Trego's Mountain Ear

I read an article (U.S. math scores show ‘devastating’ decline ) that told how US students’ performance in math is in a dive.  Here’s the graph:

When I started teaching in Trinidad, Colorado, the first term I had to take a Vocational Education class.  The motto for VE 590 seemed to be “If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.”  It made sense to me – learning can occur without a teacher, but teaching can’t occur without a student learning.  When I got on the school board and shared this thought, I learned that there were teachers who disagreed. 

My program was vocational – in two years, I was expected to train competent technicians.  The biggest challenge – the spot where the students who didn’t make it hit the wall – was mathematics.  I could teach the applications, the applied math – but I relied on good middle school and high school teachers to have done the job several years before me.  This sort of graph bothers me.

I learned other things in my vocational ed class – the instructor really believed that, since my program was in the agriculture department, my students should be in FFA.  On the other hand, one lady explained the slogan in culinary classes – “always remember that it’s the cook who has the knife.”

A 2022 report from ACT that I read said that the average GPA had risen from 3.17 in 2010 to 3.36 in 2021.  It stressed that the highest increase – a full tenth of a point – occurred between 2018 and 2021.  Grade inflation has been a challenge for years, and a satisfactory solution hasn’t occurred.