Educational Malpractice

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One of my friends tutored Calculus 1 students at WashU last year, and during one of their review sessions, they realized that instead of doing the regularly scheduled calculus work, they had to do a remedial math session.

NOT just like a college student who needs some review on high school math. These knowledge gaps traced back to middle school math, even elementary school math.

Calculus students unable to add fractions, much less work with exponent rules or solve equations with trig or square roots.

How do you expect students to take derivatives of these functions when they can’t even work with them algebraically? When they can’t even add fractions?!

So many of these students think that they have a calculus problem.

They don’t. They don’t have a calculus problem.

They have a “years of missing prerequisites” problem. Years of knowledge gaps, of holes in their foundations.

But instead of actually filling these holes, much of the education system has decided just to keep on shoving them into more advanced classes and calling it rigor.

It isn’t rigor. It’s educational malpractice.

Further reading: The Fall of Olympus: Education Edition .

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