Slashdot Mirror
A New Approach to Teaching Science
Gallenod writes "The Washington Post has an article on Joy Hakim, an author trying to re-write junior-high science textbooks to make them more readable. There are some interesting observations on how traditional textbook publishing houses control pretty much everything children read in school and her difficulties in challenging the status quo. However, she's already succeeded with an award-winning history textbook series, so maybe she'll rack up another win here."
Don't bother with textbooks - just teach them hands-on. I had 10X as much fun combining chemicals that gave off smoke than I ever did reading some dumb paragraphs.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
textbooks that are written kind of like A Brief History of Time or other such books. Of course, they'd need to have to be more indepth and whatnot, but if ideas and concepts were introduced in a more entertaining and inviting way, people would be more interested in learning the details. I did not read the article btw, I don't feel like registering.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
post your manuscripts on the web. at least one will become popular.
They're rewriting history books? Dammit, now I'll have to re-learn all sorts of things, like who won World War II!
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
The article claims that textbooks at the K-12 level are usually written by committees. This is probably true, based on my limited recollections. So why is this so very different from college textbooks, which are usually written by a small number of authors? (Usually, there are one, two or at most, three.)
There must be some driving force that makes the committee system work better for the K-12 textbooks, but what is it, I wonder?
How about we take a new approach to having students actually give a rat's ass about science or learning in general? The problem isn't textbooks or any 'style' of teaching. It's students who come to school who simply don't care. Why is there the steroetype about smart asian kids? It's because societies like those in South Korea and India place a high value on intelligence and education, ours (America) doesn't.
I was looking at a junior high science book recently. Everything seemed very dumbed down already. It was basically memory - not enough emphasis was placed on understanding concepts. Making them easier to read does not solve the real problem of students not understanding concepts.
Books are written by committees. They have no literary merit, no voice, no style, no charm. They are focused almost exclusively on facts...
Is it just me, or is an almost-exclusive focus on facts a good thing for textbooks of any sort? Would people prefer books based on rampant speculations, unwarranted assumptions, and outright lies?
Oh cruel fate, to be thusly boned! Ask not for whom the bone bones; it bones for thee. -Bender
It seems like every couple of years we get a new set of "reforms." Every time I check out the textbooks they are almost uniformly horrible. The biggest error (other than teaching incorrect notions) is that they push too general an idea rather than trying to give kids the skills and critical thinking. I guess its time for an other round. . .
First of all, I agree that publishing houses suck. I know the context of this article relates to middle school, but textbook publishers are lousy at all levels.
As a college student, I get frustrated with math textbooks that present few examples, a lot of derivations, and problems that don't necessarily follow the examples. It's rather difficult to learn from that. If I'm stuck on a homework problem, I'm pretty much screwed no matter how many times I go back and read it. There's also an attempt to ruin the used book business by publishing minor revisions with different problems every couple of years. As a victim of this, I'm all for anything that opposes the large publishing houses.
It's an interesting way to teach science, and the approach sounds a lot like reading A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking. I learned a lot from that book that I certainly would never have picked up from a classic textbook. It's a good idea.
I'd also like to add a suggestion. In a lot of schools, textbooks are being replaced with CDs containing the text. It's a nice idea, but I think a combination of both is the best idea. Consider a book that has the text, PDF files on a CD, and interactive examples or at least videos to supplement the text. It seems like a good way to learn, especially for the audience these books are intended, that being middle school.
.
...is all k-12 text books and supporting materials (worksheets, lesson plans, etc.) produced under an open source licence so we, the taxpayers of this nation, can give these publishing houses the collective finger, and to make this material available to the world freely.
This work could be all be done collectively by the nations teachers themselves, just like this good woman has done. This idea just needs a Corporate Sponsor or two to host the server space and bandwidth.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Just start the text books by explaining how science fiction has had many ideas that were later 'invented' by scientists.
Pulp scifi in the 1920's talked about ray guns, which all the established scientists ignored, knowing they were impossible. Now we have lasers.
Rocket ships. Same story.
As anyone who read much of Robert A. Heinlein's work knows, he wrote about a bed made out of a soft bladder filled with water. Now waterbeds are taken for granted.
Those people also read about all the beautiful and sexy women in the 'average' scientist's life. Nowadays we have breast implants, nose jobs, face lifts, liposuction, and every other procedure needed to make that a reality.
Finally, every male character, no matter their age, could please all those women all night. Viola, Viagra.
See how interesting they could make science if they really tried?
If I remember from my own experiences in public school, the current biggest problem with textbooks is the lack of photographs of beautiful, naked women.
Social Contract? I don't remember signing any Social Contract!
If making the books more readable is not another "code" word for dumbing down the subject then I am for it. I am going through junior high science on my fourth pass now.
No, not what you think I'm helping my third daughter through it, not that #3 needs much help. The books aren't too bad, but the schools spend too much time on none academic subjects, and not on English, Science, History, and Math.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
I'll agree that a simple reading of a science text book is boring. However you shouldn't be reading it like some novel. Your read it to learn about science. So you skim a couple pages, then get the components and mix up an expiriment.
Sure you con't do every experiment to learn about it, but you need a grounding first. (Anyone care to tell me how to prove H has 1 electron, 1 proton, and no neutrons, without equipement byond what a science classrom could afford) Sure the story of Tesla and Ben Franklin might be more interesting, but their bio will not help you understand electrisity. Doing expiriemtns will. Reading about Ohm's law, and the other basics of the Science will.
