Posted on 10/11/2008 8:23:10 AM PDT by rabscuttle385
The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued.
The study suggests that while many girls have exceptional talent in math — the talent to become top math researchers, scientists and engineers — they are rarely identified in the United States. A major reason, according to the study, is that American culture does not highly value talent in math, and so discourages girls — and boys, for that matter — from excelling in the field. The study will be published Friday in Notices of the American Mathematical Society.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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!
She never saw even the COVER of that stupid book. It was returned with the rest at the end of the year and she was never tested on, asked to review, or give her opinion on that piece of slime.
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.
Or our education. An Indian co-worker returned to India last summer in order that his son might get a decent education.
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.)
It was well-known at my college that if you couldn’t do ANYTHING, then go for an education major. It was a “can’t-fail” major. I knew a couple of folks who were majoring in education, too. Horrifying that parents are now entrusting their kids’ minds to them...
How many of those bad parents went to government schools?
If a careful study was done of the 50 national merit students in your school, it would show that the “good” parents of these kids were doing **tons** of “after-schooling” ( AKA “homeschooling”).
In truth these kids were national merit scholars **in spite** of wasting their time being incarcerated like prisoners by the government in their government indoctrination camp.
Its no secret that the best performing school in my state (West Windsor/Plainsboro) is disproportionately attended by Asian Indians and Chinese.
That doesn't stop the fat, slovenly chavs from complaining about "dot heads" and "slants."
All academically successful children are homeschooled. If they are institutionalized for their schooling, the parents are doing tons of "afterschooling" ( AKA "homeschooling") at home.
What government schools are really doing is sending home a free curriculum for the parents and child to follow. Little learning actually happens in the school. It is the parent and child who are doing 99% of the work **at home**.
Odd isn't it? When kids do poorly government teachers are quick to blame the parent. When good parents do a great job of "afterschooling" the teachers are right there to take the credit.
In truth, academically successful children do well **in spite** of being imprisoned and being treated like prisoners in their government indoctrination camps. This is true even in immigrant families. These parents find mentors ( cousins, aunts, uncles, neighbors) to teach their children at home.
What the heck is constructivist math? I’ve looked at several web pages and I still don’t understand what it is.
I was being facetious about Snoop Dog....
but he and this whole ugly pothead Thug culture and its imagery just gets worse and worse by the day, and must have an audience, or it wouldn’t be there. The big question mark is, just what constitutes that audience? Where does its money come from , to make these morons multi-millionaires?
Your generalizations about no learning happening in schools and schools being indoctrination camps really fail to hold up in the real world. Public schools are widely varied in this country. As a whole they need to be improved but there are some great districts and schools that do a great job of getting kids ready for college and life and their are some terrible ones. Most are in between.
Families make a huge difference in the success of a district/school and so do great teachers. To maximize success you must have both. Thankfully I live in an area with a district that has a track record of success. That comes down to good parents and good teachers. And success can build on itself. If a district, such as mine, becomes known for good performance then good teachers want to come to the district and parents want to move in for the schools.
The main point is that there are some absurd characterizations on this site about teachers. I think there are more good ones out there than a lot of people realize. I cannot speak for other places, but I think that the politicians and administrators deserve most of the blame for issues in my area.
Even with how dysfunctional many districts, testing regimes, and curriculum are we still have some very bright people who go into teaching. I’ve met many of them over years and benefited from some of them in my life.
I think the reason the teacher is teaching to the low kids, at least based on conversations, is the way the law works now. Part of the problem is this new universal college and every kid a success mantra. Great goal but what happens is that when there is so much pressure on making sure every single student achieves a certain level, all attention will be focused on the low achievers.
Sad to say but I think that we pay more attention to the lowest functioning kids than the highest in a lot of cases. We don’t foster our scientists, we try to spend enough time to get our dummies ready for standardized test so our schools and states can have high passing percentages. Sometimes the kids who we know will pass anyway get ignored.
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