Posted on 03/20/2019 7:59:44 AM PDT by Heartlander
We were quite concerned about that when my son was starting college. Every single college brochure he got had girls on the cover and in most photographs.
Even the school he went to. He knew every single female student and none of them were the ones on the brochure.
His school was small with only a handful of female students.
I helped coach a FIRST Robotics team for a few years. Only one girl ever stuck with the mechanical and engineering side of things. The others were incredible at strategy, marketing etc but most never even put a fingerprint on the actual robot.
The Soviets relied and promoted theoretical physics and engineering and, thus after Sputnik, the US was “forced” to play catch up and we swung the educational pendulum all they in that direction. Prior to that most of the country was built using applied physics, math, and engineering principals.
Obviously this has led to computer engineering/technology breakthroughs that have aided in assisting a better understanding of forces/reactions of engineering design in all fields. As a Professional Civil Engineer, I see todays graduates without any clue as to how to take a computer aided design and actually build it, how to check the computed answer with a calculator, how to scale a set of prints, or how to make on the fly design decisions during construction.
I started out as cad designer, but my first City Engineer made me check every calculated point, distance and elevation by hand before he would review it and eventually stamp it for construction. Then in the field all of the surveying was checked and double checked to verify the same result.
My young grads just give me a look of disbelief when I ask them to do this.
No, I think it pretty much did exactly what its Socialist sponsors intended it to do.
But it's OK. Chinese kids can make money with math and programming and American kids can make just as much money caring for the poor and saving the planet. Hooray! /s
I can’t claim to be an expert on what the future will hold. I’m confident that calculus won’t become a dead letter anytime soon, but at the same time Mathematica ™ can do the painful algebra and can obviate the need to strain your brain finding the integral of an abstruse function. Consequently, IMHO, that drudgery will in future be absorbed into apps in cell phones. That would save a lot of frustration, and maybe the students' “little gray cells” can be more usefully deployed learning higher-level analytics.Better yet they could take the Dale Carnegie Course, which would be more valuable to the typical student than that . . .
Or they try to convert STEM to STEAM or STREAM by adding art and reading to it to latch their teeth and ideology into STEM's budget.
America might also consider ending the war on males.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power
Doing things at least once by hand is still important. As much as I hate it and had points taken off in exams for transcription errors grinding through the algebra as part of your education is worth it.
Later use computer tools such as Mathematica, Maple, Reduce (Its free!), Maxima (Its free!)! If you haven't seen where the calculation results came from and how the tools "sort of" get there algebraically before. You need to! Without that experience these computer tools quickly become magic!
Aside: Google Reduce Computer Algebra System & Maxima Computer Algebra System they're free downloadable from Sourceforge. They are very powerful! Surprisingly powerful for being free!
Needs a [LONG!] Warning. Whew!
That's impossible. The USA is becoming more and more diverse and everyone knows that diversity is our strength. So, obviously all our educational achievement is going through the roof as we become more diverse.
This is probably just some big batch of lies put together by right wing extremists to try and deny that diversity is our strength.
When they get back to the safety of China, Lysenkoism is waiting for them. This is politically approved science, that actually believed, by government edict, that rye could transform into wheat and wheat into barley, that weeds could spontaneously transmute into food grains, and that "natural cooperation" was observed in nature as opposed to "natural selection. It's "Climate Change" writ large.
Science is not politically correct. And, stealing what you barely understand, while trying to apply it under government demands of predetermined results is not the fast way to a new technology.
My daughter is in First Lego league.
She loves it, but I suspect that she will drift away eventually. While she gets a lot from her math teacher mother and I, her talents are not in engineering.
One of the many engineers I trained was a young woman was pushed into it by her mother. She HATED it with a passion. So much I was kind of shocked. So we sat down and developed a plan to get her to marketing and sales, where she is excelling because of her time in the plant.
Getting an H1B is close to impossible now. They caught one of the foreign companies cheating.
” There is a HUGE glut of unwanted older STEM related professionals that have been essentially cast aside after 15-20 years of experience.”
No. I am 61 years old and I still get contacted by headhunters. You just have to stay current. Project Managers are a dime a dozen. They want coders. Programming in PL/1 in the 1980’s isn’t “current”. They want Java, SQL, even COBOL. 98% of my job is head-down coding.
“I have had a great one, but the doors that were open to me in the 90’s are closed to boys now. If you are a girl and have the skill? Go for it.”
For 20 years according to the company, I was a man. Now I am a woman and they are not allowed to ask. We needed more women in STEM careers so I am doing my part.
It's a national pasttime in india. They see nothing wrong with it.
I am probably the worst student to ever graduate from my Alma Mater with a STEM degree. I was accepted because I developed a passion for computers, would do anything to get enrolled, worked hard, would not accept no for an answer and it helped that few people wanted to enroll. This problem in STEM recruiting has existed for decades.
