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A parent whose child goes to a high school in the Wake County Public School System has been sued after criticizing the math curriculum used in the district.
Utah-based "Mathematics Vision Project" or "MVP," filed a lawsuit against Blain Dillard, whose son attends Green Hope High in Cary.
Dillard has been vocal about his opposition to the MVP curriculum, which is student-driven and focuses on group work, posting on his website, blog and social media.
The lawsuit obtained by ABC11 said, "In or around March 2019, Dillard commenced a crusade against MVP, claiming that MVP is ineffective and has harmed many students."
It alleges that some of Dillard's statements were false and defamatory and harmed the company financially.
https://abc11.com/education/wake-schools-parent-sued-after-criticizing-math-curriculum/5430840/
(Score: 5, Interesting) by hwertz on Saturday August 10 2019, @06:41AM (11 children)
They tried this doing math problems in groups off and on when I was in grade school about 30 years ago. It's crap. We were supposed to like "collectively" come up with an answer to problems. I was quite good at math, so I would blow through the problems, try to show others in my group how I got to them, but I was no teacher so they'd either get it or not. In some cases, people got it and it probably worked as intended, people who picked it up quicker showing the rest. In many cases, people in the group just agreed on some answer with no reason why. The absolute worst was having the right answer, knowing you've got the right answer, but you're wrong anyway because the others in the group inexplicably agreed on some wrong answer, so that's your groups answer.
No comment on the actual content of whoevers curriculum, especially if they are lawsuit-happy.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday August 10 2019, @07:41AM
Progress!!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Saturday August 10 2019, @10:38AM (5 children)
Indeed, at best in groups the brighter kids are just acting as the teacher and gain nothing themsleves, while the teacher surfs porn or something, or the group degenerates to the level of the lowest member.
Group teaching comes from the socialist idea that all people have exactly the same natural intelligence and if you rub them together they will all learn to exactly the same high level. Or, failing that, the brighter ones should be dragged down and the dimmer ones pulled up to some sort of intermediate common level. That's why socialists think that exams and their marks are unimportant, because we should all score the same anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @01:03PM
Teaching others can be very rewarding for the comprehension of even gifted students. Not everyone is cut out for it though, and forming groups to force smarter kids into doing the work for others is pretty stupid.
(Score: 2) by srobert on Saturday August 10 2019, @02:17PM (1 child)
I got a pretty good education in a public school. I don't think you understand socialism at all.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 10 2019, @03:23PM
Your age would be an important bit of information, regarding that statement. In the 60's & 70's there were a lot of bad schools, but there were still a lot of good schools in the public education system. Only part of that equation involved cash availability. Times since have seen a lot of changes.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday August 10 2019, @11:01PM
Oh god, this. My college CS program (run by Chinese) was huge on groupwork. So you had your leech foreign students that get good grades for doing no work whatsoever, and many situations where a single person was literally doing all the fucking work. I can also say with certainty that younger Chinese foreign students who manage to make it here are totally fucking rotten. Horseplay, don't pay attention, etc. Probably because they know they won't get beat down here like they would in China for being little assholes.
They say that groupwork is about diversity and the exchange of ideas and learning life-lessons working with a multitude of people. Yeah, no. It's so you can collect lucrative foreign tuition and hand lazy Chinks and Arab scum accredited degrees for doing nothing at all. Shit, I remember when the lazy had to actually cheat to get better grades, now everything is handed to them at the expense of the brightest and hardest workers. And don't assume that getting into a nicer school will solve that problem, because my sister described the same thing studying for her master's degree at CMU.
Back when I was a kid, we worked in groups in school, but people were grouped according to their grades and behavior. If you were in the group of idiots, fuckups, and retards; the whole class knew it. But if you wanted to improve, there was always also a way into a better group. And teachers had latitude to really discipline students back then, so if the group of fuckups wanted to try and drag the rest of the class down with them, they would get moved out or detentions until they behaved.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Sunday August 11 2019, @01:33AM
Actually group teaching comes from the idea that it's the cheapest way (in terms of resources such as classrooms and teachers, which are ulimately viewed by our bean counter overlords as money). If the group is small and all the members have similar abilities some wonderful education happens; not so much if the group is large and abilities differ greatly.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 2) by srobert on Saturday August 10 2019, @02:13PM
" The absolute worst was having the right answer, knowing you've got the right answer, but you're wrong anyway because the others in the group inexplicably agreed on some wrong answer, so that's your groups answer."
That's like being the only sober person in the car and no one will let you drive.
Yeah, this working on a subject matter as a group sounds like it would work pretty well in foreign language class, but for math, not so much.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @02:26PM
Group work isn't the problem, the way in which the group work is being assigned is the issue. I remember when I was a kid, the group work was more or less like that, you'd have a group doing the same problem and then comparing answers later on. It's deeply problematic and really just served to get the teacher out of having to do any work that day.
However, when done properly, group work really helps students to see the work from different perspectives and to take ownership of it. Really, group work in math should be more like group projects where each student has a role in the process and they come together to negotiate a solution to the problem. And no, it shouldn't be every day. There are other things like think pair and share that can be used more regularly.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 10 2019, @04:53PM (1 child)
Like all things, "group work" exercises succeed or fail based on how well they are guided and implemented.
I would suspect that the curriculum was more interested in teaching interpersonal communication, mentoring, peer learning, personality conflict resolution/suppression, resource referencing, division of labor, etc. than anything about math.
I tutored geometry in high school a little bit, just enough to learn how incredibly dis-interested some people can be in actually understanding the topic being taught - the ones I taught only cared about avoiding the pain of a failing grade by whatever method required the least time and effort on their part, and they actively sought solutions more difficult than understanding how to construct a proof - but they didn't seem difficult to them because those same solutions were more or less universally applicable to all subjects, so why learn something special just for this one class?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday August 10 2019, @11:12PM
Geometry is a fucking awesome and intuitive branch of math, at least at the undergrad levels, but goddamn did those proofs piss me the fuck off and set the stage for me really beginning to hate math.
And just when I thought I was never going to have to put up with that shit again, along came discrete math, where you must show a whole page of work just to prove that 0 * 0 = 0. And then you're magically expected to know which proving technique to use on unfamiliar problems.
I'm totally gonna sound like a bitchy spoiled brat here, but I think for the sake of keeping students interested they should hold off on all proofs until freshmen year of college when they dedicate a semester or two of it as a requirement for math majors and optional for others interested, with possibly as an AP class or in private schools before then for those who want a head-start. Some foreign (maybe also domestic) colleges have entire proof-based curriculum. Poor bastards. Learning math doesn't have to suck, but some seem determined to make it suck as much as possible. Oh well, better for them, having a higher barrier of entry makes them more valuable.