California abandons algebra requirement for eighth-graders

[Mariana]

89. You're a great parent. Of course it's okay.

Education isn't a race. It's much more important to learn the material well than it is to learn it early or to learn it quickly. So many young students who enter college don't finish, and in many cases it's because they tried to do too much too fast and fell on their faces, got discouraged and quit. I think it's much better to take extra time, if it's needed.

I'm another one of those people who flunked algebra in ninth grade and did very well with it later on, when I went to college. Nothing was wrong with me, and the teacher was good - she and I worked and worked trying to get me to understand algebra. I just wasn't ready for it yet in ninth grade.

My kid learned at a different pace than most of the others, too. She learned in spurts - when she was "on" she'd make extremely rapid progress in a short time, followed by a long "off" period in which progress pretty much just stopped. Her reading in particular was like that. She'd go "on", jump a grade level or two in a matter of a few weeks, and then not improve at all for six or eight or ten months. Weird. It freaked out a few of her teachers. She was like that until she got to be about 14.