The night after I first heard about the new opportunities at West
High I had a dream. This dream was odd even by the standard of dreams.
It began as a spy thriller set along aroad through the woods. The road
was unpaved and muddy; a car driving along would be at serious risk for
getting stuck in the mud. (I know; you would expect me to dream about
being stuck in the snow. But this dream was set in August.) The woods
had been developed for use by a youth rustic camping program. None of
the youth were present at this particular moment which is probably good
given the dangers inherent in any spy thriller.

What really set this dream apart was not the content, the plot line or
the visuals or the particular risks the characters encountered. What
makes the dream notable is what I was reminded of when I woke from it.
Why would a dream in the August woods with a muddy road evoke concerns
about the teaching of IB math?

My real life memory raised by this dreaming was of a particular topic
which was confusing a number of West High students last fall. Both Erin
and I had tried to help some of these students but neither of us could
figure out what the class was asking them to do. Eventually Erin found a
boy who kept very clear and careful notes; she took pictures of them,
analyzed the pictures, and reached a conclusion about the expectations
for the students. Her reconstuction was mathematically correct and
consistent with what students had told us. As near as I could determine
the reconstructed lesson was also pedagogically pointless.

I have doubts about this reconstruction because I have never previously
come upon an IB presentation in any subject which I could not tie to
fundamental educational goals. This reconstructed lesson came across as
learning a very particular rote sequence for the purpose of knowing that
rote sequence when you move to England and take up the IB sequence. We
have broken away from that sort of rote learning across modern education
and away from using the next class in sequence as a justification for
the current content.

There we were in real life trying to figure out what students were being
assigned to do by reading notes taken by another student in the class.

It sounds like a bad dream.

----------------------

I have a suggestion. Let's stop trying to sell math -- and all the other
subjects -- as material kids will need for employment. Most kids are
smart enough to know that is bunk anyway. For example, I worked as a
computer programmer from post-college to willful unemployment. Did I use
math concepts in my work? Yes! But not typically the ones we push in
high school math classes. What I as a programmer primarily gained from
math was a style of thinking and some techniques for conceptualization.
Some of the people I worked with had similar math-based skills but
others did not. Besides the job of "computer programmer" is essentially
passe now; the title is still used but the people they hire are mostly
either packaged software users or low-grade hackers.

This does not mean we should not teach math. It means we should teach
math and German and history and Shakespeare for the real benefits these
subjects offer to students. For example, reading, writing, painting, and
thinking contribute objectively to the "health span" of adults.

    People with the highest lifetime enrichment developed Alzheimer's
    disease at an average age of 94, compared with 88 for those with the
    lowest level of enrichment - more than a five-year delay.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/feb/11/reading-writing-lower-dementia-risk-study-finds

Maybe you could round up some grants for teaching Chinese language or
for shawn playing on the grounds these topics (unlike STEM) have direct
benefits for student lives.

Speaking of STEM, I have thoughts on that as well:

https://pivotrock.net/wit/actualreality/2020/arg.20200525.2034.html


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Also, I wonder about a math problem I saw in the computer lessons.
There was a little story about shooting a rocket from the top of a
tower. Then an equation was given and the student was told to use
the formula to figure out how long the rocket was in the air before
hitting the ground.

The formula was written using x and y variables rather than some
more mnemonic letters like h and t. There was nothing in the lesson
about how the a.b.c parameters were chosen; nothing about how c
represents the height of the tower, for example. (There was advice 
from the teacher that hitting the ground was the same thing as zero
height, h=y=0.)

I am wondering what the purpose of the lesson was. The student is
not synthesizing a equation as it is handed to them. The student
is not analyzing what the equation is communicating; there is no
hint of the richness of the mathematical language. The student is
not asked to relate the little story about flying a rocket to the
equation at all. I suppose we are teaching the student to ignore
the bulk of what is told but even then we are not providing any
method for choosing which information is useful and which is fluff.