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They do, but since they are a minority of those who take the tests and they are not separated out, the scores reflect averages.
Each district and school is different in the way they do this. My granddaughter will take Algebra II/Trig as a 10th grader, but she could have taken it as a 9th grader if she had doubled up Geometry and Algebra II which some of her friends did, but she did not.
Algebra II is hard for some people. Maybe her Alg. I experience was such that she decided she needed to take things more gradually, and not do 2 math courses at once. I had a blast with geometry, but Algebra was always a struggle.
Algebra II is hard for some people. Maybe her Alg. I experience was such that she decided she needed to take things more gradually, and not do 2 math courses at once. I had a blast with geometry, but Algebra was always a struggle.
Nope, it was more confusion - she really did not know she could do two at once and only in Freshman year. She wanted to double up this year with Alg II and preCalc, but that is not allowed at her school.
Ah, thank you. The "regular sequence" is what I'm familiar with. It's great that some kids really love math, though, and can jump ahead! Why don't those kids ever factor into those international academic rankings?
Yeah, what people forget is that school is set up to hit the average kid. The few who accelerate in Math are outliers in most circumstances.
I'm blown away by how many kids take advanced math these days at some high schools.
I graduated high school in 1996 in a good suburb in the S.F. Bay Area. Normal was:
Freshman: Algebra I
Sophomore: Geometry
Junior: Algebra II/Trig
Senior: Pre-Calculus
Advanced was one year ahead:
Senior Calculus AB, (and they took "advanced" math in 5th & 6th grades, with Pre-Algebra in 7th and Algebra in 8th.)
By my senior year, there were about 20 kids taking Calculus, out of 197 total seniors (I just checked my yearbook). The teacher was horrible and almost nobody knew what was going on. I felt thrilled to get a 2 on the AP Test, and I doubt more than two or three of us got a score of 3 or higher. I thought only like the top 3% of students could understand Calculus in high school. Then I took it again few years later in college, and was amazed that properly taught, I could understand it, though it took more work for me than most classes. I'd also struggled with Algebra I in 8th grade growing up, and had gone back a year before jumping forward in high school by taking geometry in summer school.
Another thing about high school that amazes me now, is no one every told us that engineers made lots of money, and the only thing we were every told about going into the computer field, is that they _didn't_ make much money.
Ah, thank you. The "regular sequence" is what I'm familiar with. It's great that some kids really love math, though, and can jump ahead! Why don't those kids ever factor into those international academic rankings?
They do.
It was pretty much the same at my school. I was in a combined 7th/8th grade algebra I class in 7th grade. Unfortunately I was also pretty much a lazy snot nosed kid. Since the teacher didn't know how to graph, we spent the majority of the year doing the only part of "algebra" she knew how to do -- simple diamond problems. My parents weren't on top of it as I was bringing back As and I wasn't motivated enough to teach myself algebra even though I knew it was at best a bad pre-algebra class. Retook algebra in 8th grade at the high school first period.
Bad math teachers didn't end there. Algebra in high school was taught by a formerly very good teacher with an opioid addiction in chronic pain. Some days were good, other days she was completely spaced out on painkillers. Geometry the class was taught by having people go up to the board and work problems in the book. Since the teacher didn't know how to do geometry, you could just go up there and do anything and then put the correct answer that was conveniently listed in the back of the book. By that point I'd figured out teaching yourself though. Algebra II/Trig and Calculus were both taught by excellent teachers.
It's the sum total of everything though with a mismash of incompetence and social promotion and checks. To take geometry coming in to high school, the school required you take a standard algebra test to demonstrate you'd actually learned algebra. Most people taking it in junior high had not learned algebra (bad school system). That wasn't required within the high school though. Almost everyone in my geometry class passed and went on to algebra II/trig even though we'd only covered half the material and unless you taught yourself you probably didn't even know how to do that half.
9th, 10th, or even 11th depending the the path the kid is on here.
This is how it is at my daughter's school. A few take it in 9th, most take it in 10th, and some take it in 11th. She is taking it in 10th and about half of her class is 11th graders, but they came from a different feeder school. She could have taken it in 9th, but when she transferred, she was put in a lower math class for 7th grade (compacted 7/8). It was a repeat of what she had done in 6th.
Our school district doesn't teach a class called Algebra 2 anymore. There's Math 1, Math 2, Math 3, and then pre-calc. The Math 1-3 sequence is a more integrated series of algebra and geometry, rather than having it (geometry) separated out into one year's worth of class.
About 45% take Math 1 in 8th grade and 45% in 9th grade. The rest are the outliers, taking it 1-2 years earlier or later than the majority.
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