Science is about how and why things work, and the process of finding out. Science is not about enertainment, other than the enertainment of a hands on expiriemnt, or hands on solving some difficult math. (it is exciting to solve a complex math problem after spending several full days thinking about it, most people have never experienced it though)
I'm not completely against these books. If they really help teach science great. However the joke about modern teaching where it doesn't matter if the kid says 2+2=2, so long as the kid tried hard the kid gets all the points is a concern. Science is fun, but a new textbook is not the answer. The answer is in teachers who understand science (not teaching, there is a BIG difference, though understanding teaching is important too) and can show the kids how to do it. Somehow, I'm not a teacher because I can't do it.
Ok, this is something I am really sick and tired of hearing... Are you a teacher?
I just spoke w/a group of professors who complained that students aren't willing to learn anymore...
1. School is forced (especially college, which has become a *necessary* extension of High School).
2. Teachers teach passively yet expect students to be active learners. Putting an overhead on the screen or a PPT presentation DOES NOT COUNT as active teaching. It causes people to become uninterested and bored.
Once teachers start teaching actively, students will probably learn actively. Until that time, it is just as much the fault of the educators.
You obviously didn't glance at the article or anything, 'cause if you had you'd probably understand that the idea is to overhaul these books which were essentially designed Way Back When (and subsequently only updated) to reflect a more modern understanding of how to effectively impart information to children -- we know that they don't learn like adults do, so it's backwards to use instruments which assume that they do.
For example: It's hard to dispute that kids or a certain age absorb more from a narrative than from being presented with a list of facts to absorb. So, what possible objection could you have to using a narrative to impart these lessons? When your kid was learning the alphabet, didn't you teach her the song version? Or did you insist that the A-B-C song is a lightweight new-agey tool for stupid children and force her to recite it without singing? No ROY G BIV or other memory aids for her, no sir....
Anyhow, if there's a better way to impart information, I'm all for it. If you're not, well, you're an idiot. And read the fucking article next time.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
When I look at my dad's old math textbooks, they are usually much dryer and "harder" to read than most of today's textbooks, which are loaded with colorful pictures and silly examples to make them more "child-friendly" instead of being concise and to-the-point.
As a result, it is very hard to find the point from all the fluff-talk, and next to impossible to create a good systematic understanding of the topic. With these books, children don't take science seriously, and the result is much worse.
In the recent 50 years or so, there's a very visible trend where textbooks get prettier, topics get more lightweight, school gets to be more "fun" instead of education, and the result (people's knowledge of science) gets worse and worse.
We need to finally understand that we can't teach more/better by making the books easier and easier.
When men used to be men
damnit already, quit allowing the state government dictate what textbooks to buy each year.
I am sure that many many lawmakers would like to contract out their printing of free open content books instead of paying $10 - $15 each for whatever the book publishers want to sell.
I think D-Day, Omaha Beach, and WW2 deserver more than 3 pages in a US history text book.
Seneca Falls women's rights meeting does not deserve the 15 or so mentions it gets in US history books. I would suggest something a little more significant like how everybody gets their rights by being alive and not from a king or government as expressed in the Declaration of Independence.
Look at this article by Dorothy Sayers.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
The biggest problem I see in textbooks right now is just how full of errors they are. After that, they have too many pictures, too much white space and rarely get to the point -- they've got fat that needs to be trimmed.
Check out that link. It's a really good source for what's wrong with textbooks.
I suspect that college-level textbooks don't get written by committee for several reasons, but here's my main guess: They're not being written for a committee, either.
Since an individual professor selects the text for his or her course, the texts don't have to be written to satisfy the varied and mutually contradictory demands of an approval committee. That, and most of my textbooks are on a narrower subject area than "Science."
While the intent of the subject in the article is noble, it's just another example of educators trying to treat the symptoms and not the sickness. Kids aren't learning science (as well as pretty much every other subject) and the readability of science textbooks have almost nothing to do with it. The problem facing schools today is a cultural problem, not a logistical problem. We keep lowering the bar, instilling some idiotic postmodern philosophy of entitlement into kids who will one day grow into the idiotic adults everyone expects them to be, instead of raising the bar and working kids harder. Can't cut the mustard? You should be embarrassed. Instead, parents blame teachers for their own parental failures and everyone is hunky dory, as long as there is someone to blame. Teachers get beat down by this and feel like nothing they do helps so they quit too, robbing other children of the education provided by Uncle Sam.
It's funny. I graduated high school in '97 and have since gotten a BS in comp sci and I look back and realize my favorite teachers are the ones that made me bust ass. I couldn't stand them when I was under their totalitarian rule but I learned whether I liked it or not. Sure, I had plenty of teachers whose classes were a joke. Nothing was expected of me and so I did as little as I could get away with...what else would a teenager do? I despise those teachers now, as I realize that their insistence on being my friend and not working hard was a disservice to me.
There's plenty of blame to go around, whether it be lazy teachers, apathetic parents, cowardly administrators, or rowdy kids, but instead we pour more and more money into facilities, books, technology, or some other taxpayer funded red herring. Kids of the ages mentioned in the article...junior high age...aren't self-motivated. Less than 1% of kids that age have the self-motivation to pursue knowledge so you have to cram it down the little SOBs throats. Eventually, you'll find that the majority of them will then develop a craving for it and your work as a teacher is done.
