China or India. Would be very intimidating, and will obviously result in a lot of dropouts/major changes.

I don't think so.

Strange.... it does seem to exist, but maybe only at elite preparatory academies.

https://www.bths.edu/m/pages/index.j...pREC_ID=840562

Basically says its the same as AP calculus, without worrying about the AP test. Which is kinda strange since I never felt like that was a big part of AP calculus. But maybe these elite schools are way more into making sure everyone gets a 5.

I thought the college board directed the AP cal classes for the high schools and that you could take a calculus class that was the "high schools" version of it that didn't include the AP test or anything - basically just the school's own creation of it but I'm probably off on a lot of this. I thought maybe it was a budget issue.

Algebra was for 9th graders since 1998 at least in Cali. You are just making things up now.


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That post was mostly a copy-paste with a link to the source, so obviously I didn't make it up. I also am a product of the Cali public school system and I took geometry in 9th grade. And from what I remember the only 12 grade calculus class offered was titled "AP Calculus" and the whole focus of the class was preparation for the AP Calculus test, although you could decline to take the test if you wanted.

All this arguing about which discipline goes with which grade, and everyone is ignoring the substance of the article that started the discussion, which is they're getting rid of advanced classes because it might hurt the feelings of those who didn't sign up.

Because when I think about how to improve society, I consider it of the utmost importance that we artificially throttle the progress of high-achievers.

I assumed the first article was a rage-bait with the buzz words about social justice and equity in math, and didn't read it. The second one is just gross. You're not actually solving any equity issues here, you're just hiding it behind a curtain while also materially affecting some of those underprivileged kids who may have benefited. It's not like there were no black or latino kids in advanced math. It's just that there was a heavy level of participation from whites and asians. Well good job, woke mob. Now there really are no black or latino kids that can benefit. Inequity fixed!

Nobody is more racist than the lefties who pull **** like this.

In "fairness" to progressives, what I know happens in California (which means it is probably happening in other blue states/cities too) is that schools are assigned "equity" scores which are pretty much regarded as the most important metric by progressive educators, much more important than actual achievement by their students.

And equity score is calculated by the difference between the top performers and lowest performers. So the two ways to increase your score is bring up the bottom or to bring the top down. So I suspect a lot of the "reforms" to dumb down the curriculum and actively inhibit excellence are a cynical attempt to increase the equity score.