I'm not an education “theory” expert but my wife, who has an Engineering Degree and was one of the hardest working and smartest woman I ever met spent the last 15 years as a teacher in a private school. She stayed at home with our children until our youngest entered school in the first grade.
She worked as an Engineer in the private sector for nearly 15 years; I was an IT worker for 33 years.
We agreed when we were married that who ever earned the least amount of money and had the lowest Net Present Value in their future career at the time we had children would stay at home with the kids until they entered school. I guess I studied harder than I thought. (LOL)
Both my wife and I took a lot of advanced classes. We pulled all our children from a quote “Good” Public school system after 2 years and enrolled them in a private school because we were shocked at the poor quality of the teachers, curriculum, administration and policies of one of the better school districts in our State.
To obtain tuition discounts, my wife became a teachers assistant and after a few years she became a certified teacher by taking graduate classes at night. She has been an assistant teacher or a full time STEM teacher for more than 20 years now.
We've discussed the problem in education for many years always with the goal of giving our kids the best we could. The problem has several complex dimensions that need to be addressed. I will discuss only one of the multiple dimensions here. I will discuss the level and depth of education in the foundation and fundamentals of mathematics! Even in a private school, with students who have all the advantages that one could ask for, more than half the students fail to grasp the most basic mathematical concepts.
Half the students struggle with simple fractions in the 7th or 8th grade even though they have been promoted into algebra or even higher level classes. Those concepts must be mastered to go any further. A STEM education that uses advanced math is impossible without a solid foundation in the fundamentals of mathematics.
By the time children reach High School many are lost. They struggle through the classes but they are given passing grades and passed along. Their education is very broad on many subjects but only inches deep.
The fundamentals are poorly taught and poorly understood by many of the elementary school teachers themselves. By the time kids reach middle school, they are already behind. This is true even for some of the students whose parents are quote “professionals”.
Many Parents refuse to believe that their child is anything less that an Albert Einstein and blame the “system” for their child's failures. Many parents are incapable of helping their child by the time they reach the 7th grade.
Most parents tell the schools and their children that quote, “I never needed math in the real world” and they demand that their child be passed along.
Childhood Development experts will disagree with me but I am convinced that students who are not drilled in the memorization of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division tables and children who don't spend a great deal of time reading by the time they reach High School will be hopelessly lost in the “New Economy”.
Instead of the fundamentals, children are given in the State Mandated curriculum at best a very broad and meaningless set of survey courses, with little depth and at worst they are given “State” driven propaganda designed to scare the crap out of kids into the “correct” political ideology. i.e. The world will end in 12 years if we don't ..... (Vote Democrat)
Even my Church has given up on an Apocalyptic world view as an incentive to believe. It's counter productive when the apocalypse repeatedly fails to materialize.
I've noticed several posts about the availability of calculators and computer based “algebraic” and “mathematical” software that are capable of solving most of the “mundane” mathematical tasks. I'm a firm believer that if you can't do the mundane by hand you don't understand what you're doing. There is a big differences between minimally understanding the mechanical processes of a concept and understanding the fundamental building blocks of a concept and being able to derive by yourself the fundamentals to arrive at the mechanical process by yourself.
Memorizing the basic fundamental formulas of Calculus from a text book is not the same as learning how to derive the formulas from scratch. The difference is as simple as knowing the difference between the “What” versus the “Why” of a phenomena. Without a knowledge of the “Why” you can't advance, you can only remain in place. If you can't derive what has been you can't derive what will be.
Don't get me wrong, there are excellent students coming out of our schools but they are kids who would have done well if you just left them in a library by themselves with a little bit of attention and direction.
Our failure has been to not expect our children to live up to their potential and to be content with them achieving the average. We are teaching to the least common denominator instead of teaching to the greatest common multiple.
Caveat: I spent more than 30 years in IT. I learned the full syntax and grammar of innumerable programming languages, multiple operating systems, multiple design methodologies, software frameworks, user interface API's and integrated development environments over the course of time. Without the theoretical underpinnings of my chosen discipline my career would have been significantly shorter and the list of "tools" I learned to use even shorter!
My knowledge of the syntax and grammar of multiple programming languages is significantly greater than my grasp of English grammar rules and especially punctuation.
Be kind. I believe my intent is understandable in spite of my spelling, punctuation and grammar mistakes.
I’m afraid that computerized anti-differentiation looks like black magic to me as it is. I might argue, OTOH, that functionally it is no different than using a table of integrals, and that a way to exploit it legitimately might be to have the student prove the integral that comes out of the machine by differentiating it, before using it. Wouldn’t that be enough?You can certainly expose the student to the old manual process, but I have the feeling that the new math apps probably don’t even work the same way internally as the process we learned. In which case, what actually is the point in grinding out a lot of moot examples of the way you would do it on a desert island?
People on desert islands don’t use calculus!
That is nice for coders...the other 90% of STEM folks are SOL.
They need to learn to code.
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