It's the exact same way with behavior. You don't ask a child to behave, you have to make them behave. If parents would get over their little ego trip of how high and mighty their children are and treat them like the subordinates they are, this wouldn't be a problem. God forbid we hurt poor little Johnny's self esteem though.
considering that the only people who sit down and read science textbooks are teachers.
If I were king, I would make the introductory science class be taught like an English lit class. They should read books every week from authors like S J Gould, Weinberg's "The First Three Minutes", maybe Feynman later, and explain what they read about. Any of the quantum mechanics "what a fking screwy world this is" genre and some good hard-science fiction. After they learn what the world is made out of and how it works, the interested ones can can put it to numbers.
Physics first, Chemistry second, Biology last. Then Physics again.
Leave equation solving till later and for algebra class until they're grown up enough to understand what the concept of a model is.
In lab class, just make things happen - you figure out why if you're interested.
This book seems to fit neatly in a bigger trend.
Textbooks are becoming more and more readable and accessible, typically somewhat at the expense of sophistication.
This is good news for many of those who struggle in school (with science in this case). It is bad news for many talented kids that need challenges and prefer abstractions over colorful examples.
My solution? Realize that all kids are not made alike, and develop a few different books with different methodologies covering the same material. Test the kids for apptitude as well as prefered learning method and give them the book that suits them best.
Tor
Can't be. I learn more science and technology from anecdotes and references on Slashdot than I ever learned from a textbook. (Well, maybe not so much chemistry as biology and physics.)
What's this Submit thingy do?
This a part of a worrying trend in writing books and movies on complicated subject matters in more accessible way.
... i am sure every high school student will feel good reading about that. I am also sure they will not learn any physics by reading about that.
It is not just science textbooks, i have noticed the same trend in documentaries and educational movies.
Well needless to say it is really annoying. First of all the proponents of this new trend all have two things in common - they think their audience is stupid, and they thing the audience does not want to know about the subject matter.
So basicly they do not teach about the subject matter at all. They teach some details that are some how connected to the subject matter, they are really easy to understand, but do not help the understanding of the subject matter at all. Usually those details are about people, somehow connected to the subject matter. That is because the writers in their belief that their readers are stupid, think the readers would be much more interested reading about people's lives (that of course are written in a way to be similar to the life of the average reader) than history, or science or whatever the subject matter is.
The quote from that woman's textbook serves the perfect example. It talks about how albert einstein was briliant, yet he hated doing homework
The quote from the older text, teaches actual physics. It is perfect it explains an aspect of the theory of relativity in a way that a student, that is too young to be able to learn it, can at least learn how it fits in the general field of physics, and how it applies in the real world. Thus the student will be able to learn classical physics without worrying that he/she is not learning relativity.
The new and improved physics passage leaves the student with no knowledge of physics whatsoever. Now parents and teachers may be happy that the student has more fun reading this passage and maybe even remembers it better, but they are fooling themselves, the kid is not learning any physics.
Maybe passages like this have a place as background sidenotes. But in no way should they replace actual physics. And it seems to me that in that woman's books they do.
I remember my elementary school and middle school days. Its been this way for years, since I started going to school 11 years ago. In 4th grade, I remember the class also had some 5th graders in it. The teacher had both halves working on different assignments, and I could do the math delegated to the fifth grade segment of the class faster then they could after they had been learning it for a while. It was pitiful. In 7th and 8th grade, I still breezed through math. Sadly, the school didn't think I could, though, and placed me in a standard math class. They offered high school credit algebra, and they know I should have taken algebra. Now, I am still good at math (I'm taking algebra II now), and I still belong in a higher level class. I do my work, I know how to do most of the things we are shown, and the damn school doesn't allow you to take classes elsewhere to get up to the appropriate level to take the most advanced math class they offer, AP Calculus AB, so now I have to find the appropriate loophole in Arizona law to bypass the need to take the prerequisite class my senior year. The American education system is a joke. It is so reliant on the assumption that all students are dumb and ignorant idiots that the exceptional students are forced to be at the same level as the ones that really are dumb and ignorant.
Even the teachers believe that the American education system is terrible!
The American education system does have some measures to make sure the brighter students are learning and challenged, but these are open to only a select few who meet the prerequisite requirements. And these prerequisite requirements require the schools to have recognised your ability years beforehand. My AP American History class is incredible, and it is one of the few classes I enjoy, mainly because it is interesting and not dumbed down. If you aren't familiar with the AP program, it provides for university level classes in high school. I don't know how well the classes do in that regard, but AP Am. Hist. is a great class, and everyone in it is intelligent and understands what is going on. Because we are expected to.
And science in middle school is a joke. It was 6 years ago. It was 4 years ago. It still is. Its not science. Its just a filler class. We built mousetrap cars. Why? Not a clue. The teacher never explained the physics, and we were just supposed to build the cars.
Textbooks are terrible for most subjects in school, anyway, so it doesn't matter.
Oh, and we spent three days covering World War II. You have a problem with that?
"FDR, sitting in his car, smoking a cigar, driving over tar, he's gone to far, he's gone to far." If you get this, all I have to say is "Wie heisst du?"
Slashdot is a waste of time. I enjoy wasting time.
