Slashdot Mirror
Making Science and Math Kid Friendly?
mtspim asks: "I work for a non-profit organization that creates interactive math and science curriculum materials for kids and their instructors. Even though we have seen kids learn difficult topic more easily by using a computational approach to learning, most instructors are reluctant to introduce these new ways of thinking into their curriculum. What do Slashdot users think are the best ways to help revitalize math and science programs in our schools, or should we stick to the old conventional methods to learning?"
The one thing i asked of all my teachers, even into high school. Sock puppets.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I remember a way to get a lot of people interested in subjects back in the day was to offer some sort of reward for successful completion. It made people more apt to try hard in a subject when they could get something on the far side. Just my $.02
Throw away computers - bring back times-tables and logs - make people *think* again. Nick
It's always about making *science* and *math* kid-friendly.
Has anyone ever tried making the *kids* science and math-friendly?
Are you sure this is the right question to be asking Slashdotters, many of whom found both topics plenty kid friendly already?
I honestly think that the more different teaching concepts that are used within the same classroom, the better chance a student will connect with at least one that actually makes them grasp the concept.
It's instructors who rely on only one presentation technique all year who connect with only the students who respond to that technique, and end up having no way to bring the ones who get lost back into the fold.
The first thing that needs to be done to revitalize math and science learning is to remove the stigmas associated with it. These stigmas were not present to the degree they are today in the 50's and 60's. This is one of the reasons that we were able to pull of some amazing feats (such as the space program in the 60's and the microprocessors in the 70's) during those times. Being labeled a 'geek' and being ostracized by other students does little to make other 'normal' students want to learn science and math. The sad thing is that it starts young (8 years old).
I learn most when forced to apply abstract concepts to the real world. Things I learn by doing and 'through the hands' have taken me much father than my limited mind might have otherwise allowed.
Schools should return to more traditional approaches, IMO. I'm in my 50s, and am appalled at how ignorant and unmathematical are most young people today. It's because they didn't have long division and square root extraction drummed into their heads like us oldsters did.
.nosig
When I was in public schools, I had the benefit of being identified in the high-performer category because I had actually learned a lot from of math from watching PBS programs such as Square One Television, and my mother had taught me to read before my first day of kindergarden unlike any other member of my class.
As more and more resources are being allocated to "special ed" for those who underperform because such spending is mandatory under various laws, I notice that the programs for the overperformers are being cut back repeatedly because they are strictly optional. I wonder how many future whiz-kids we're losing to the fact that they're getting bored in too-dumb-for-them mainstream classes and therefore goofing off with their extra time instead of being given work that's at their actual mental level rather than their age's level.
I'm in highschool right now. At my highschool, and when I was in middle school, they were introducting a lot of the classes "hands on" learning programs. I learn nothing from these, they are basically busy work that you do without writing anything. The best way to learn something is just to read it out of the book. Someday, once we have created a society of idiots,MAYBE we'll see the mistake in these new BS methods of learning. But some how, I doubt it...
Usually when we teach or do stuff we try to be as efficient and simple as possible yet with math this is not the case. We currently teach math as "problem solving". We teach it by having people solve pointless problems which they will never face and never remember the solutions for unless they are one of the rare people who actually enjoy solving problems and who actually enjoy working through calculations.
I enjoy computer work, but if I were to teach computers assuming everyone who uses one enjoys it as much as I do, I'd make everyone learn C, everyone learn the linux commandline, and everyone learn what every single component in the computer does.
Look, we all can't like the same things and in my opinion schools should focus more on the math that matters in life. Statistics, Addition and Subtraction, perhaps even some logic and discrete math. All which are more useful to the common man than calculus, algebra, geometry (perhaps some people do need geometry)
Basic math and basic english should be the primary goals of school. The other classes are simply a complete waste of time and only harm a person by preventing them from doing as well as they would have done if they focused on the basics.
The math we actually use in life should not be decided by the math experts, it should be decided by surveys which the government should conduct. Once we find out the math people use most in daily life that should be what we teach in school. If we want to learn any other math then we specialize in math and learn it in college or in AP math.
The problem with the school system is we expect a jack of all trades, as if a human can be good at every subject. In reality only several thousand go to Harvard, Yale or MIT, the rest go state schools, community college, or they never go to college at all. The majority of people simply don't need the math and never will go to a college or have a job which requires it. Statistics, working with money, and logic are the only types of math people use. Discrete math may also be useful for scientific or technical fields involving computers.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
...to visualize as much as possible. When I teach math (I tutor college level math) I find it helpful to keep the attention of the student as keep them interested to visually verify any concept I can. For example when teaching solving triangles I visually measure off the angles and demonstrate that they all add to 180 degrees. Also teaching the pythagorean(sp?) theorum is helped by getting out a ruler and proving that in fact A^2 + B^2 = C^2 without just saying it's so.
