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Dumbing down schools for equity

Puppycow said:
In California, the latest idea is that colleges will no longer consider SAT scores in their admissions process. So a high SAT score will no longer get you into college.
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It's about time:

The SATs Are Designed to Be Racist. Here’s How (The Amber Ruffin Show, Sep 18, 2021)

 
autumn1971 said:
You are incorrect. Counting (up or down depending on where you’re from) is much more efficient in time and also reduces errors from the extra step of entering the tendered amount.

Quicker and more accurate seem to me to validate the hour or so it takes a functional human to learn it. ETA: the option of entering the tendered amount is still available if the cashier is confused or hung-over or whatever.
There is no scenario where being a good cashier is less efficient. At the very least it is exactly as efficient.

Plus, all customers are thieves and scam-artists, so **** them
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This is the part that I think is a little off. It is indeed quick to learn, but as I mentioned it only saves time if the cashier does it routinely, and I just don't think it happens enough to get the repetitions needed for it to become second nature. If I were running a store I would consider it a bad idea to encourage my cashiers to attempt this--and yes, **** the scam artists, and one of the ways to do that is to rely on procedure rather than the wits of the cashier, even if mine are the smartest in the business. Enter in exactly what the customer gave you, so that if a dispute arises--honest or ill-intentioned--the customer's and cashier's exact action is what was saved on record, and will most closely match the video footage.

As a result I don't see how it's a meaningful part of being a "good cashier" to have that talent. It doesn't detract, but there's little reason to lament its absence.
 
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If given the opportunity I would rename this thread Dumbing down Schools for Equity is Not Equitable. The problem I am trying to highlight is that the word "equity" has serious barriers to critical review even if the policies that include "equity" in the name increases racism.

That is why when I highlighted issues of systematic racism, I could get labeled racist with lots of bolding and highlighting, even while the accuser activity defends sytematic racism systems. I don't blame her, bless her heart, as propaganda for party loyalty is far more powerful than the goals off that party.

However, as a lifelong Democrat, my goal is to make my party stronger. There are many areas where Democrats seek to make improvements only to make thighs worse off. It is not beneficial to blindly defend Democrats while defending their shortcomings.

When policies by Democrats increase Systematic Racism, it is beneficial to point out or and address it. Rather than follow through with Systematic Racism policies if you think that raising alarms might reflect poorly on the party that implemented them.
 
Butter! said:
No, it has happened to me. More than once. I've been the dumb young cashier that snooty old dads pull this move on. Then they'd try to give me a patronizing math lesson, loudly, on the spot. Sometimes, their wives would at least grant me the dignity of looking embarrassed to be with them.

My own father has come home / over bitching about these exact same types of interactions too, over the years. Use your ******* credit card, if it bothers you so much DAD.

The thing is, I actually don't think most cashiers freeze up when they're given weird change because they are dumb. It's just unexpected, and they're often not sure why someone is giving them an odd configuration. Plus, there's usually a big line they're expected to keep moving. I think this kind of transaction should be alluded to in training, so that new workers will recognize it.
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So what are we up to, an anecdote of 4-5 cases?


But yes, every subsequent generation is ruining the world, everyone younger than me is bad, etc.
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:D
 
Thermal said:
Absolutely stunned that it took this long for someone else to realize this. There is no change-counting skill, or lost esoteric arts, or even math. The cashier merely enters the amount tendered, $2.01 for the $1.76 purchase, and the register reads $.25 change. That's it.
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And if you get $2.01, how many times does it take for a cashier to catch on?
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
So what are we up to, an anecdote of 4-5 cases
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Mike! and I brought it up for the same reason (presumably): to ask if others see this too? My kids and I see it frequently enough to comment on.

Demanding studies is kind of stupid though. I seriously doubt anyone has been dedicating funds to studying cashier thought processes.

Skeptic Ginger said:
And if you get $2.01, how many times does it take for a cashier to catch on?
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I assume you mean 'give' $2.01, not 'get'? If so, how the hell would I know what the rest of the cashier's day goes like? You think I stand there buying small coffees over and over
for hours?

If I were to guess, I'd say 3/4 of the cashiers would need no explanation and understand what was being done. Of the remaining 1/4, the majority would be on autopilot and just enter the $2.01 and give back the quarter that the register told them was the change.

A very very small minority would stop and argue with the customer once or twice before catching on, then not do it again. That would make such a sighting as rare as a four leaf clover in the wild, that you might run across once in a decade.

Since the thread started, it has happened to me twice. The second time the cashier meticulously counted out twenty five cents in nickels and pennies (there were plenty of quarters visible in the till). I did not say a single word to her but "hi", and to answer "that's it" when she asked if that was all I was buying.
 