Painting with a broad brush, there are two major camps of educators -- those who take an objectivist approach and those who take a constructivist approach. The objectives focus on learning objectives -- where you can say that all learning results in a specific behavior you can test (e.g. using a standardized test) -- while the constructivists believe that you can't standardize the outcomes because groups collectively negotiate and construct their belief systems. So the constructivists encourage learners to look at multiple viewpoints, become investigators, and draw their own conclusions about the underlying reality.
(From the article) [Hakim] wrote an 11-volume series, "A History of US"
Constructivism is popular in teaching the social sciences, where students can be given multiple viewpoints and encouraged to seek out diverse views. It doesn't find much of a home in learning the 3R's, nor in science education -- basic skills education is driven largely these days by the inststance that students pass standardized tests (Textbooks today are hugely accountable to individual state standards defined for that particular course," said Wendy Spiegel, head of communications for Pearson Education) and by the sense that science describes a world in precise, irreducable, and unambiguous terms. Neither of these leave room for the "social construction of meaning" that's so dear to the constructivists.
...this urban legend? First, a lot of the questions on the exam were stupid; many of them involved listing rules rather than actually being able to use capital letters etc. in practice. It was probably also a teacher's exam, which would explain some of the strange questions.
One thing that bugged me with my Junior High science text book was that it seemed to take a very unimaginative and finalized tone forgetting that science isn't a static set of rules and is constantly advancing. I still remember when is shortly after the Dolly experiment I ran across a passage in the textbook. That ran along the lines of "Cloning simply isn't possible and is pure science fiction" (not exact quote memory fuzzy). Needless to say I took a lot less stock in the imaginative opinions of that book thereafter:)
I stole this Sig
In his autobiograpical book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, physicist Richard Feynman wrote about his service on the State Curriculum Committee, which selected textbooks for California schools. There is an excerpt from the book here.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
Except...
If you've read James Burke's columns in Scientific American you realize that he is an insightful *television* writer. That's his medium. In contrast his written columns are an incoherent jumble of odd organization, asides, and unresolved thoughts. You really need to read them three or four times to figure out what he's trying to get across.
Understand, I love his television programs, but he's a perfect example of how interesting, readable prose is an art in itself. Her skills are not about just waking up in the morning and saying "Hey, how about taking an historical approach," but also being able to organize it, edit it, and write it in such a way that it slots into kids' brains and stays there.
--------
Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
As a graduate student pursing a Ph.D. degree and one of a minority who actually enjoys teaching I don't think changing the readability of a textbook is news.
Yes, I do believe that a textbook should be an interesting read to help students retain the material, but it's just as important for the teacher to make the information exciting as well.
Students all learn differently and teachers should be assessing students using different and valid techniques to determine if their 'little ones' are understanding what is being taught. If some are having difficulties, it should be up to a good teacher to find another way to connect with the student. The downfall of all this is the limited time a teacher has to cover a certain amount of material.
The field of teaching science to students is under constant review and revision and there are many questions yet to be answered. Entire journals are dedicated to improve the methods used to educate students in various scientific fields.
Another outstanding textbook was "From Gaia to Selfish Genes", by I think Lynn Margulis. This was a collection of short essays on various biology topics, all highly radical, that was given to a "weed out" biology course for majors in college. THe results of the study I saw were interesting -- the non majors loved it because it was more interesting that the traditional approach, and all the majors hated it because they basically said "Just teach us what you're supposed to teach us so we can get the degree, don't screw with tradition."
Lastly, a great module was done where a teacher doing a unit on evolution began teaching that the dinosaurs were wiped out by space aliens. The program was complete with a staged firing of the teacher who was warned not to teach that. Afterward the class held a mock trial where they decided her fate.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
I apologize in advance for lack of references. This is all from memory here.
The important thing about learning anything isn't rote memorization, but internalization of concepts and then being able to reason from those concepts. Much of science is "common sense", and can be checked out using your intuition - cause preceeds effect, faster things cover set distances in shorter times, etc. But many physical and mathematical concepts are not intuitively obvious.
In the 80s I heard of an educational program that used physical intuition to help teach "poor students" math and science. The educators knew that people learn using different modalities that develop at different ages. The kinesthetic modality develops first - that's what lets a baby put its hand in its mouth, or find its feet. Next comes the visiual modality. This is extremely powerful - you can recognize one face out of thousands in just a blink of an eye. The most abstract modality is symbolic. You can reason about anything symbolically, but it is the slowest mode, and unlike the others has little "hardware acceleration".
(There seems to be cool hardware/software in the brain for doing lots of visual processing. For instance, the time it takes to match a shape with the same shape rotated is proportional to the angle of rotation. And Deaf people who grow up using sign language score much better at visual perception tests, as the visual parts of their brains are more developed from using them for language.)
The program I heard about used an approach of starting with the lowest level modalities and progressing upwards until students had a symbolic grasp of the material.
For instance, the students were taken out into a field with portable sonar range-finders and computers. They were then asked to run in various manners: constant velocity, accelerating, decelerating, running in a circle, etc. Using the gadgetry, they could see a visual plot of their movement, in terms of velocity and acceleration. This let them tie their kinesthetic understanding of simple physics to a visual one. Building on that, they were able to grasp the mathematical concepts of position, velocity, and acceleration.
