"Students in upper-track math courses are no smarter or better at math than others. But their families have managed to give them a jump-start through additional after-school programs, tutors and other resources" --SFUSD administrator who supported detracking

Insane quote ... 1/

https://twitter.com/EdSurge/status/1869247973210673191

I've run high school summer camps in Ethiopia for 13 years now in which the bulk of participants come from low income families

Here's one of our students, Yosef, talking about @timnitGebru paying for his SAT+TOEFL because he couldn't afford it 2/

Many know of Brian Conrad's claims of 'citation misrepresentation' in the CA Math Framework (CMF) but don't know details. In this thread I'll describe just 1 example amongst his 31 pgs of comment (, and some of ). It's egregious. 🧵drive.google.com/file/d/17O123E…
drive.google.com/file/d/1yKnDjv… I'll focus on one that still persists in the version of the CMF that was finalized last month. The below is from Chapter 12. (2012 is a typo; they meant 2002, as can be seen from the bibliography) The problem: Engle'02 is not about math anxiety or about timed tests at all. 2/

The California State system is, I believe, the largest university system in the USA (by enrollment). Its systemwide academic senate has published a formal resolution stating the UC is approving courses as math that don't meet state standards. Specifically, data science courses 1/ This is huge. Cal State has an enrollment of over 450,000 students at 23 campuses, and > 50k faculty/staff. This resolution does not represent a small set of faculty. This is a formal document from a systemwide committee that represents the entire body of Cal State faculty. 2/

Why has the desire to make math more accessible, for many folks, translated into wanting to get rid of calculus? Pedagogical debates should not create confusion on what content is important. We should 1) identify knowledge is important, then 2) find the best way to teach it. 1/ Discrete math and statistics can likewise be made hard to access depending on how they're taught. The concepts in calculus are, actually, quite intuitive if taught the right way. Let's look at the most fundamental concept in the subject: the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus 2/

I've been a theorist working on algorithms in the academic ivory tower for 17 years. Last summer I started part-time in industry 1 day per week (@Google); this is fairly common amongst my more applied colleagues in ML/systems, but less so for theorists. I highly recommend it. 🧵 Ultimately CS is an applied field. Yes I'm a theorist, but the theoretical models I consider, and the problems I choose to work on, are only as interesting as the applications that motivate them. The bulk of those applications come from industry. 1/