Maybe we shouldn’t shield kids from complex controversies
Imagine if students at one of our nation’s highest-ranking universities couldn’t do grammar school math. Well, administrators at the University of California, San Diego recently discovered that plenty of their students struggle with math they should have learned a long time ago.
Here’s an example: Rounding is a third-grade skill, yet 61% of UCSD students who were placed in a remedial math course couldn’t round the number 374,518 to the nearest hundred.
Keep in mind that UCSD placed sixth in US News & World Report’s national rankings of public universities. Also keep in mind that 94% of the students placed in the remedial math course had completed an advanced math class in high school such as pre-calculus, calculus or statistics. And keep one more thing in mind — those students received an average grade of A- in those advanced high school math classes.
College students should be able to round correctly, and what if they could? What would that tell us? Not much. If they could answer a dozen other standardized questions correctly that would tell us more, but maybe not much more.
How would most college students answer a different kind of question, say, one like this: Are WNBA players underpaid?
Maybe it makes me a crazy homeschool parent, but when he was 10, I had my son tackle that question.