It seems a lot of education tries to deliver information at the symbolic level. If you give students a way to connect that abstract stuff to things they already understand, they do a lot better at internalizing it.
Piaget showed that people learn at the frontiers of their knowledge. If you tell someone something they've already learned, there isn't any opportunity to learn it again. And if you tell someone something too far removed from what they already know, they can't make a connection to it and won't understand it (try explaining quantum mechanics to someone who doesn't know about atomic theory). But if you tell someone something that they have enough background for, they will be able to make that connection, and voila, learning occurs!
Hakim's approach of telling stories about scientific progress might make the information easier for students to memorize. However it doesn't seem like it will make the concepts easier to internalize. That takes a more radical approach.
in the latter, it was the chapter where feynman was asked to serve on a textbook selection comittee. very enlightening. and scary.
the first book is a rather scathing review of a dozen high school history books, how they are written, reviewed and edited, (read scrawled, mauled and gutted.) it's actually almost painful to read as you realize how much more interesting history class would have been had they just told you ALL of the facts.
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
My undergrad (Biology) advisor had this most excellent poster on his wall:
(This is what I remember from it... Not an exact quote. But you'll get the gist...)
--Begin Poster--
If Baseball was taught like Biology:
1. Athletes would read about some of the great players in Baseball history.
2. They would listen to lectures about the fundamental concepts of baseball: batting, fielding, pitching, running.
3. Athletes would become involved in group discussions about the rules of baseball and the strategies involved in playing a game.
4. Athletes would assemble for 2-3 hours a week and have "hands-on" experiences with balls and bats in a closed and highly controlled environment.
5. Athletes would learn and practice the techniques of calculating statistics such as the RBI.
6. Then athletes would "take the field" and attempt to play a competitive game against other teams who had limited experience on a baseball field
---End Poster--Begin Rant--
Science is not a body of knowledge, but a methodology of answering questions. Though "the hard facts" are important to understanding Science (like memorizing the carbon atom has 6 electrons) these are simply facts. More and more today we have immediately available facts. I haven't even seen "The Handbook of Physics and Chemistry" in dead-tree format for over 5 years now! We need to realize that since information is readily available, the concepts and methods are important. Instead of pounding in facts, teach students how to become talented information-finders. That type of skill will be more important in "the real world" than knowing the chemicals involved in the Krebs Cycle.
"One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin." George Bernard Shaw
Lord of the Benzene Rings,
Burning Chromium, and of course,
Jurassic Park (Teacher's Edition).
Think, write, think, edit, think...then post.
But while you're doing this, make sure what you say is accurate. The above quote is not accurate. Energy is not created; matter is not destroyed. One is changed into the other. If students have previous knowledge of the subject, this statement would confuse them. I understand what she means, but I wouldn't expect a middle school student to. I think this is a great idea, but I hope she has some people who are in the respective fields edit it.
At my high school, we use Paul G. Hewitt's physics books. Firstly, I should explain that my school subscribes to the view of "physics first," so all students are required to take a semester of physics freshman year (9th grade). The books provide a great overview of basic physics, have festive little drawings, and have writing full of personality. By the end of the class, many students (including me) love the book, compared to other textbooks, which are promptly forgotten. These books are a good standard for a more basic course's textbook.
Hmmm. Comprehension is enough? Then aren't we dumbing down slashdot to the lowest common denominator, those who haven't grasped the basic skills of writing and grammar?
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The operator of the League site, Bill Bennetta, posted on the Skeptic list today on this subject. He said he was interviewed for the Washington Post piece, and gave the journo various straightforward examples of Hakim's deception in her previous books. This got edited down to "Even amid all the acclaim, one textbook group accused Hakim of writing in errors."
Actually, the League didn't "accuse" her of anything; they darn well proved it, so far as I can see. But who's ever going to be able to check for themselves, while the League is anonymised as "one textbook group"?
Well, here are the references the Post doesn't want you to see. Check 'em out here, here and here (a search reveals a few more, too).
Basically, Hakim gets stuff wrong, and just loves calling her own religious beliefs "history". Other people's don't get the same treatment.
Maybe she'll be just great at inspiring kids with the majesty and humanity of the scientific endeavour, tra la. Her past work doesn't bode well, though.
I have been intrigued for quite a while by the Sudbury Valley model. Sudbury schools are free, democratic schools which allow students the freedom to pursue their own interests, and to learn by doing.
Suggested reading:
Sudbury schools are definitely radically different than traditional U.S. public and private schools, and probably aren't for everyone. All I know is that school was absolutely the most miserable experience in my life, and that I undoubtedly would have thrived in a Sudbury-like environment.
Hey, I fucking turned out great, and I'll beat the shit out of anyone that says otherwise...
;-)
I see it didn't have any long term effects at all
Kidding! KIDDING! OW! OW!
Freedom: "I won't!"
and a habit of believing "arcane, obtuse language" == "truth"
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Go read Brave New World. It's an excellent book (yup, supported by that same educational system). Maybe, after reading it, you'll understand why your post was flamebait. (I would mod it down, but you don't learn anything from that - you'd just dismiss me as "a blockhead who didn't understand my point").
First, as someone else mentioned before you reamed them, learn to spell correctly and use proper grammar. Maybe it's the educational system's fault for not teaching you well enough, maybe it's your own fault for never bothering to learn; and frankly, I don't care which it is. Good grammar makes writing easier to read and understand, and tells me that what you have to say is important enough for you to spend the time on to making it readable, rather than the rantings of some illiterate adolescent upset at the world.
