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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: 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.