oh well
Moontower Munchies #158
Friends,
A few quick hits on the topics of education and learning.
Childhood and Education #18: Do The Math | 15 min read
So this happened at UCSD:
In the fall of 2020, 32 students took Math 2. In the fall of 2025, fully 1,000 students had math placement scores so low they would need it.
Oh. Well, then. That’s 12% of students at UCSD. Who all failed math, then?
Reviewing test results like these, you would expect transcripts full of Cs, Ds, or even failing grades. But alarmingly, these students’ transcripts did not even reflect profound struggles in math. Mostly, they were students whose transcripts said they had taken advanced math courses and performed well.
“Of those who demonstrated math skills not meeting middle school levels,” the report found, 42% reported completing calculus or precalculus.
… The students were broadly receiving good grades, too: More than a quarter of the students needing remedial math had a 4.0 grade point average in math. The average was 3.7.
Year after year, they fall farther behind, and it becomes more and more impossible for any teacher to admit that the students cannot do math and grade accordingly — since that would ruin the kids’ GPAs and college prospects. In this manner, they may make it all the way to college before they find out that they can only do math at a middle-school or sometimes an elementary-school level.
Oh. Well, then. The whole math educational system is a fraud. Once the SAT and ACT were eliminated as requirements for the UC system in 2020, there was no, as Kelsey puts it, ‘reality check’ on any of it, and that was that.
One observer said:
These kids were not doing anything wrong. They were lied to. They were told that they were prepared for classes they were not prepared for. They were told that they were excelling in classes that they were not excelling in. They deserved better.
Zvi isn’t going to let students’ convenient pleas of ignorance go unaccountable. And he’s right. The whole problem, and this sure feels like it goes on beyond math these days, is there is no accountability. It’s almost like the “too big to fail” virus spawned in 2008 infects every giant mass of human coordination effort with a “oh well” shrug of learned helplessness resignation. Home insurance doesn’t work in CA? Oh well. Guess you’ll just have to be rich enough to self-insure or sweat it out. Don’t have the attention span to read a book because short-form video fried the GFI in your brain? Oh well, guess you need parents who have enough discipline and bandwidth to fight you hard enough so you don’t log 12 screen time hours on a Saturday. Can’t do long division? Oh well, what do you need that for when robots are the future.
[I ended up titling this post “oh well” which compelled me to look up the Fleetwood Mac blues rock tune of the same name that's often covered by guitarists. I forgot it had a distinct call and response structure and apparently I subconsciously had that bleed into how I wrote that section. Oh well I guess.]
Zvi:
I would love to not also blame the kids in all this, but that’s kind of nuts? If you can’t do the most basic math questions, and there’s an AP test at the end that almost no one in class even bothers taking, and you’re somehow opting out of every objective standardized test for math, how can you possibly actually think you’re passing Calculus for real?
This isn’t just a UCSD problem. It’s even playing out at Harvard. Yeah, Harvard. The most prestigious university in the USA and maybe even the world. Last year they had to add remedial support to their entry-level calculus courses.
It should not be so difficult to select a Harvard class that is ready for Calculus. If the school that is the first choice of half of students can’t do it, then that is their choice.
Zvi’s post is about education, not to be confused with, umm, learning.
While the lower 99% get hollowed by accepting the unaccountable default programming, there’s never been more opportunities to avail yourself the ability to learn.
I’d rather share stuff in that vein rather than rolling the same complaints uphill.
Here’s Scott Young, author of Ultralearning, and one of my favorite resources on the topic of learning broadly:
Why I’m Skeptical About Efforts to Revolutionize Schooling | 9 min read
Whenever we have high-quality evidence that rigorously compares two teaching methods, the research invariably favors strong, direct instruction plus practice. Or, in other words, the exact stereotype of schooling that so many of the people asking me about school reform despise.
A “better” school probably looks more like the stereotype of an old-fashioned schoolhouse with kids sitting at desks, drilling facts and concepts that are patiently explained by a teacher. To the extent that school becomes more like free play, project-building or acting like a scientist, it will probably be worse.
Quantity has a quality all its own, and with enough well-integrated knowledge the result is expertise that seems almost magical to those who don’t possess it.
It all rhymes with Justin’s treatise on learning which I condensed and re-factored into:
And finally for today, this is a good lesson by PhD Benjamin Keep who researches and writes about learning. He explains a powerful study shwing the value of breaking a complex skill into sub-skills, focusing on them deliberately and in serial, only to watch your general ability improve at the complex super-skill. Learning is a lot of wax-on, wax-off. It was quaint to Ralph Macchio’s ears. Now we have all but forgotten.
Stay groovy
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I remember reading this piece from Zvi about the remedial math challenge and how grade inflation, pass the buck culture pervades, and increasingly agree re direct instruction with practice. Challenge is hiring and upskilling a massive group of teachers to this level in a country and system which doesn’t value teachers in any form. And then not changing the instruction, tech, policy and standards all the time … and lots of addition without also removing something …
I know it's a very minor part of the post, but CA home insurance is broken because people don't actually want to pay for the risk their property incurs. Insurance regulation is designed to keep prices down; a few examples of how this happens are:
1. Insurance companies have to request rate increases through the California Department of Insurance, which has the power to approve or deny them for a variety of reasons.
2. Rate increases of 7% or greater have required public hearings; this functionally caps any rate increase requests at 6.9%. That's why if you look at the public filings, a pretty sizable percentage sit at 6.9%.
3. Up until recently, you couldn't price wildfire risk based on anything but your actual claims history. This seems sensible, but big wildfires don't happen often enough for this to give adequate rates. It's why catastrophe models are standard tools for making rates (California has allowed their use for earthquake insurance since the late 90's, and the same goes for Florida for hurricane insurance).
The main disconnect here is between "the amount that the government and people want insurance to cost" and "What the free market would charge for insurance." That gap widened in recent years; in particular, the wildfire issue was why we saw State Farm and others stop writing new policies in 2023.
That gap is present in education too, I think. It's the gap between "how many students want an A" and "what an A should represent." The solution in insurance is making people pay for the risk their house takes on. The solution in education is a little more complicated, but it boils down to standardizing what an A represents.
The "oh well" comes from people who don't actually want that gap to close. Nobody that lives next to a giant forest wants to pay the actual cost of their risk, so everyone else stomachs a 5% rise in their insurance and pays for it. In education, nobody wants a C.