Second, get off your high horse. You seem quite cavalier about abandoning "the dumb people" in favor of giving presumably "better" people - people like you, perhaps? - a better education. Everyone who's not as capable as you gets shuffled off into a "K-mart management school educational system". The modern educational system does not do that. It bends over backwards to give everyone a chance. "Some kids aren't college material, let's not kid ourselves": then perhaps you should be the one to tell every one of those kids that he or she is not smart enough to go to college (but you apparently are). By your logic, Einstein wasn't smart enough to go to college either. You seem to have given a lot of thought to how to educate the top 5% of students; now I challenge you to spend more than a half-second thinking about the other 95%. Many of the best people I know are in that 95%, and I will not have you dismiss them as useless to the world.
Third. You are dismissing the entire educational system based on your personal experiences. Your AP textbooks were bull? I found mine exceptionally well written. What half-truths and partial histories do you feel were there? Have you ever looked at any textbooks beyond the handful you used? And what sort of un-learning do you see college professors having to do? So far, all I've seen are college lessons filling in a lot of details that would simply overwhelm me had I not spent most of my education learning how to deal with that influx of information.
And finally, you want to push calculus back to eigth grade? Are you insane? Perhaps you think you could have handled it then; I doubt you actually could have. Calculus requires trig, a strong foundation in algebra, and analytical skills usually taught in geometry. Start compressing all this down into middle school and even elementary school, and you've just given a way to burn out 99.9% of the students in this country. Congratulations, you've just killed scientific achievement.
The college professors you admire so much aren't teaching you new material that you've never seen before. Instead, they're forcing you to think about it. The better teachers I've had used the textbook only to fill in background so they didn't have to cover everything in class; the worse teachers rehashed the book for an hour each day. Read that again: the better teachers have done as much teaching as the worse teachers, and STILL have every hour of class time to use for whatever purpose they need. How dare you presume that there are no good teachers before college? It's insulting to some of the best teachers I've ever known.
Perhaps you never had a good teacher until college. Maybe your school couldn't afford to bring in the teachers you needed; maybe those teachers were too busy teaching everyone else who tried to learn and left out those who rejected their help. Fine. But whatever you do, don't insist on throwing away an educational system that many others, myself included, have found productive and useful, simply because it didn't work for you.
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
but before i cracked open my math110/105 Multivariable Calculus book here at the University of Regina i thought that it might be healthy to crack open a junior highschool math textbook to brush up skills that never really had a chance to fade away to begin with. that's right, i went right from highschool, taking at least one math course every semester since BIRTH[my parent's have been throwing numbers at me in one form or another, [now to think about it, if you include music, before birth woo jsbach/pinkfloyd/eltonjohn!] pretty much since i was created.]... and part of my major is mathematics [ComputerScience/Mathematics]. fair enough... also - i'm not exactly stupid here. sure i may not be the top of my class... the classic underacheiver, but it's not my intelligence, at least i think, which is the cause. so i take and i pull open this textbook of simple, simple math...
...
i first notice it's from awhile back. mabye the 70s, mabye the early 80s...old stuff. it starts out defining very specific terms, such as 'membership' and a 'set' [after a breif writeup of who, cantor right?], and then proceeds to what an axiom is, the axioms of transitvity, symmetry, etc...
before i actually read the text, i got ALL The questions wrong. every single one. i knew NONE of this. i suspected it's existance, but i had never been taught any of this stuff. i remember in elementary school being told not to do any more math because 'i was getting ahead of the class' and the teacher wanted me to stay with the class. given it was a french elementary school, who knows mabye that was relevant. anyway, while i do know[or at least believe i know, or know that i believe that i know...?] that i can count to 1000 or so in both french and english,
WHY is it that i can't do these really simple bits of math, that i'm sure have been doable since the times of Daedalus...yet if i can't do it i'd be willing to bet good money that no one who's graduated my highschool within the past 5 or so years has. that's what, 6000 people? i guess i'm not talking for very many, but this is really significant. this means that many people have no idea what a number is. that many people have no idea why specific relations hold, and proofs weren't taken until grade 12 --- in a class most people didn't take, which means people CANT recreate mathematics if they had to for whatever reason. of course one could argue that if we weren't so restricted by the axioms we have that we'd still come up with a bunch of mathematics, albeit completely different from a set of newfangled axioms, and it may solve the same, or roughly more problems than our current one, but i'm still kinda skeptical of this whole process being productive - after all if this current system of mathematics is a bad thing wouldn't it be better to raise a person up in it so that they could find out in university that "there are no absolutes", "god is not a number", or whatever you want to negate? or mabye i'm completely and utterly wrong? but the whole matter scared the hell out of me, and this was before i got into descartes and his doubting the simplest of logical reasonings. but yes. in case you hadn't been paying attention, what i'm saying is the fundemental parts of math are no longer taught in either elementary or highschool [local saskatchewan, Canada]. of course, mabye if the highschool i went to didn't have this strange mentality of 'get overinvolved in every social club and athletic group and community group you can get invovled in so that not only do you not have time enough to have a social life so you can fuck and get into trouble, but you'll be so overtired, overworked, and burnt out by the end of the 4 years you'll be either hopelessly insane or wanting to commit suicide just to get some rest... but that's all just speculation, of course...
or mabye i just suck at math? that's always an option i suppose....or mabye there's another factor? mabye it's all my fault?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
In high school we were doing some experiment in groups, spinning a cork on the end of string, with the string going through a tube and a weight on the bottom, to demonstrate centipetal force. I forget exactly what the exercise was, but it wasn't terribly interesting and everyone was just screwing around. I got bored and started checking out what was in the cabinets along the wall.
