For some time now, since before I fought successfully to recover from cancer and completed my novel last year, I’ve had the intuition that I want to make some kind of change to Prospericity. I’ve also had the competing intuition that this occasional blog continues to be a worthwhile project for me. I’ve liked the process of writing essays here, and I’ve enjoyed posting photographs perhaps even more. Prospericity has been an opportunity to adopt the persona of an individual who gets to be highly engaged with intellectual and public life, a respite from the constant demands of household and classroom, the latter of which I’ve often experienced as a highly demanding simulacrum of household life.
One might say Prospericity has, at least so far, been my spear to tilt at windmills. Like Cervantes’ famous hidalgo who did not regret his seemingly hopeless exploits, I won’t regret mine either. But still, as I look toward leaving the classroom in three more years, I realize I’d like to start using this project in a way that’s more focused. I’d like to grow my readership and perhaps one day start to get paid for writing, not because I need the money (thankfully) but because readership and money are one metric of impact, and I want my endeavors to be impactful.
So, given that the only likely path toward impact is to try something new, my plan is to keep this blog but also get with reality and replicate it on the Substack platform. I also plan to follow the advice of others and focus my writing thematically. For now I want the theme to be around public education and the profession of teaching; ironically the very activity that in the past I’ve used my writing to feel less subsumed within.
But that’s looking forward. For this post, I want to briefly develop the third and last fragmentary essay that I entered into my journal during the long June Edinburgh twilight. See here and here for the first two. This essay fragment was a response to an LA Times article describing efforts on the part of UC faculty to bring back SAT testing as part of admissions criteria, primarily due to faculty concern about the lack of reliable ways to measure math preparedness. Here’s an Atlantic article by Idres Kahloon on the same topic, and here’s the actual letter from the faculty, with nearly 3,000 signatures as of July 1 of this year including seven of the nine chairs of UC Mathematics Departments. I’m only a high school math teacher and part-time writer, but I can only imagine that even for a tenured professor it is never cost-free to speak out against the administration of your own institution, especially when one runs the risk of being criticized as insensitive or worse on racial grounds. To see faculty in such open, widespread revolt is striking; an indicator of something truly amiss.
All this builds on another flurry of coverage last winter. Here is yet another Atlantic article, this one from Rose Horowitch, describing how many entering UC San Diego freshmen struggle to cope with even middle school mathematics. The article is based around this alarm bell of a report from the “Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions” at UC San Diego.
A couple of things struck me about this report. One was that the students entering college without high school math skills almost all got good grades in high school math! As anyone who lives in California knows, you need super high grades, often well above a 4.0, to get into any higher tier UC campus. It seems to me that UC San Diego faculty, in arguing so strongly for a return to the SAT, are in effect saying that the system of high school grades is now pervasively broken as a predictor of academic preparedness.
Ouch! One might think UC San Diego report would be a huge wakeup call for teachers and administrators in the California K-12 system. One might also think the letter and the report would enter meaningfully into debates about mathematics pedagogy, debates in which UC and especially Stanford education professors (not math professors) have very loud, influential voices. But as far as I can see both the UC San Diego report and the more recent UC faculty letter seem to have caused barely a ripple of interest in the K-12 world. Something, I’ll say again, feels truly amiss right now.
The other thing that struck me in reading the UC San Diego report was how its language reminded me powerfully of some of the informal discussions we have around the high school math department lunchroom, especially at the each end of term when it comes to math placement recommendations. Here is just one small sample:
“Alarmingly, the instructors running the 2023-2024 Math 2 courses observed a marked change in the skill gaps compared to prior years. While Math 2 was designed in 2016 to remediate missing high school math knowledge, now most students had knowledge gaps that went back much further, to middle and even elementary school. To address the large number of underprepared students, the Mathematics Department redesigned Math 2 for Fall 2024 to focus entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades 1-8), and introduced a new course, Math 3B, so as to cover missing high-school common core math subjects (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II or Math I, II, III; grades 9-11).” (UC San Diego Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions, Final Report)
Just like UC faculty struggle to find students ready to move through the college math sequence, high school teachers struggle to find students with both the technical skills and internal motivation required to move through the core high school Math I, II, III sequence. (Note here that high school Math II is a different and harder course than the remedial “Math 2” course at UC San Diego). A kind of ambient pressure exists, to which I’m proud to say my own little math department has refused to bow, to simply lower standards in response to this lack of preparedness, or else to adopt trendy pedagogical methods that sometimes feel explicitly designed to cover over rather than address fundamental issues with technical skills and motivation.
K-12 education is a challenging, important, sometimes uniquely rewarding, nearly always under-appreciated line of work. Given my unusual skill set as both an active service K-12 teacher and a professional writer, I find I have a great deal to say right now about my own line of work, and also the capacity to say it. I’m also finally at a place in a career where it’s time to start speaking out.
But I’m not just motivated because I’m longer afraid. I’m also motivated because the stakes are high. The sign above the former Edinburgh bar in the photograph above carries an enormous amount of truth. I might add that those without deep literacy in the humanities “shall not enter” the doors of enlightenment either. It’s not that we don’t want them to. In fact, this Fourth of July, I’d say that it’s never been more urgent to have a deeply educated and reflective citizenry. But for too long we’ve allowed the basic institutions of K-12 education to fall into decline, or never built them up sufficiently in the first place. It is time to change this.