Posted on 05/13/2008 7:03:24 AM PDT by reaganaut1
In many schools teachers are penalized for holding students back so they just pass them through. In other schools parents complain (and win) when they complain about a teacher who has given their son/daughter a score below that which the parents think they should have.
I just get so frustrated with these threads. Especially with the people who say that anyone who does not know algebra must not have any intelligence. I busted my butt trying to learn algebra and just never got it. I would still be in high school if there had not been some way around it. My husband says I probably just had bad teachers, but who knows.
My husband always said I just had bad math teachers and no one taught me how to do math right. I do basic math easily, because I just taught myself new ways to do it and and am not worrying that someone will see my work. So, maybe I’m not as stupid as I am thinking right now.
When I was learning arithmetic in grade school, we were drilled in long addition, long subtraction, long multiplication, and long division. I could do arithmetic quite well. Everything was fine until 1963, then the school district instituted New Math. Big mistake.
New Math didn’t work. Instruction in mathematics has never been the same.
Today math teachers have so much to teach, they no long take the time to do drills, which accustom students to sit still and work those problems through and through, repeatedly until it becomes second nature.
I’ve been home teaching my nephew for three years. He now performs reading comphrehension on the college level after a disasterous grade school experience. He still dislikes to read but he can do it. Mathematics is different.
He was never drilled, mostly because he had ADD and can’t keep his attention concentrated. He’s completed Algebra I & II at home and is now onto Geometry, but he still has problems with addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, and decimals. We keep going over and over it but to no avail.
The sad part is that he is very smart, loves physics, is creative in engineering solutions, proficient with computers and wants to be an IT Administrator. To do that one must have math. We are still working at it. He may end up in one of the military branches because of his poor academic habits but enlistees are known for deciding on their future college careers quickly while in boot camp - and it ususally is NOT military related.
We’ll get through it. I couldn’t figure out Algebra and Trig until I was in my late 30s and early 40s. Some people just don’t have a mature enough brain in their teens.
Well, it’s run by nuns as a charity and that keeps the tuition way way down. Also those amounts that are spent on special ed are hugely inflated in the gubmint schools.
I don’t know their methods. I know they teach kids to read with phonics and to do math by memorization. No calculators. And they have kids with Down Syndrome, autism, and other problems reading, writing, and doing math.
Thanks for this great post. I was beginning to think I was the only person who was not able to do algebra as a teenager.
Now they learning nothing.
-PJ
IT’S THE TEXTBOOKS AND THE TEACHERS, STUPID!
If they tested California’s math teachers, they would find the same percentage as the students who couldn’t pass these tests.
There is no excuse for not being up to speed in math before college. The taxpayers paid for this site - http://www.ucopenaccess.org/ - so any student could go on line and take these open access courses as preparation for college.
That’s a good point. The primary place in high school mathematics where logic and deduction are taught is in geometry. In the olden days (1970s or before, when I was in high school), this was taught similar to the ancient scheme in Euclid, where there were about five axioms or postulates from which all the theorems were deduced. You had to learn how to prove various theorems. (The usual scheme was the “two-column” proof.) But nowadays, geometry classes have lots of axioms or postulates. Most of these are theorems in the old geometry classes. The reason they do this is to make the subject simpler, easier to teach, and so the grades are higher. And the students and parents are happier. Unfortunately, parents share some of the guilt here, in the watering down of education: if a teacher gives an F, he or she may hear from irate parents. Or the coach.
That’s interesting about Geometry and deductive reasoning. Geometry was my favorite subject in high school, I thought it was like a brain teaser. I drove the teacher crazy because I would finish the proof before the rest of the kids had even begun. One day he made me get up and teach the class so that I would understand the difficulties that he was facing.
But, we also were taught deductive reasoning in all our sciences, right from seventh grade, and in the grade school word problems. Deductive reasoning was actually an integral part of all of our subjects, including social studies and government. There was alway the element of cause and affect and objective testing was only a small part of the evaluation process. Tests were always returned and discussed in depth because the teachers were aware that learning from mistakes often makes more of an impression than wrote memorization.
C'mon, we're talking huge percentages that can't do basic arithmetic! That's clearly not due to a few socially promoted kids leaking through to college. The schools are failing at everything except protecting themselves. The kids are disposable to them. It's a disgrace.
Everything you buy is a pound? What if it's a 16.6oz box of cereal at $1.83 vs. a 15.2oz box of similar cereal on sale at 3 for $5? Which one do you buy?
That's pretty amazing.
I'd be curious both to see them in action and to see the results.
The "real" problem is that [almost] 50% of the kids these days are coming from groups which are at least a standard deviation stupider than the groups we were familiar with when we grew up.
And there's not a damned thing anyone can do about it - well, except for smart people to start making babies again.
But until smart people start making more babies than stupid people [and I know of almost no demographic data anywhere which would indicate that that is happening], the world is pretty much doomed.
Prepare for the worst, because it's coming.
No doubt the textbooks and the teachers are pretty lousy, but the underlying problem is the students.
We just don't have any remedy for genetically dumb kids - there's nothing we can do about it - the problem is intractable.
Again, prepare for the worst.
And how many children did your brother make?
Our only hope [literally our ONLY HOPE] is for smart people to start making babies again.
If smart people don't make babies, then we are doomed.
My brother never married. He is all rational thought, no emotion. It just wouldn’t work.
BTW, did you make any babies yourself?
I also believe that many of the college students who require remedial math and reading are reflections of the poor quality of the teachers in the public school system. I suspect that many of these teachers required the very type of remedial education in college that their students now require in the 13th grade. I've known many teachers over the years, and with the exception of a very few who had “the calling,” most are not the “best and the brightest” or anything close. Indeed, most of the teachers I have known over the years had SAT/ACT scores on the lower half of the bell curve. They also graduated from “less selective” teachers colleges where many of the core requirements are remedial, at least by the non-affirmative action standards at the more selective colleges and universities.
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