Could be they were managing to the stash--even plenty of quarters can dry up quick when people like me show up and want five or six at a time to get water from the machine outside.
 
Possible, I suppose. Of course the machines take bills, and drinks are $1 now IIRC.

There are a lot of possible explanations. I was mostly curious how many others noticed something similar. Replies here go from 'doesn't happen/urban myth' to the 'Behold the Lost Skill of Counting Coins'.
 
Going way back to the OP,....my own fractions anecdote.

My modern physics prof at the University of Illinois was kind of a cranky, irritable sort of person. After handing back exams one day, he was berating us for our stupidity. Seriously. There was one particular misdeed he was especially adamant about. Some huge number is students, maybe 1/3? had added 1/2+1/3 and gotten either 1/5 or 1/6. He concluded, "That's why I drive a Toyota".

Ok. Just to put it in context, U of I was one of the top engineering schools in the country. We weren't MIT, but we were in the next tier. So, that room really was full of the best and the brightest. Does it mean that our schools were putting out idiots?

No. It means that 18 year olds make dumb mistakes when they are in a hurry. We all knew that 1/2 was more than 1/5, but a fair number of people were racing through a problem under time pressure.

I'm pretty sure that more than half of Americans knew that 1/3 was bigger than 1/4. I just suspect that in the midst of a focus group, some people gave hasty and imprecise answers, and the marketers decided that a good summary to the A&W executives would be, "you had a great plan, but your customers were too stupid to understand it."

One other thing that makes me suspicious of the anecdote is that I remember "Papa Burgers" at A&W in the 1960s. The anecdote makes it sound like it was a name invented to avoid fractionally challenged Americans in the 1980s.

Basically, I share the concerns of the OP. I just don't think the evidence presented really proves it is happening in a way that needs to be a cause of concern.
 
Thermal said:
I assume you mean 'give' $2.01, not 'get'?
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I think that it was implied that the you in the example is the cashier, who gets $2.01 from a customer.
Why do old people not understand this immediately? Did they learn nothing in school? :)
 
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dann said:
Why do old people not understand this immediately? Did they learn nothing in school? :)
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Interesting thing that. In the 1960s, schools started teaching arithmetic using Cuisenaire Rods. The theory was that students using these rods would not have to learn arithmetic by rote. As a result, a number of students from that time would not be able to do mental arithmetic without a calculator.

Fortunately for me, although the nuns also used Cuisenaire Rods, they were skeptical that they would replace rote learning so they continued to beat arithmetic into me.

After a few years, schools started to realize that Cuisenaire rods were promising more than they could deliver and went back to teaching arithmetic the way they knew best.
 
I messed with those things when I was a kid! Would have been in the 70s I think. Possibly very early 80s. Personally I think a tactile representation of numbers and quantities was valuable, but just so--I think they tried to make more of them than they were.

In the end I was just using them as Legos that wouldn't stick together. I never discovered any way of doing basic arithmetic that worked better for me than the traditional addition and times tables, long division, and so forth. Once in a while my stepdad or a teacher tried to get me to visualize the problems in a different way, like "Ok this is ALMOST 20, so just multiply by twenty and then add the extras back in". But I couldn't work that way--that meant changing my method every time depending on what numbers I got. The only way I could get it right reliably was to do it the same way every time.

Some people can think that way and save time, other people can't.
 
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California did the same thing for "imbalances" with minority arrests. They lowered many crimes from felony to misdemeanor, and raised the monetary amount for a felony as well. All in an effort to make things equal across racial lines.

They don't deny that is the reason so I won't bother looking for a link. I've posted it many times here in the past year.

And I no I do not agree with any of this.
 
psionl0 said:
Interesting thing that. In the 1960s, schools started teaching arithmetic using Cuisenaire Rods.
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I never heard of those. There is no Wikipedia article about them in a Scandinavian language, so I don't think they were ever used here.
I remember slide rules. I hated those things even though there was nothing irrational about them. Fortunately, they didn't survive the arrival of pocket calculators, at least not in schools.
 
dann said:
I never heard of those. There is no Wikipedia article about them in a Scandinavian language, so I don't think they were ever used here.
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Maybe it is an AUSUK thing. ;)

Education departments in Australia tend to be top heavy bureaucracies that are always foisting fads into schools - riding roughshod over the qualms of the teachers who have to try and implement them in the class room. Cuisenaire rods is just one of these ideas.

Don't get me wrong. Tactile devices to help figure out addition and multiplication tables is a good idea but if you are going to do arithmetic without a calculator then sooner or later, you will have to rote memorize these tables.
 
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