I have three children (2 boys and 1 girl); all three are strong in math and all three are in SDUSD. I’ve watched advanced math quickly fall out of favor in the district and from the looks of it, the problem will get worse. I’m hoping I’ll be able to enroll them in community college math courses, but we’ll see.
Since a lot of this thread has been about hiring biases, I’ll share my own personal anecdote. I’m Jewish, but I’m not sure it is very obvious from looking at me. Several years after college (same alma mater as Coronita) and during a stint in the Army Reserves, I decided I needed to leave my private sector software engineering job for something in government as the company I worked for really hated the fact that I had to take time off on occasion as part of my Army Reserve obligation.
One of my interviews was with a department at UCSD for a job that my experience lined up with quite well. The interview went really well from my point of view… The technical questions were cake and there really didn’t seem to be any problems. At the end of the interview, the female Asian department head thanked me for coming, but said that my military background would cause problems because the staff is very liberal and conservatives would not fit in with the other employees. I was taken aback for a couple of reasons. First, I couldn’t believe she was admitting this, and second, I was, politically, very much a liberal! I didn’t see a point in arguing with her, so I left. This incident to this day upsets me and has left me with a really bad taste toward academia.
