Kids will make eye contact with you and nod along as you teach, but they are wearing air pods and can't hear you over their spotify playlist.

Im not sure I can be more interesting than Taylor Swift, Call of Duty, MrBeast, and texting with friends all at the same time. You need the student to be a little bit receptive to even have the opportunity to convince them what you are teaching is relevant to them.

How many paving stones do I need to buy for the walkway I'm building in my backyard?

How far from the top of the roof should I start attaching this gutter so that I still have roof to nail it to 30 feet later?

How big of a ladder do I need to get to that branch I want to cut down in that tall tree?

Will I be able to get this couch up the stairs, around the corner, and through the door?

That's what DEI solves for. Not "higher a lesser candidate," but "when both candidates are equal, use diversity of the company when making the final decision"

Whoever you pick, for whatever reason, didn't take an opportunity from the other 4 qualified people.

Heck, my wife would have a pile of resumes to go through and she only read them until she found 5 people she wanted to call. If you were "the next" person in the pile it was just bad luck that you didn't get called. The people in the pile before you didn't take your opportunity.

Interviewing is hard. People don't have a "technical skill" stat that you can sort by and just take the best one. People interviewing people is a terrible way to decided if someone will be a good fit, but it's the only way we have.

Often you end up with a bunch of people that you feel are equally qualified and you just have to pick one. If you use "dei" to pick rather than "this person was in the same fraternity as me" that's just a different side of the same coin. The difference is that before DEI programs, the people that passed the "post technical" part of the interview were the people that were most similar to the interviewers (that's human nature) and the interviewers were mostly white guys.

Rather than taking away opportunities, DEI takes away the ability for white people to "always win ties"

I suppose you could switch Probability & Statistics to "Just Enough Calculus" & Statistics to make it a less religious experience... but that also sort of defeats the "nobody really uses Calculus" mentality.

I'm curious to think through what a second track like this would look like.

Assuming the "normal" 8-12 track is:

Algebra 1 -> Geometry -> Algebra 2 -> Trig/PreCalc -> Calculus

I think you need Algebra 1... maybe I'm too stuck in the old ways.. but at some point you need to understand what a variable is and how to "solve for x". How to plot points, read and interpret a graph. Identify patterns in series of numbers, etc.. Call it what you want, but without the content of Algebra 1 you're going to have a hard time communicating ideas in the language of Mathematics. And these kids also have a Physics graduation requirement where they will need to at least solve f=ma.

Geometry is usually the "proofs" class. You're only really learning geometry so you can write proofs. You could plug&play that with a Discrete Math/Sets/Boolean/Logic class. I think Geometry is conceptually easier to understand as a 14/15 year old because you can "see" that the proofs work. Truth tables are kind of visual, but still a little more abstract than triangles and rectangles.

Combinatorics/Probability is already a half year course that's usually combined with the half year course of Statistics. I can see non-AP versions of this class split into two full year classes.

I imagine this would be something like what you're thinking of:

Algebra 1 -> Discrete Math -> Probability -> Statistics

The only thing standing in the way of something like this is politicians (state boards of education) and startup costs. For example, the graduation requirements in Texas are "4 credits of Math including Algebra, Geometry, and Algebra 2" (and the content of those classes are explicitly laid out in the TEKS). And you would also need to buy new textbooks/curriculum... which is money that schools don't really have to spend.

I took 2 years of Probability and Statistics in Highschool in 1998-99 and 1999-00 at a school with 200 students. At the 4000 students school I taught at a few years ago we offered AP Probability and Statistics (had have been for at least 10 years, but probably much longer than that). In both situations, you could (and many did) take Stats without Calc.

Most times when people say "schools should teach X", many schools are (and have been) doing it (taxes, car maintenance, carpentry, gardening). Just maybe not your school ... or maybe nobody told you that it was a possibility at your school... Or maybe it's not at your school, but it is offered at another school in your district...

Or maybe it's just not offered at your school. Because there is an AP exam associated with Stats, it is fairly easy to get the class made as long as there are students that want to take the class and enough teacher slots to accommodate that. If a school is understaffed in the math department and class sizes are nearing 40, then you probably won't find a Stats class there.

That's how it works now, pretty much everywhere. Your 7th grade teacher recommends you to take the 8th grade algebra class based on your performance (or, at least, their interpretation of your performance)

The question is, where do you draw the line that qualifies someone to take 8th grade algebra? Who do you let in when there is 1 seat left and 3 eligible students to fill that seat? How do you make sure that the grades you are using to determine who makes the cut are accurately measuring mathematical ability of the students and not biased in some other way?

I'm not advocating for either the California or the Dallas solution to this problem, but both those school districts have identified that letting the 7th grade teachers make this placement decisions is a problem.

It doesn't take too many parent-teacher conferences to figure out that the parents that ask for parent-teacher conferences want to see "the line go up" and aren't necessarily concerned with their children being challenged or learning much of anything.

The squeekiest of those wheels move from parent-teacher conferences to parent-administrator conferences (and sometimes parent-lawyer-administrator conferences) and you end up with school-wide policies like failure quotas where you are not allowed to have more than 5% of your students fail your class (ie the responsibility of the students grade falls on the teacher, not the student). And that is how grades stop being a measure of a student's understanding of the material.

"By the department's last count, only 1% of the people who think they've made their 10 years of payments and apply for loan forgiveness are getting approved.

If you took all the people getting rejected and got them together in one place, Peterson says, you'd have "football stadiums full of nurses, firefighters, teachers, law enforcement officers that are seeking to have their debts forgiven.""

Here is a Tedx Talk about those studies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=855Now8h5Rs

This is one of the studies (that with citations to many dubunking studies) that I was assigned in my M.Ed program:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1539-6053.20...

The Maps app was so much better than printing MapQuest maps or trying to use the flip phone version of MapQuest.

Being able to access the real internet from anywhere was futuristic.

You could use iMessage without paying $0.10 per text?!?! Can you even imagine paying $0.10 per text (and $0.25 for every text after the first 100 per month?)

Visual voice mail was also a game changer at the time.

And you got an ipod along with all that. (The iphone was my first "big" ipod device)

I also bought the Dragon Quest Builders game and hated that. It turns out I like classic RPG and action puzzler games but I don't like crafting and sandbox games. Now I know.

Pacer or not, you still have to run the run and that's not nothing.