Competent people represent too great a danger for the left. Must teach that “Jimmy has two Mommies”, not how to add and subtract.
How could our math skills be sliding when the Media
puts forth someone like Snoop Dog as an Icon?
IT DOESN”T MAKE SENSE!
Miss Teen Journey is making A’s in her 3, yes three, advanced math courses in high school this year.
This is because te liberals wanted to make math easier for girls so they watered down the curriculum. Facts showed boys were stronger at math but that didn’t jibe with the feminist agenda. Now every kid suffers.
As long as the government schools are teaching kids muticulturalism, diversity, homosexual appreciation and how to put on condoms; there is little need for insignificant subjects like math and science.
The way things like No Child Left Behind work is they set testing goals based on universal passage and everyone getting to the same level. So in order to meet the ever-increasing goals (they go up to 100% in each of more than a dozen different racial/economic categories by 2014) teachers and schools have to focus all their attention on the kids on the cusp. That means the smart ones don’t have enough attention paid to them and aren’t nurtured.
I know this idea of universal graduation and competence in every subject is a nice one but at some level you have to focus resources and attention on making the high achievers better and realize that not every kid needs to or should go to college and that we need mechanics and plumbers too.
As is evidenced by the people in Washington who think that one can somehow get 700 billion dollars from a purse that not only doesn't have any money but is actually in debt (i.e. a 10-trillion dollar national debt, I think).
-10 trillion minus 700 billion = pure insanity
Now there's some real math for you.
Not only math skills are but understanding of the economy as well.
If people understood how the economy ticks they would know how bad Obama’s economic plan is. But he’s winning, which tells you a lot about the economic knowledge of the majority who would vote for him.
How can they have math skills, when you are required to buy your children $150 calculators for their math classes?
Here is Dec, I will finish an undergrad degree in statistics and I can tell you that American kids are math stupid. I work for my university by tutoring for a class called Business Statistics. This is a class required for all busines/finance/economic etc majors. You would not believe the number of students I see that don’t know how to take an average of a group of numbers. The concepts taught in the class are not difficult to understand, but I am constantly amazed at people’s inability to understand basic mathematica theory.
As I think about my department, I think there are 6 American statistics majors and in the mathematics department it is probably 4 to 1 or higher foreign to American. It really is scary.
The kids may lack math skill but their self esteem is the highest it has ever been. Only in America do the failing feel proud and good about themselves.
Help is on the way! Thanks to the blessings of the DOE and concerned and caring Mayors such as Bloomberg, we present the new and exciting Radical Math!
It's also known as "teaching math for social justice," and one of the leading lights of the genre is Eric Gutstein, a Marxist colleague of Bill Ayers’s at the University of Illinois and also a full-time Chicago public school math teacher.
But the brilliant idea is sweeping the country, as Sol Stern reported about an April 2007 conference in NY City:
Late last month, over 400 high school math teachers and education professors gathered in Brooklyn for a three-day conference, titled “Creating Balance in an Unjust World: Math Education and Social Justice.” Prominently displayed on the official program’s first page was a passage from Paulo Freire, the Brazilian Marxist educator and icon of the teaching-for-social-justice movement: “There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to . . . bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of our world.”
The conference’s organizers left nothing to the imagination about their leftist agenda. At many of the conference’s 28 workshops, math teachers proudly demonstrated how they used classroom projects to train students in seeing social problems from a radical anticapitalist perspective. At a plenary session, Professor Marilyn Frankenstein of the University of Massachusetts’ math education department proclaimed that elementary school teachers should not use traditional math lessons, in which students calculate, say, the cost of food. Rather, the teachers should make clear that in a truly “just society,” food would “be as free as breathing the air.”.....
But suppose you’re a parent with children in the public schools and you happen to believe in the old fashioned, anti-Freirian view that public education in a democracy must be politically neutral, and that teachers have an ethical and professional responsibility to keep their politics, left-wing or right-wing, out of the classroom. What if you want your child to learn, not Sweat Shop Math, but rather the traditional algebra, trigonometry, and calculus—part of a curriculum that throughout the twentieth century helped millions of Gotham public school students from poor immigrant families graduate and pursue productive careers?
Unfortunately, you’re probably not going to get much help from the DOE. A few days before the conference, I provided schools chancellor Joel Klein with details on the city teachers and schools that were participating. His response: “This is a private conference, at which a range of views will be expressed. It seems that many of these views are hardly ‘radical’. . . . In any case, the people who are speaking at this conference are participating in their personal capacity, not as representatives of the Department of Education. We are committed to making sure that all of our teachers teach math to our high standards—and we are working hard to build on our students’ recent substantial gains.”
How odd that the NY Times article doesn't mention this wonderful innovation and "students' recent substantial gains." After all, it's "hardly radical." /sarc
What fools! You don’t need math skills to put a rubber on a cucumber!....idiots!
Presumably since we'll have all the money we can just sit back in our ignorance while others do all the work.
With the collapse of the financial markets we might have to put that utopian expectation on hold for a few more decades though.
The near future does not seem to demand math and reading. “We take this from you and give it to him,” does not seem to require any particular skill set.
Its not like math is more important than high school football. Get real.
Math? Sheesh. They want to ban competitive sports too, with kids faking jump rope without a rope in PT classes.
It’s all about titles and kids not having to learn and teachers not having to teach.
Math like music takes practice and concentration. Kids today have extremely fragmented consicousness. They are usually surfing, chatting, and playing music all at the same time.
The fundamental reason for America’s decline is not bad schoolks but bad parents that don’t spend enough time with their kids and don’t teach them the value of hard work. My old high school produced over 50 national merits. It had nothing to do with the quality of teachers, there were just a lot of smart motivated students there.
Problem: Education majors have the lowest SAT scores on campus. Too many of our government teachers are utterly incapable of doing math themselves.
Solution: Make all government teachers sit in college level Calculus courses with math and science majors. Of course this might shut down the government schools since few government teachers could pass Calculus.
By the way, I think **all** government teachers should be required to pass the GED for high school graduates. I’d give them a month to prepare. This might shut the government schools down too given the number who would fail ( especially the math section.)