a good idea: In a storefront at a Marblehead strip mall, six students aged 10 to 12 sit at folding tables and stare at math equations handed to them moments before by their teacher. For the next two hours, they will puzzle out dozens of math problems with little assistance. The students are among the first 35 pupils at the newest satellite branch of the Russian School of Mathematics. The school, which teaches algebra to kids as young as 5, began in founder Inessa Rifkin’s Newton kitchen 12 years ago. At the time, Rifkin believed her son was underachieving and decided to start a small class for teenagers. Today, the school has 1,800 students at its Newton location, a camp in New Hampshire, and branches in Acton, Marblehead, and San Jose, Calif. The North Shore branch opened earlier this month.
a bad idea:As the New Jersey Department of Education continues to redesign its high school curriculum to add more rigor, officials have moved away from one of the proposed plan’s most controversial elements: requiring all students to pass Algebra II. Algebra I already is a graduation requirement for this year’s freshman class, and plans are to make geometry – or a course with equivalent content – mandatory. But the proposed Algebra II requirement has been relaxed, enabling students to comply by taking a yet-to-be-designed course that builds on Algebra I and geometry. Marlene Brubaker, a science teacher at Camden County Technical School in Pennsauken, criticized what she called a “one-size-fits-all approach” to education.
“I have the highest regard for people being able to do higher math,” Brubaker said. “However, you need to have appropriate levels of math and science for the careers the students are shooting for.”
As it is, she said, her students lost time from their technical course work to get tutored for standardized tests in math and language arts. She worries what will happen if the state requires multiple exams for graduation. She would like to see versions of third-year math that target differing needs of students.
At a legislative hearing two months ago, Joseph G. Rosenstein of the New Jersey Mathematics and Science Education Coalition called the Algebra II requirement an “intellectual Ponzi scheme.”
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i am not sure what an “intellectual Ponzi scheme” is, but it seems clear to me that the good people of new jersey have this wrong to the detriment of the kids in that state.
