Posted on 05/18/2004 12:14:08 PM PDT by hsmomx3
I think your post is a great example of something that I mentioned as important in a previous post -- critical thinking skills. You taught your kids to love learning and to think for themselves, and it paid off! Congratulations on your success.
That ability to think for yourself is the kind of ability I think is most important, in tandem with sound values. For instance, as a parent I need to be able to research and reason out which doctor I will trust and which medical choices I will make -- as a car owner I need to figure out what I need to know myself to get by and which mechanic I will trust for the more difficult stuff -- as a lawmaker, I need to have the common sense to make sound financial decisions and, in those cases where I need to rely on the technical expertise of others, to evaluate not only the data provided me, but which people are most trustworthy and/or make the best argument. Critical thinking skills (including questioning, reasoning, and researching) are key in all areas of life.
Please add me to the homeschool ping list.
Twenty-five years ago, maybe. Now, without teaching discrete mathematics and computational methods such a department would be incompetent and a degree program deficient. You can't even teach a responsible course in statistics without computers because they are necessary for even the most rudimentary multivariate experiments. Without a degree program, what kind of professors are you going to get? This isn't about high school math or simple calculus, most of which should be done before the college level and IS in many other industrialized countries.
The core curriculum reading list, Malaspina Books, not only includes works by Jane Austin, Aristotle or DaVinci, but it also includes the great discourses of Einstein, Faraday and Newton.
Woopie. There are lots of "great books" lists out there.
bump
While the article is very poorly written, its one bright spot shines forth from the excerpt above. Of the six groups listed, the last group would most certainly kill or imprison all members of the other groups.
Smirking ping
The kids kept interrupting; the post was premature.
Your inference is not based on fact, only circumstantial evidence.
What a shame that the "rough draft" interrupted the gist of the message.
Did you even bother to examine the book list?
This is a Christian College. Is it not possible that a Christian math professor would be relieved to teach in a Christian environment?
There are many, many highly qualified math professors teaching in community colleges all across the country, despite the fact that those institutions have no "degree programs".
It is not necessary to offer degree programs in order to provide quality classes in a variety of disciplines.
Wait, don't I live in a free society? Since when was it illegal for whomever, including the Christian Right, to be hired for positions? To hold whatever religious beliefs as they wish, provided they are not committing acts of violence? Not to mention the right of private educational institutions to set their curriculum. Or does Voice of Freedom not follow the inspiration behind its own name?
The writers state, "if you think that Bin Laden and his thugs are bad news, just look at the list of right-wing zealots already in America's government." So the Christian Right is WORSE than guys who killed 3,000 folks on 9/11 (to name just one of their crimes)? I don't even agree with much of PHC's views, but to compare PHC and the Christian Right to madrasas or bin Ladin is ridiculous. PHC isn't saying "kill the infidels," having women clad head-to-toe in burqas while denying them an education, or advocating terrorism. The Left's ridiculous moral equivalency comparisons astound me.
When liberals say they want religion out of politics, I remind them of the civil rights movement (religion in politics). That always shuts them up because it exposes their true bias: it's not religion per se that these writers dislike, but conservativism.
Sure, I think you posted a great reading list. That wasn't really related to my point, which was to dispute that a well-educated person must necessarily have college-level coursework in mathematics (or, if specializing in mathematics, other areas). My point was that we all have gifts in different areas and as adults don't necessarily have to continue to be a "jack of all trades" educationally speaking.
My inferences were based on the facts as presented to me, which is all any of us have to work with on the list :). As a parent of 4 I can understand if the note as posted did not fairly present your abilities!
What a simpleton.
1) Nazi Germany was not a theocracy in any ordinary sense of the word. Hitler was no Christian (he praised Christianity in public and condemned it as a Jewish export -- which it is -- in private), and even if he were, or adhered to any real religion, there was enough occult weirdness going on to prove there was never a formal Nazi religious orthodoxy that anyone was expected to adhere to.
2) That's "German Workers' National Socialist Party", not "German Nationalist Party".
3) That's 1933, not 1935.
Duh. The best math teacher I ever had was at a junior college, which worked at the level at which he was teaching (entry level calculus). Still, that obsolete approach doesn't work when it comes to attracting top students and it didn't teach new approaches to the computational methods that are rapidly rendering the continuous mathematics he so ably taught obsolete. Clearly, Patrick Henry isn't using their facility with imparting an understanding of mathematics as part of their marketing program, which is too bad.