My $.02
SW
I ran into this with writing, and it made a large difference. For most of my elementary years, I dreaded writing essays. Every time one was assigned, the teacher explained it like I was being given a chore of some sort.
Then, a little later in my schooling (fifth grade) someone asked me to write something outside of school unrelated to any assignments and I discovered I like writing. Since then, I was never bothered by essays. A similar thing applied to reading for me, and still does to some extent.
I'm naturally a writer and reader, but the point is still important to remember: Never tell kids work is going to be hard, they will believe you.
I found most students who do poorly in higher math don't even know their multiplication tables.
for (i = 0; i < ALL_CHICKS_I_KNOW; i++) { ask_out(); if (get_laid) break; }
Leave our kids alone. We can fill our universities with foreign students, and get top-level math/science done that way. It's cheaper to pay for 1 foreign genius than to train 100,000 american kids and get 1 genius that way.
I am confused by this topic as well. when i was a kid in the70's i routinely watched PBS and saw all the science and math shows that were on and they were readily understandable. even though they were advanced topics.
Furthermore the foundation site speaks of "reform" not improvement. If you base your offering on the position that standard education is faulty don't expect open arms.
So in my opinion you'd be better off with some solid research and an attempt to work with teachers as opposed to fixing them.
Was entirely "word problem" based, with real world problems. In our class, most of the problems revolved around polution and environmental questions. The problems we had to work out had tangible meanings. If you want x less emissions, then how much of a reduction in y factories (except more complex, with multiple factors). We'd write up real reports on the longer topics.
I teach Math and Science to ESE students. I find with my students that the problem is holding their attention long enough to transfer meaningful information. Typically I try to use manipulatives and audio-visual aids. This allows them to process the information on several different levels. Honestly, I think the "old" ways that were used were inferior to what we use today. The problem with kids learning today aren't the methods though, but the tremendous amount of distractions. Also, and I hate to state such an obvious fact, parents MUST be involved.
I think if the teacher actually cares about the students as individuals, cares about the math and science, and cares about whether the students learn it, then the teacher will do a good job and find a way to get the students to learn.
So I'd say it's more-or-less hopeless in the current society with the current unionized system.
There's money to be made pretending to care though.
People need to realize that most kids don't have a desire to learn these things, and most teachers don't have a desire to teach. Kids go because it's publicly funded babysitting, teachers go to get paid. At some point grades become relevant, and kids learn to do whatever it is they have to do to pass the classes. When it becomes necessary to accomplish some goal, the material will be learned.
If we did, for some reason, decide to make an point of 'teaching' our kids, by somehow giving them a real reason to learn and the teachers a real reason to teach, it'd be amazing the knowledge that could be imparted. I don't see any reason why a 10 year old cant do calculus, other than they're "not prepared yet."
Better "curriculum materials" aren't the answer. I don't know what the answer is, but it should somehow involve rewarding kids for learning and rewarding teachers for teaching, which just doesn't happen in our current system.
Fact: The real numbers can be extended with the addition of the imaginary number i, equal to sqr-rt(-1). Numbers of the form x+iy, where x and y are both real, are called complex numbers, which also form a field.
Child: That is soo cool!
Never gonna happen.
Lets all become math geniuses and solve every problem in our heads without any paper. Lets all think harder even if we are less efficient and lack the physical ability to do so.
Is the goal to be efficient/progress or is the goal to do things in the least efficient way just to use our brain more?
Hey if you can do math in your head without any paper go ahead, just don't tell every other kid in the world to be good at spatial and logic areas of their brain as if we all are clones of you.
Thank you.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
1) As they get older... there should be a math stream for kids who are good at math, a science stream for people who are good at science, and one of each for people who are just not good at either. Really, there are people like that, and putting them in the same class with the really smart kids just discourages them from continuing. Happens to grade 9s at my highschool all the time.
2) This is more the case for math, but there should be an emphasis on investigating real things out there. In some book somewhere the lesson on circumference of a circle is taught with an activity involving cookies. Showing kids how their math applies to real life (instead of a boring jumble of numbers and symbols) will help to keep them interested in it.
3)In Science: More labs and investigations. I don't know how this is with other school systems, but I find in mine we do a very limited number of labs and a lot of sitting and listening in science classes. This may work wonders for visual and auditory learners, but for people who learn by doing (I'm one of them), there's nothing I like more than breaking out the lab equipment and doing the lab. This also ties to my second point - you can see how these things apply in real life.
