Posted on 03/15/2010 11:07:04 AM PDT by bs9021
Advanced Abacus
Malcolm A. Kline, March 15, 2010
The Washington, D. C. suburb of Montgomery County, Maryland is one of America’s richest—in dollars. Its’ public school curricula is a bit more impoverished.
“A top Montgomery County schools official has called the district’s tenacious and much-publicized push for all middle school students to complete high-level mathematics a ‘mistake,’” Leah Fabel reported in The Washington Examiner. Specifically, Susan Marks, the district’s associate superintendent for human resources and a former teacher and principal said that “One mistake that we did make is that we pushed every kid into eighth-grade algebra.”
“Hallelujah,” Gordon Brenne, a PTA vice president at Kensington’s Albert Einstein High School, said when told of Marks’ comment. One wonders if the high school’s namesake would have reacted the same way.
Full disclosure: this correspondent first encountered Algebra in sixth-grade. The decision by the county further calls into question the oft-repeated assertion by teacher’s unions that a school district’s wealth determines its scholastics....
(Excerpt) Read more at academia.org ...
Why are they using the word abacus in the headline?
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.
At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear
shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.
ROBERT HEINLEIN
God made the idiot for practice, and then
He made the School Board. — Mark Twain —
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