.txt file I'd downloaded somewhere. Anyway I formed the wired and hooked them to the transformer and fired the thing up. It was great. In about 30 seconds half the class was crowded around this thing and asking me how it worked.
When the teacher wasn't looking, I pulled out a high voltage transformer and a few bits of heavy wire. I hadn't done this before, but I'd read about it in a
For the rest of the class, we ditched the centripetal force thing, and she had me at the white board explaining how a Jacob's Ladder works. I'll never forget it...
I'd love to be a science teacher some day. Sadly, teaching hardly pays a living wage in California, so instead I sit at a desk writing code.
I'm a high school sophomore and at my school (public) we have a similar problem with dumbing down. However it is carried out in a different manner. Instead of having bullshit prerequisits that make it impossible to get into classes, they let almost everyone into the advanced class. Someone with a D in regular 10th grade chemistry who can't grasp the concept behind a mole or titration, even after weeks of review on the subject, should not be in an AP Chem class the next year. However, the school lets them in and the teacher feels obligated to teach to the bottom, or atleast near bottom.
This is especially problematic when it's an AP class with a set curriculum for the AP exam. My chemistry teacher actually said to me, "I don't teach the stuff on the AP Chem exam because most of the class wouldn't be able to keep up." That's no way to run a class at all.
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule. -Randal, Clerks
It lets the kids individually do an experiment, find any unexplained observations, make a hypothesis, and then go about proving or disproving their hypothesis. All the while documenting everything of course. The kids have a blast because they're actually trying to figure something out and see if their ideas are right. In a single classroom with the same "experiment" there could be 10 or more different hypothesis and even more ways to test them.
The best part of this is that the lab is not scripted. The kids go into this class and actually have to think for themselves. They can't just follow some instructions and get an A. Also they're learning science the way scientists do real work.
We're currently part of a huge Department of Education grant in its 3rd year. If you're interested please go to http://waves.okstate.edu and look around.
Also if any Department of Education brass are reading this. Please don't cut our funding! This stuff actually works. The kids are actually enjoying class.
It's a good thing to have confidence in math. I hope you are planning for college.
If I had to condense all of my high school/college advice into one point for future engineering/math/science students, it would be this: Focus on the derivation of the proposed solution.
Memorizing a bunch of formulae is a total waste of time and energy. Instead of spending hours memorizing, go through the process of deriving the problem mathematically, and then go through the complete derivation of the possible solutions. When grappling with some scientific/mathematic question, knowing the "why" behind a presented solution is just as important as knowing the "how."
The value of slogging through the derivations once or twice (like on homework) is that you will become familiar with the "tips and tricks" that WILL be used in your professional career--essentially, the philosophy and methodology of coming up with mathematical models and solutions. There is unmeasurable value in being able to recognize what approximations or assumptions can be be imposed on a mathematical model, and how they will affect the model (including its solution).
A comment on grade/high school being too easy: It is. I would love to see a much more rigorous college prep program. However, I know people who didn't even try college because they had trouble in high school. While I think increasing the intensity of education (esp. math/science) would benefit the "good students," keeping the intensity level within the ability of the maximun number of students increases the odds of even mediocre students at least attempting to try college. In the big picture, THAT is what's important.
Consider this: if you are going to college-particularly to study math/engineering- the second you matriculate, all of your previous educational records are essentially worthless. The college prep focus of getting you INTERESTED in engineering/math/whatever by letting you build balsa wood bridges, mousetrap cars, et cetera-- worked. In college, you will learn how to analyze mousetrap cars: energy analysis, kinematics, material selections, optimization for speed or distance or weight. You'll learn it all! And the bulk of what is important (the philosophy) it will be based on mathematics beyond even the most advanced high school math.
Bottom line is, if can get into college, you can make it as challenging and rewarding as you want it to be.
I think an awful lot of it comes down to social promotion.
Schools are doomed by social promotion. How can you have effective schools if it is essentially impossible to get left back, or to fail a grade?
Next year, you are guaranteed to have students who can't do the work getting promoted to the next grade. Teachers may not grade on a curve, but won't completely abandon those students who can't get the material. Repeat this cycle a few times with a consequent lowering of standards each time around, and it's a miracle that our schools work at all.
Once they're lost, they're lost for good. For example, reading ability is a big part of their ability to work around those bad teachers and crappy texts. If they don't learn to read, they'll hit a hard ceiling, just as they'll hit a hard ceiling later on if they don't learn mathematics. When you have illiterate kids graduating from high school, then obviously schools are failing.
If we don't quantify what we're trying to achieve we've got no chance of measuring success. Social promotion is the equivalent of renaming failure to success.
As far as respect goes, I didn't respect some of my teachers, in some cases with good reason. One of them was finally fired for throwing a stool at a student, (he taught 4th grade, so we're talking about an adult launching a stool at a nine year old.) This didn't surprise me, and he wasn't my worst teacher.
