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[richtx1]

I had to come back to the U.S., and ended up editing an on-line newspaper along the border between Laredo/Nuevo Laredo and El Paso/Juarez... a huge chunk of the Chihuahua Desert, where the biggest city has a population of around 5500 (this area averages about one person per square mile).

Natually, the local schools have trouble finding teachers... especially math teachers. Its an odd situation... the schol boards are starting to talk about hiring Mexican teachers. But, there's two problems. First, teachers out here usually have to fill a second slot -- coaching girls' basketball type jobs -- something most foreign teachers find bizarre, or a distraction from what they see as their "mission". Secondly, math is not as rigorous in the U.S. as in most countries... and the math teachers are way over the kid's heads.

I'm not recruiting teachers -- I got out of that a long time ago. I am interested in finding out what the Mexican math curriculum looks like -- what are the teachers teaching, what are the kids learning. At what grade level, etc.

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[MELEE]

My husband is a mathematician, so I can ask him. One thing I remember of the top of my head is that the secundarias in the state of Oaxaca still use a curriculum that the rest of the world abandoned in the 70s when brain researchers declared that abstract thought is not perfected until around 17 (of course there are exceptions). Thousands of kids don't get it, what they and their teachers don't know is that they are biologically incapable of getting it.