Posted on 12/15/2004 5:46:49 AM PST by Republicanprofessor
A long read but worthwhile. I could not find a date for when this article was posted, but it popped up immediately when I did a google search for this professor at Michigan State and I thought it worthwhile.
This is not necessarily news, but I think we can infer a few solutions from the article.
Agreed. The writer nailed it. My son's currently in 8th grade pre-algebra, and all they're doing is revising stuff they did years ago: arithmetic of fractions, etc.. Needless to say, he's bored, and he usually likes math.
All you can do is make sure to teach 'em yourself.
We made the mistake of assuming our son's teachers were doing math facts with him. At the end of 5th grade, he was STILL having trouble. It was a large reason that we decided to homeschool him. He just returned to school this year; he's a freshman in high school doing Alg. 1. He's doing much better now that he had a few years one on one with Dad doing Math.
This suggests that the problem lies not with our children, but that it is the education system that is failing them. This, I believe, strongly supports the need for a major national initiative in mathematics education.
I can hear the lib response now: Whats needed is more money! If we only had 13 billion dollars more, well then, we would have what we need for the children!
/em sighs softly...
I see the results of this rot daily when the students hit the university. The problem is we've given a monopoly on teacher preparation to Colleges of Education where the curriculum is vacuous--ed majors are the major of last resort for weak college students--and where an egalitarian 'lowest common denominator' approach to everything prevails.
No Child Left Behind tried to address this, but the states (who granted these monopolies) have balked at the 'highly qualified teacher' requirements.
The solution lies in breaking the teachers college monopolies--indeed requiring a major in a subject to teach it at the junior high or high school level and increasing teacher pay to get decent majors in other subjects (esp. in this case mathematics) to take up school teaching as a profession. (If you can finish a major in mathematics or any of the natural sciences, I think you're smart enough to figure out how to make a lesson plan, record grades, write on a blackboard without standing in front of what you wrote, and all the other things teachers need to do without specialized courses--TA's tossed into university classrooms just out of undergrad majors do it routinely.)
Education colleges were a part of Dewey's plan to ruin American education. GEt rid of all of 'em.
Ah, but that's another problem: in most states of the union, 8th grade is completely vacuous--all review in all subjects except for science where it's something lite like 'Earth Science' or 'Ecology' (and I used the commercialized misspelling advisedly) and maybe health where it's time for sex ed. Ever since I went through it, I've advocated abolishing it. A year of community service would be more edifying than 8th grade.
I've also hear that there is a serious demographic split in the testing of AMerican students. Whites and Asians still score high (in the top 10) but when African American and Hispanic students from the inner city are included, the average drops like a rock. The U.S. is producing bright, educated kids and ones that haven't learned a thing in school. Very little in the middle.
You can thank Prentice-Hall, and others publishers, for producing the most abysmal textbooks ever.
My daughter is in an AP program, and her math book is HORRIBLE -- it just sorta tosses in new ideas with no real explanation of why it's there, how it works, or how it's used. The authors of the book spend a lot of time tossing in various linear algebra concepts, and they try to do it without having actually explain why linear algebra exists in the first place.
Matrix multiplication was actually introduced for the first time in the middle of a chapter on signed numbers!!! F***ing ridiculous.
The excuse given by the authors is that it's part of the "spiral learning model." I suppose such a model is helpful if a kid is first given some f***ing background in the subject matter, but this particular book doesn't bother to do that.
I can walk her through it, since I use most of the math in real life and understand it. But my daughter is just doing the mechanics -- and I suspect the other kids in her class are, too. The book does not teach for understanding, and the teacher hasn't got time to do it....
Sigh.
On the other side of the coin, my daughter is actually doing the more advanced stuff, but it's so poorly presented -- no motivation of topics, no systematic buildup, etc. -- that she's utterly confused most of the time....
I agree. There is way too much pedagogy, which deadens the brains of the bright and doesn't contribute any real knowledge. But you would not believe the way the education professors circle their wagons when criticized. They won't allow for new ideas (although the need for brainstorming and change is dramatic).
the states (who granted these monopolies) have balked at the 'highly qualified teacher' requirements
Schools have a hard enough time finding teachers to teach at all, whether in their area or not, much less highly qualified ones. Yes, higher salaries may draw better teachers. But also less certification b.s. and more discipline in the classrooms. Who wants to waste their time with ill-disciplined brats who disrupt class and won't let you teach?
