What’s important to note is that there has been a big shift in the goals and techniques of education. This most famously occured with “common core” math in the US. It was a push to teach math in a more intuitive way, one that directly corresponds with what children already know. You can physically add things together by putting more of them together, and then counting them, so they try to teach addition with that analog in mind.
Prior to common core math, there was “new math,” which anyone under 80 years old assumes has always been the standard. New math was a push to teach math in a more understandable way, one that gradually introduced new concepts to ensure children understood how math works. This was satirized by Tom Leher in his song “New Math.” If you look up the song, you’ll see that new math mostly was implemented by teaching students how base-10 positional notation works, and then using that understanding to present addition and subtraction as logical algorithms.
Prior to new math, the focus of math education was much more about getting the right answer, rather than the skills needed for problem solving using math. This allows for a higher breadth of education, as topics can be covered quickly, but each topic is understood in a shallow way.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
In my experience, if you’re the smartest kid in your class, you’re not smart. You’re just in the wrong class.
Also, if you’re the dumbest kid.
But I’ll spot one further. Standardized testing exists to place students on a curve. You don’t want everyone failing. You don’t want everyone acing the exam. You want to be able to point and say “These are the good schools/students and the bad ones”.
Coincidentally, the wealth, the politics, and the ethnic composition of the districts tend to speak far louder to exam performance. Schools that are targeted for privatization can suddenly find their students doing very poorly, year to year. Schools that have a partisan administrator with friends at Pearson can find themselves doing amazingly well, practically overnight.
thedarkfly@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
If there really were a single dimension axis of smartness, won’t there be a “smartest” and a “least smart” in every classroom? And if they’re in the wrong class and they leave, won’t there be two new pupils at the extremes? This argument of “you’re in the wrong class” always sounded elitist to me.
The important is that the teacher tailors the teaching to the students. Spend more time on the ones who struggle, give extra stuff to do to the quickest (e.g. help teaching to other pupils).
I’ve also always been against separating children by “intelligence”. Having a “smart” class and a “dumb” class is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That being said, there are children who have special needs and who require a teacher who has the proper formation to help them.
Comrade_Spood@quokk.au 3 weeks ago
As someone currently in college for a degree in secondary education, yes this is exactly it. Putting the underachieving students in the “dumb class” reinforces low self esteem and crushes motivation, causing them to continue to underperform or even perform worse than before.
Individualizing lessons in the classroom is what helps students. However I have found teachers are typically pretty bad at doing this, and in my opinion, its because they are afraid of giving up control.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
Sure but there are different ranges. If your entire year is on a scale of 0-100 and you need multiple classes then you split them up based on that scale. Of course its usually going to be a bell curve so you probably only need 1 or 2 high and low ability classes, the rest can be mixed from the middle.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Moment to moment, presumably. But your cognitive ability waxes and wanes for a host of reasons - mood, exhaustion, calorie consumption, experience on the problem set. If you test ten kids over ten iterations, and each testing gives you a different permutation of rank, which kid is the smartest? If you have four kinds of intelligence exams and four different kids all place 1st in one of them, who is the smartest? Is the kid who aces Numeric Problems but flunks Word Problems smarter or dumber than the kid who middles in both?
Sure, which is why you want to cluster kids by current ability rather than some holistic but ambiguous attribute like IQ score or head shape. But you don’t really see this sorting by ability until upper-end high school elective classes (sorting the Bio 1 kids from the Bio 2 kids or the Honors musicians from the fuck-offs).
Sure sure. But we’re defunding all that under the current administration, so its a moot point.
LodeMike@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
And with homework, grades are an approximation of how much your parents can help you.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd7fb5oQhVg
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Eh, my kids are the smartest in their class, and the only real option is to put them a year ahead, where they’re likely the “dumbest”. They’re still in elementary school, so I would really rather they spend their time enjoying their childhood instead of trying to catch up in school.
I was the same way as a kid. I did all the extras, was in “honors” classes, did “AP” (college credit) classes, and even went to the local community college while in high school and got a 2-year degree simultaneously with my high school diploma. I’m not some savant or anything, and if I skipped a grade at the wrong moment, I might have merely graduated a year early and not gotten that 2-year degree. My friend group also would’ve been impacted since I’d be a year different from everyone my age.