Posted on 05/19/2009 5:11:45 AM PDT by Zakeet
Of course leave it to AP to do a bit of misdirection. They will never cover the fact that it is not so much about test scores and “progress” per se but the overall problem has to do with socialization and the complete Marxist control of our school system from top to bottom.
I'm okay with that. Well, the latter more than the former. I can't recall the last time I was stranded on a desert island without a calculator or a computer or other problem-solving device, and the only thing that would have saved me was manually calculating a long division problem.
Perhaps that's true if you only consider time spent in public school. South Korean children leave public school and then head over to a "hagwon" for private schooling: spoken English, math, etc. These kids are often returning home late in the evening, and then are up late doing their homework.
Me brudder’s left engineering, having been squoze enough by the shrinking manufacturing base and by inexpensive, H1-B visa, foreign (mostly Russian and Indian) rent-gineers. Substitute-taught in one place all year (teacher’s sabbatical) a couple years ago and student-taught last semester. His angle: most of our students have little interest in anything but cell phones, computer games, relationships, and parties and most of our students’ parents have little to no interest in, or control over, our students’ academic effort.
Oddly, despite having a calculator at hand, I do long division on paper every week or so. When calculatins something as simple as miles-per-gallon, it's often quicker to just write it out rather than use the calculator anyway. And I routinely add and subtract numbers in my head (provided they aren't huge numbers, of course).
I readily admit semi-geek status.
The point is, if you don't understand the basics of math, you won't be able to understand algebra, let alone simple geometry or calculus.
That’s the problem - public schooled kids are being indoctrinated as a first priority, educated as a distant second.
If the left were smarter about this, they’d try to make the public schools more successful at putting out better educated kids so that parents wouldn’t mind the indoctrination.
But, alas, you can’t avoid natural consequences for stepping off the path of God’s plan.
Oh sure - the kids are ignorant, but they are socialized to a tee!
They say that socialization is more important than knowledge in the modern world. You can just look up facts, if you have to, but you can’t just act “socialized” all at once, if you have to.
Calculators and computers obviate the necessity of numeracy, and schools can properly focus on their real “socialization” task - identifying intelligence and curiosity in children and killing it when found.
Without an understanding of how the basic concepts work, how can a person be expected to perform higher-level concepts?
I see this all of the time in IT. Person comes in who's "learned the test" and gotten their certifications. Can quote the book verbatim. Thinks that they're a brilliant engineer.
No concept, though, of *why* they do things the way that they do them. More often than not, the *why* (or *how*) is important. The aforementioned people usually (not always, but usually) flame out immediately. Those that don't get a crash course in remedial IT.
You gain more from doing long division and other tedious math problems than just the answer to your problem.
You get a feel for numbers and how they relate to each other.
You learn that “an order of magnitude” is not just a figure of speech, but a real mathematical concept that aids your understanding of your world.
You learn to make useful estimations almost instantly that can alert you when you’ve made an error not just in your arithmetic, but in the formulation of your problem.
You pick up on it more surely and quickly when a politician or journalist has told a lie or made a gross miscalculation.
You learn what garbage-in, garbage-out means, and cultivate a skepticism for pat answers and an appreciation for the limitations of machine generated knowledge, from calculators to spell checkers.
You learn the connection between very large numbers and very small numbers, and why you can’t divide by zero.
You get an innate sense for what the difference between precision and accuracy is, and when the significant digits in a number should or should not be rounded off.
You lay down the patterns of mind that you need when learning heuristic techniques for problem solving, or when programming a computer according to a particular algorithm, or solving a workflow or logistics problem in any kind of job.
There is just no substitute for learning things the long and difficult way first. Much of what passes for educational research and progress nowadays are misguided attempts to get around this fact, but all are doomed to failure, as the deterioration of our schools should make plain.
“Gist: we’re lagging leading Asian economies, but holding steady with dying European ones...”
Nice summary, but it’s worse than that. We’re lagging leading Asian economies even though our kids spend much more time in school than theirs! That means that from an efficiency point of view, we are even further behind. That is a tragic waste of the nation’s most valuable resource: the time of the next generation that hypothetically is supposed to solve all the problems they’ve inherited from us, such as a $104 trillion entitlements deficit.
It’s the private colleges that hand out the higher grades. They will claim it is because they get better students but actually they don’t want to flunk out kids whose parents are paying $40,000+ plus a year in tuition.
You haven't visited Cleveland State University in Ohio.
Unlike many global competitors, the U.S. is growing ever more diverse
Break down US scores by the demographics that successful education systems aren't burdened with and we're doing just fine.
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