Parents and teachers also resist the mandated testing too. Makes Johnny look too dumb.
As I mentioned on the discussion of the recent PISA study, I think that it is mandatory that teachers understand mathematics in order to teach it. I will assert that a teacher who does understand mathematics cannot possibly teach or grade work in mathematics.
I agree with your post. I was an electrical engineer, turned high school teacher. Science major, math minor. I got to teach one class in science, (no openings in the department in ten years) and taught low level math as my seniority moved me up. Kids were poorly prepared when they came from poor areas. Well prepared when they came from wealthy areas. (My school had both feeder schools, the difference was that in the wealthy schools more was expected, and teachers gave 10 to 14 pages of supplementary homework per day. The teachers in the poor schools did not expect much and did not assign much, maybe one page a day.)
I lost my job because of a mass layoff based solely on senority. The union controls firing. I went back to my engineering job and began to teach new engineers as the company hired them. I was one of the highest ranked industry teachers, but the school could find no way to keep me. So I contend that it is not just a problem with the level of ability of the teachers, the union creates roadblocks to getting and keeping the best teachers.
Incidently, the text books we had were very good. Class size was large, and many teachers teaching math did not have math as a strength, but likewise there were many strong math teachers, particularly in the higher levels of math. My belief is that homework, and lots of it is the key to success in math. (And the homework must be looked over by the teacher.)
And if not all the way, supplement at home - be involved. As a single parent, it's not feasable for me to homeschool, but my son is also in 8th grade and education has always been supplemented at home. Not so much in a book-sense, but in life-sense.
The danger does come when the kids get bored. If their love for learning decreases, so will the results. My son was getting bored in science - talked with his teacher (seeing as he wants to major in life sciences, kind of important he stay interested) - though the curriculum can't be changed, he suggested that my son do extra research and work on subjects he's interested in and he'd be happy to give feedback. This also gives him the opportunity to see tangible applications for science.
Like I said, be involved. Public school will never be good enough on it's own. IMHO
The problem in mathematics teaching has been going on since the '30s or so. When I was in elementary school in the '50s, our principal was constantly fighting to keep using the old pre-WWII math books up through grade 4, which contained lots of rote learning and enough drill for anyone. Her view (and she had an MA in mathematics from UC Berkeley) was that there was simply no substitute for rote and drill below the age of 10. She wanted evey student who went through her school to know basic arithmetic cold. Our kids did better in junior high and high school than all the other schools in town, except the other school which also kept using the old books. The were only replaced in the mid-1960s when they literally wore out after 35 years of use.
For me, the rote was pure torture, but I'm an anomoly: theoretical mathematics comes very easily to me, but arithmetic is still painful. However, knowing the arithmetic made it possible for me to do real math later on.
I'm also convinced the teaching of the middle school subjects in mathematics -- elementary algebra and plain geometry -- need to be much more rigorous. In my daughters' middle school, there was only one good mathematics teacher out of a dozen. In their high school, there was a huge bifurcation. There were several good mathematics teachers, but they only taught the very top kids (the ones two grade levels ahead- calculus as juniors, AP calculus as seniors), the rest of the math faculty was so bad the kids who were struggling couldn't get the material, let alone ever catch up with the kids who were getting the best instruction.
Notice the problem in the article wasn't with the classes up to the age of 10, it's with what happens after. At 4th grade our kids do fine, between 4th and 12th, when they need more than rote and don't get it, we slip behind almost all other developed countries (last time I checked, only Canada was worse, but maybe that's changed one way or another).
When they start paying for Quality Math and Science Teachers we will get quality math and science programs. The reason that alot of middle school kids get stuck at this level is because the people expected to teach higher math and science don't know it themselvs.
Ain't it the truth. For some now forgotten reason, one of my kids was being asked to show the inverse image of an open set was open in a pre-calculus or calculus class a couple of years ago. They book had a clunky way to get at the problem, so I just got out my old copy of Rudin's Principles of Analysis and explained the proof to her, which she then used. The teacher marked it wrong!! (Straight out of RUDIN, for Gosh sakes!!) Turned out the teacher didn't understand the proof, and it took me an hour, with the book and another math teacher, to explain it to her.... Argh.
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