doing it the hard way

Just got back from picking up Christopher's other school supplies from the store at the Middle School.

While there I debriefed a high school girl about the math track at Irvington High School.

The Irvington math track is something parents know essentially nothing about unless they do things like debrief high school kids at the school store. There's no brochure; there's nothing on the web site. It's a secret.

OK, it's not a secret. My problem is I don't see why I have to work to find out what the math track is in my own school district.

I've mentioned more than once that for a variety of reasons Irvington grade school ended up with 4 math tracks starting in 3rd grade, a situation no one inside the school liked or ever intended to create. They started with the idea of an enrichment program for the best math kids, then one thing led to another, and they ended up with four math tracks.

At the beginning of 3rd grade Christopher was placed in 'Phase 3,' one step down from Phase 4, the most advanced track. He was 8.

We had no idea what Phase 3 meant, and we were never told. We just thought.....well, I don't know what we thought. At some point I realized they were hitting the Phase 4 kids with a lot of Math Olympiad problems the kids couldn't do. Often the parents couldn't do them, either. Apart from that, both phases were using the same textbook (SRA Math) and moving through it at basically the same rate.

Giving kids a lot of Math Olympiad problems they couldn't do seemed like a waste of time (and in fact is a waste of time), so I didn't worry about it.

At the end of 4th grade we were told, directly, by Christopher's 4th grade teacher: 'Don't worry about the phases. They don't make any difference. All the kids have the same ability.'

Because of the funky way the Phases evolved in the first place, she was probably right that there wasn't a significant difference in ability level, so we took her word for it that there was 'no difference' between Phase 3 and Phase 4.

Then, at the beginning of 5th grade, we showed up for school and discovered that, lo and behold, the Phase 4 kids were using the 6th grade book. Phase 3 kids were using the 5th grade book.

All of a sudden this difference that was not a difference was a difference of one year.

That's the back story.

The point is: none of us parents knew, back in 3rd grade, that all but the Phase 4 kids had just been tracked out of calculus in high school.

We had no idea. Zero. Christopher was 8; we were one year out from 9/11 and 10 months out from the anthrax attacks. (We lost our TONYSS tests that year because they went through one of the anthrax post offices. So we didn't know how he'd done on the state tests.) We weren't thinking about high school calculus.

This is not the way a school district should work.

Track a kid out of high school calculus in the 3rd grade and not tell the parents?

That's not the social contract I thought I was signing when we moved here.

So today I debriefed this girl.

Like Christopher, she was placed in Phase 3. Then, at some point, she 'turned out to be good at math.'

This was not discovered until her freshman year in high school, it seems. A week from now, when school starts, she'll be joining the honors track.

To jump tracks, she had to spend her entire summer taking math at Rye Country Day School, which I'm sure cost an arm and a leg. She also had to get permission from the high school; she had to petition them to move her to the honors track this fall.

When I got home and figured out exactly how much ground she had to make up in one summer, I was stunned. The advanced kids are about a year and a half ahead of everyone else, which means she had to take and master all the math those kids have been taking and mastering for the last 2 years. And she had to do it in 8 weeks.

She said it was torture. She was up at 7 am every day doing math 'til she went to bed. I'm impressed as heck that she did it, but in my view it's pedagogically unsound, and she should not have been put in this position in the first place.

Worse yet, my own experience is that you can't cram math. You need time for math to sink in. Unless you're a natural born whiz, you need to be doing math every day, and living with it.

And, of course, we know from years of research on learning & memory that crammed knowledge disappears rapidly. (See Practice Makes Perfect But Only If Your Practice Beyond the Point of Perfection.)

I think it's extremely unlikely that her parents knew, when she was put in Phase 3 math, what kind of heroic effort it would take for their daughter to get back out of Phase 3 math.

I know for a fact that none of the parents around me have any idea Phase 3 means no calculus in high school.

The incredible thing is, they still don't know.

I made noises about this all last year, to anyone who would listen, which apparently did some good, because some 5th-grade parents raised the question in get-together meetings with the Middle School principal. By the time Ed & I went to our own get-together, on the last available date, the principal told us that parents at the other meetings had been asking whether their Phase 3 kids would be able to take calculus in high school. He acted surprised anyone would ask such a thing.

Then he said Phase 3 kids wouldn't be able to take calculus in high school, at which point the vice principal jumped in and said, Yes, they would be able to take calculus if they wished.

And there we left it.

That is not what I call Information. The principal says no & the vice principal says yes.....and that's an answer? That's it? They've had 3 weeks since the first get-together to figure it out and they still don't know?

And if the principal & vice principal of the middle school don't know whether a Phase 3 kid is on track to take calculus in high school, how am I supposed to know?

After the meeting, I was thinking the vice principal was more likely to be right, because she's been here awhile and the principal is new.

But no.

The principal was right.

Phase 3 kids are not going to be taking calculus in high school unless their parents sign them up for a brutal summer of 12-hour a day algebra & geometry catch-up 4 years from now.


Of course, now that Trailblazers is coming in and tracks are going out.....it'll be interesting.

I own the 5th grade Trailblazers book, which is the final book in the series. I've read it.

I don't see anyone coming out of Trailblazers on track to take calculus in high school.

UPDATE 10-9-2006: Based on what I hear from other parents, the tracks seem to have been preserved. It's possible the administration finally looked at the calculus track and realized they'd abolished it. I surmise this because two years ago parents of mathematically gifted children were pressing Raph Napolitano, the Assistant Superintendent in charge of curriculum, for an answer to the question of whether their children would be able to take calculus in high school. He didn't know. That was his answer. He didn't know whether mathematically gifted 3rd graders taking Math Trailblazers would be able to take calculus in high school. That's typical of this district. Parents are given no syllabi, no scope and sequence, no topic matrix. Unless we debrief other parents and their children we have no idea what lies ahead, or what our children need to know today to be prepared for advanced high school courses tomorrow. It takes many weeks and many emails and telephone calls to get a simple answer to a simple question. So I could be wrong about the tracks. Maybe we have them; maybe we don't.

UPDATE 10-24-2006: A friend whose child is in 4th grade says the tracks are gone. I have no idea what's going on.

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