What an idiotic thing to do. This will absolutely hurt women and underprivileged people far more than privileged men, and it will result in a lot gifted people refusing to cooperate.

Lol you should actually read the thread and replies. It may calm some of your fears. The author does a whole lot of backpedaling after being called out for the fact that the DOE’s proposal does not, in fact, eliminate HS calculus.

Edit: The “lol” wasn’t directed at you by the way. I found it funny that the author of that thread was making a big deal about “the elimination of HS Calculus” and then immediately followed it up with a bunch of hemming and hawing about how that wasn’t true.

> I found it funny that the author of that thread was making a big deal about “the elimination of HS Calculus” and then immediately followed it up with a bunch of hemming and hawing about how that wasn’t true.

From what I've gathered in the thread, the actual official recommendations appears to be simultaneously recommending and not recommending the elimination of HS Calculus.

At some point hanlon’s razor starts getting dull. Follow the money

Note that getting rid of tailored instruction does not just "eliminate opportunity for accelerated math", it also makes it harder to access remedial math instruction promptly for those who need it. This is how you get students who can't quite grok negative numbers or fractions when they're in a frickin' Algebra I class. It absolutely hurts vulnerable students.

Of course the most common 'solution' is then to get rid of "advanced" stuff like Algebra as a graduation requirement altogether, which is an even clearer disservice to students and their surrounding communities.

It’s still bad, but the tweet mischaracterizes the report.

Nowhere does it say that 8th grade algebra or 12th grade calc will be removed.

For those of us not in the know, could you explain how the report is bad? It doesn't remove 8th grade algebra or 12th grade calculus, so it's not bad for those reasons. So far so good. What does it do that is bad?

I do not yet have kids, but shit like this is why i already have a bank account saving money for private school. This move will not produce more equality - quite the opposite. All those whose parents can afford it will be in private school learning Algebra, and the rest will be left behind.

This is already happening in a significant way. See also: why funding schools with property taxes is objectively evil.

The only mitigating factor is Khan Academy and its surrounding ecosystem. A motivated learner with internet access can excel in spite of the school system.

Ugh, the "incorruptibles" fallacy but in a different format.

"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps! So and so came from a violent environment with food scarcity, and THEY succeeded, so you can too!" - Nevermind that that person's environment produces generation after generation of poverty (hence, "cycle") and violence.

Khan Academy mitigates nothing - it's a structural failure.

Tens of millions of students and 240,000 thousand teachers in 50 countries. Hopefully one day I can achieve such failure.

https://khanacademyannualreport.org/

https://www.khanacademy.org/donate

Algebra is another story but if you ask university math faculty their opinions of high school AP "Calculus" you might want to sit down first.

whats wrong with it? My AP Calc in high school classes (two semesters) in Virgina (Halifax Country) was just as good as Calc 1 in college. I wished I had skipped it. Calc 2 was the class that I found challenging.

I also in high school, I took Pascal as a learning to program/into class. I college I learned Ada, and it was a breeze due to my high school.

I feel thankful to my last year in public school in middle of no where, rural VA, as it gave me great education/foundation that I did really well in college.

I feel bad, as now Virginia is doing the same crap with math in the name of equity. Dumbing things down to the least common denominator is terrible, especially for smart/capable immigrants like I was. We don't have the luxury of private schools, and public schools are starting to pull the rug out as well.

It is awful

That’s because all of these so called “gifted students” flunk our first semester calculus. We have to implement curves just to get them through to higher level math courses. Which they also struggle in because they only needed to get 40% on that Taylor Series test to get through second semester.

Ap calc is a joke from my perspective. I’m not sure how to solve the crisis, but it’s plain to see that American students that test into calc are woefully underprepared. I’ve tried to advise students to start with more fundamental courses, but they’ve been told they are “gifted” their whole lives. They ignore you and charge into calculus. Then they come back when the semester is about to end to reassess options. Just like that, what would have been another perfectly serviceable American engineer is lost.

Calculus is a joke anyway, colleges should just teach real analysis which will go through the same material in a way that's actually rigorous. If the students are lacking in mathematical fundamentals, teach those via discrete math and linear algebra.

So the solution to poor instruction is to drop it?

Math is a useful skill for everyone, including calculus. Not everybody goes to university, so we should teach it in HS.

Approaching 40. Haven't ever needed calculus (or Trig) for anything. Sometimes I make an effort to pick math back up just because I feel like I ought to, but it'd be so purely a hobby with no practical use that I have a hard time keeping at it. Some of it's neat but it's not really any more valuable to my life than doing even-less-useful-but-more-fun recreational math puzzles.

Most people's lives and jobs involve even less math than mine does.

More stats probably would have been helpful. Anything less-obviously-useful needs a hell of a lot more emphasis on what it's used for and how to apply it than I ever received, IMO, unless you're a pure-math major, and certainly in k-12 since almost none of the kids are going to be math majors.

I have a degree in math and physics. I only used one tiny bit of calculus once in my career - say, maybe a month total...

... and then I got a new job when I was 43, in medical x-ray machines. Suddenly everything was 3D coordinate transforms, Fourier transforms, and integrals, plus radiation physics.

You don't need or use this stuff... until you do.

I'm 25 and I use calc and trig all the time.

I used trig yesterday to figure out what angle I needed to cut a board (I'm building a barn).

I used calculus a few weeks ago to help solve an issue I was having with a water tank.

Hahaha, see, I'm so terrible at both measuring and cutting that I'd never expect anything I'm building to come out remotely right if I needed to start doing much with angles that aren't 90, 45, or 30, with hard pre-sets on whatever tools I'm using because if I'm setting the angle myself it's gonna be off by enough to ruin it, no matter how precise I think I've got it. No way I'm not gonna end up working around or re-doing it with something simpler if I start bringing trigonometry to the party. I'm lucky when my straight cuts that I measured and marked 3 times "just to be sure" don't somehow end up wrong.

[EDIT] actually, I take that back, I do sometimes work with odd angles but never do it without a physical template built and fitted, because attempts to do it "cute" or figure it out purely on paper have a history of being hilariously wrong (when I do them) even when the math is 100% correct (according to the evidently-not-precise-enough measurements).