> I mean, this all sounds like an red herring anyway if what you want is to improve maths education broadly
That's the tricky bit here, right? Math competition gamifies math, and encourages a level of play and understanding that normal math classes don't deliver.
But if you don't feel like you have some basic level of competence, being measured in this way is demotivating.
We need to figure out ways to make it interesting and involve exploration and that game-like feel for a broad slice of students.
I would rather a given student end their HS math journey in algebra I and have finished it with A) wonder, and B) a broad and solid understanding of the material that they can take into their adult lives... than to have ended it being able to do a big slice of AP Calc BC problems well, but without any kind of underlying fluency in math.
True mastery is one thing missing from all these discussions of math levels, tracks, etc.
> encourages a level of play and understanding that normal math classes don't deliver
Yes, but this is largely by convention for much of it. With some effort you can incorporate more playful and open exercises in a normal class. However few teachers have the spare time to spend this effort. It is also risky because you're likely to have some students that cannot cope with the challenge and if they do poorly the new thing you tried is likely to attract blame.
As an aside, a fundamental problem in any discussion about education is that it tends to happen with the various parties speaking about interventions aimed as only a section of the student population, but without this segmentation being explicitly acknowledged.
It is always important to remember there is a huge range of abilities and home circumstances in the student population the schools have to educate, so in a very real sense there is not just one, but rather a whole society of underlying problems that lead the the educational outcomes that then get summarised as a unitary PISA ranking or similar.
> Yes, but this is largely by convention for much of it. With some effort you can incorporate more playful and open exercises in a normal class. However few teachers have the spare time to spend this effort. It is also risky because you're likely to have some students that cannot cope with the challenge and if they do poorly the new thing you tried is likely to attract blame.
That's the big thing that has to be figured out. It needs to be fun. You need some randomness and handicapping. Effort and ability needs to affect outcome in gamified lessons but you need to feel like you have a fighting chance even if you're at the bottom.
I feel like good PE teachers know better how to do this than most in education. Their curriculum is intrinsically gamified and they need to manage to get effort and development from those with obviously different levels of ability.
> As an aside, a fundamental problem in any discussion about education is that it tends to happen with the various parties speaking about interventions aimed as only a section of the student population, but without this segmentation being explicitly acknowledged.
A bigger fundamental problem is that we don't get rigorous data on anything. We flit from trend to trend to trend, without measuring any of them well.
I'm data driven, and I read all the educational research, and I have very little rigorous guidance that I can believe. It falls to personal judgment, then, which is notoriously easy to fool.
> It is always important to remember there is a huge range of abilities and home circumstances in the student population the schools have to educate, so in a very real sense there is not just one, but rather a whole society of underlying problems that lead the the educational outcomes that then get summarised as a unitary PISA ranking or similar.
Yes, but it's similarly a mistake to think we're at some kind of global optimum and that there's not a set of different practices and curriculum that would result in a drastically better distribution of outcomes. In particular, I feel like we really, really screw up how math is taught.
I did recovery with a couple of students up in precalc levels that were struggling. They were missing some fundamental things. When they fell behind, it's everyone's (parents, teachers, tutors, etc) immediate intervention to help them with the problems they're struggling with, and drill them with rote. But if the real problem is that you don't have a good understanding of the associative property of multiplication, you end up memorizing a million special cases and getting yourself confused.
So when can you rearrange terms, and when can you not? It's time to play with it and find out...
That's the tricky bit here, right? Math competition gamifies math, and encourages a level of play and understanding that normal math classes don't deliver.
But if you don't feel like you have some basic level of competence, being measured in this way is demotivating.
We need to figure out ways to make it interesting and involve exploration and that game-like feel for a broad slice of students.
I would rather a given student end their HS math journey in algebra I and have finished it with A) wonder, and B) a broad and solid understanding of the material that they can take into their adult lives... than to have ended it being able to do a big slice of AP Calc BC problems well, but without any kind of underlying fluency in math.
True mastery is one thing missing from all these discussions of math levels, tracks, etc.