We'll always need better teachers, better textbooks, and wish our culture put more value on education. We will always need to pursue these things. I was lucky: Even if I didn't respect my teachers, I sure as hell wanted to learn from all of them, even the floating turds, who will always be there.
What we must do is try to make education about education, and put the mechanics in place for the system to succeed at its chosen task. Perhaps we should introduce the novel idea of academic promotion in school, as a sort of social experiment.
Nah, I'm sure it's much too risky.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
I was raised largely this way by my parents, and I don't think they could have done it better. When I asked questions they couldn't answer, my mother took me to the library to find the answer and learned with me. I never had a curfew but I rarely stayed out too late. My parents never punished or rewarded me for my grades, but I usually got good ones. They told me they were proud of me if I did well, and helped me learn if I asked for help and that was it.
I once had a substitute teacher who saw things a little differently. She was teaching an algebraic principle in my 8th grade math class, when I noticed another way to solve the same problem. I tried to tell the sub about it, but she told me to shut up. But my fellow students understood what I was saying and starting asking me about it. The reaction I got from the sub was punishment for disrupting the class (I guess she saw me as a sort of ring-leader against her).
Children *love* to learn -- more so than adults. Attempting to quench even a portion of that thirst, is one way of respecting them as people. It means taking their questions seriously. It also means pointing them to other questions which you think should interest them, and making an effort to explain why it should interest them. Once that's done, getting the kids to do the work that is also a necessary part of learning won't be difficult, because they will see the rewards involved in doing so.
This is not the same as cramming things down their throats -- with that approach your children may, if you're lucky, reach your level of competence. But if you feed and magnify a child's natural desire to learn, he will continue to seek knowledge well after you can no longer provide it yourself.
Most of us have one or more lasers lying around the house, only they're today's replacement for the gramophone needle, and not for atomizing our enemies at a press of a trigger.
Extrapolating from this, I predict that in another hundred years, warp drive engines will enable us to build new, faster and more efficient washing machines.
Of course this is all just a smiley face on the fact that teachers dont want to look bad (by having anyone fail) or, god forbid, work too hard.
It's not necessarily the teachers. My gf teaches middle-school science at a pretty bad school in SE Dallas. [yes she hates the textbooks]. Anyway, she is not allowed to give a grade lower than a 50. Even though almost half of her students earn less than 50, she has to put 50 on the report card.
In addition to this, the principal [or the administration, I'm not sure] complains about the percentage of her students that are failing [ranging from 50-70%]. It's not that she's a bad teacher. She really tries to make things interesting. Not only that, but on every homework assignment and test, the students are given the opportunity to correct their wrong answers for partial credit. So the students have every possiblility to pass, either by understanding the material OR by simply doing the corrections on their wrong answers [they do this at home with the book]. Yet they all still fail.
She's getting in trouble because she actually expects the students to put forth some effort. Many of the other teachers just pass the kids so they don't get in trouble for having too many kids fail.
Of course, it may also have to do with the fact that she's having to teach the kids how to read and do math, so that they can understand the science. The really sad thing is that she teaches 2 classes for students that have recently come to the US [mostly from Mexico though she doesn't speak Spanish]. The spanish speaking classes end up doing better than her normal classes.
In addition to the books being poorly written, this kind of thing is really killing the US education system.
The moral? There must be CONSEQUENCES for the students actions [or lack thereof]. Otherwise they will continue to do nothing and pass.
As it is, she's considering moving to teaching Kindergarten or first grade. This way, she figures she can get the kids off to a better start than they are getting now. She wants to prove that she can have all her kindergarteners reading by the end of the year. I personally think it's possible as well, and hopefully getting the kids off to a good start will help them deal with the crappy teaching/education they are likely to get for the rest of their public school lives.
Ender
Nothing to see here
All the teachers I know would like to be able to fail kids and have it do some good but the administration doesn't agree.
At least here in California the prevailing theory is that kids belong in a class of their peers with kids close to their own age. What this means is that you can give all the F grades you want and in 2 years they'll be moved on anyway if they don't pass, maybe to a remedial class, maybe not.
This carries over to kids with serious disabilities as well. We're "mainstreaming" everyone so that in an "ideal" class setting the teacher has to deal with the smart kid asking uncomfortable questions about God, the jackass jumping around on top of his desk and the changing the diapers of the kid in the wheelchair who doesn't understand any of it.
At the same time we're "clustering" which means we group kids according to ability, interest and sometimes even handicap. What this means is that, far from the ideal, we're giving teachers a group of problem kids whose parents don't give a damn, handicapped kids who need special attention or smart/normal kids who can be dealt with using traditional teaching/discipline. Far from *truly* mainstreaming, we're just tracking the kids but call it mainstreaming because we're not giving them "special" teachers. We just expect that any given education major can graduate and be prepared to change diapers and mop up drool in the classroom.
Parents don't get to "sign off" as soon as the kids are school age. If you want that, send them to prep school somewhere. Our schools are a nightmare and the teachers haven't gotten worse, the kids have because parents are out working to get by instead of being home with kids teaching them basic civics. We complain that we don't want the teacher teaching the kids values because those belong in the home and then we neglect to teach kids values and complain that the teachers aren't doing anything to "fix" our kids.
I just found out there's no such thing as the real world. It's just a lie you've got to rise above. - John Mayer