It is not necessary to offer degree programs in order to provide quality classes in a variety of disciplines.
It's not necessary only if you assume that the discipline doesn't change much over time. Unfortunately, I was burned on that one when it came to finite difference equations and won't let that happen to my kids. There are many areas where the academy is way behind industry, and both experimental design (which can be applied to a whole array of disciplines) and finite mathematics are but two of them.
Frankly, I had thought about whether to include math in the list of lab courses and was waiting for a smartass rejoinder such as your first post. After some consideration of how much my math education had missed when it came to preparing me for real world problems, I decided to proffer the bait.
You took it.
I get no respect.
Kind of an asinine question that answers itself. They've invited ALL there are - which is NONE.
You got it!
Nonsense. Providing a basic grounding in math and science requires a competent teacher and a few textbooks. PHC's failure to do so is a critical blow to its credibility as an alleged institution of higher learning.
Sorry, but it is. Without that sort of basic background, a policymaker has no basis for deciding (for example) whether "global warming" is a looming catastrophe caused by human technology, a background phenomenon that comes and goes independent of human activities, or just plain hokum.
"The 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with these three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots."
--Robert A. Heinlein
The issue is providing sufficient mathematics to qualify someone as "college-educated" in a meaningful sense of the term (instead of "another ignorant peasant with dung on his boots"). The requirements for that are lower than those for a specialized math degree... but still a lot higher than what is found in PHC's course catalog.
I had thought about whether to include math in the list of lab courses and was waiting for a smartass rejoinder such as your first post.
I am reminded of the old joke, "Why do you physicists need all this expensive equipemnt? All the math department asks for are paper, pencils, and erasers. And the philosophy department is even better -- they don't ask for erasers."
MAT101 Algebra and Trigonometry for Physics
MAT105DL College Algebra and Trigonometry
MAT210 Euclidian Geometry
The self-contradiction is in your post: the word "basic," upon assumption that all they need to be teaching is calculus or that such constitutes adequacy in a college math department. My point was and is that computational methods are now "basic," or should be but for the inadequacies in k-12 education. They are used throughout many major industries and are becoming increasingly common as a resource management and optimization tool. Having an understanding of how they work, their limitations, and what the resource and personnel requirements might be is intuitively important to twenty-first century leadership in industry, something for which these students and PHC should be aspiring.
That's but one of the reasons why, in my discussion with GOPrincess, I asserted that calculus should be done before entering college or studying physics, biology, and chemistry at the high school level. We have a fundamental problem in teaching continuous mathematics in a world of computational methods: Discrete mathematics aren't at all intuitive; i.e., they don't teach understanding of the relationships among physical principles. Humans need continuous mathematics to viscerally understand the relationship between field strength and gravitational attraction as an inverse square with distance. Computers don't, and there lies a problem.
When a person has spent their entire academic career with continuous mathematics, albeit with infinite series approximations, they are so far along and habituated to seeing the world that way that when somebody finally pops finite difference equations on them as a perfectly sufficient numerical substitute for differential equations (the Fourier transformations are the same), the mental gear grinding is tremendous. It occurs so late in the curriculum that there isn't time for the concepts to settle in. Indeed, many schools don't get to it at all. It's a problem, because the future belongs to people who can handle it.
I can hear it now, "What does this have to do with being a judge?" My response, "How many times do expert witnesses bamboozle judges and congressmen on regulatory issues using computational methods or dimensional analyses?"
It matters.
Here is what I am doing about it. I front-loaded my kids' instruction with mathematics, three to four hours per day. They were both doing high school algebra by eight. We will have calculus done by thirteen. We will do college physics, chemistry, and biology instead of introducing them at the high school level. We have thus eliminated a good many years from the k-16 curriculum. We study history, english, etc. at a college level as well. The expectations are high, the work is focused and protracted. It works. My elder daughter tested "post high school" on the Stanford 9 test in every subject at the age of nine. They do college level work, slbeit at a slower pace than college requires. They're damn proud of it too, and should be. The work is more enjoyable, because they can now study the richness of Western civilization and read all those great works we wished we had time for when we went to school.
I have NO INTEREST in a curriculum for my kids that delivers anything less. In a nation where its educational product that lies at the bottom of the industrialized world, I owe my kids nothing less. "Adequate" sucks.
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