There are many more points, I'm sure, but these are just three quick ones off the top of my head.
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Sorry to say this, but as much as I appreciate the effort to make the teaching of subjects in school easier, and for that matter more cost effective, school systems are largely ignoring their own research into providing effective instruction.
Schools are attempting to save money by doing such things as making classes 2 or even 4 hours long, so that the teachers for those classes can do other things on days that they no longer need to teach that class (usually taking classes themselves, or using those days for "inservice" work.)
This flies in the face of several decades of research that shows that instruction should be provided in 15 min blocks, and classes should not be more than 60 min long without breaks. Additionally if a student is ill one day, they loose a minimum of a week's worth of instruction in that class if that four hour block is all that is held on that course for the week. Missing that much material can easily make the difference between an A and an F in a course.
Yes. All of this is being done as part of cost cutting measures, and with a goal of meeting the "No Child Left Behind" mandate. The effect however is closer to "No Child Able To Keep Up".
Standardized test scores are going down, schools are loosing funding as a result, and some are even being forced to close their doors. Granted when they close their doors, the cost of that school goes to Zero. Supposedly that was not the intent however.
-Rusty
You never know...
I am a High School Sophomore, and believe that myself, as with most of my friends -- geeks and non-geeks alike -- would learn better if we/they had computerized Math/Science classes. Not only would it be so that we would never have to worry about forgetting our textbooks, but it would keep us awake.
Children's Television Workshop, the producers of "Sesame Street", used to have other shows as well.
- "The Electric Company" was a spinoff for kids who had just outgrown the muppets of Seasame Street, but still had more to learn. It was basically the same kind of show, but leaned just a little older.
- "3-2-1 Contact" was the science spinoff for middle school students. It presented some grade-level appropriate documentaries, followed by The Bloodhound Gang using those concepts to solve mysteries.
- "Square One Televison" was the math spinoff, presenting skits, catoons, music videos, and games that all math concepts for grade school students.
However, all of those shows have since faded off of PBS, and CTW has now even taken on the name of Sesame Workshop which more-or-less indicates that they don't intend on ever expanding beyond Seasame Street again...
The entire PBS Kids lineup seems to have taken a turn for the younger, with babby-level shows like Teletubbies and Barney lining up with Seasame Street and still-timeless episodes of Mr. Rogers's Neighborhood. Shows aimed at middle schoolers have fallen off the board altogether... and I see that as a problem.
Sock Puppet 1: "Hello there, Mr. Function. How are you doing today?"
Sock Puppet 2: "Not so good... I'm kind of scared."
1: "Why is that?"
2: "Well, I've heard that there's a derive operator running around here somewhere."
1: "Oh, is that so?"
2: "Yes, and I'm just a constant function, if anyone derives me, I'm zero!"
1: "Ha! But I don't have to worry about that!"
2: "Why not?"
1: "I'm the exponential function e^x. You can derive me all you want, it doesn't hurt me at all!"
Sock Puppet 3: "Hello there. I'm the partial derivative with respect to y!"
I think books in general are better than computers for most learning. I print out most articles that I like, for instance.
:)
I'm not sure how you mean by kid-friendly.
Math is a difficult and tedious subject.(I enjoy it)
Its an exercise in abstract logic.
Kids don't want to go to school and do the mental drudgery- they want to go play with their friends. I only got serious about school when I was 16 or so- now I'm going to be a senior in college next year(just to show I'm not completely worthless).
Raw knowledge is usually boring. This hold true up into college.
The onus is on the instructor, I think.
Can the teacher present it in a manner that insures that most of the class will have 70+% retention of the material?
Naturally, the next goal is to make this as painless as possible for both teacher and class.
I'm spectacularly unexcited about curricula that do not have a book-centric focus. There is probably a way to have a mostly computer curriculum that works very well.
I don't think it's here yet.
Glancing at what Shodor provides in the math arena, I suspect you are being too visual and cutesy. But I'm not a really visual learner. These exercises would probably work better for a very visual person.
Also: why are you doing elementry stats for 5th grade? Are they expected to have mastered arithmatic?
/b
|f(x)dx = F(b) - F(a)
Math Blaster, back in the good old days of the 80's, was probably the best we've ever gotten in terms of interactive learning. It was an engrossing game for 2nd-graders that made you use math skills to figure things out. THAT is the kind of thing that kids today are looking for, I believe.
It is important to make learning fun. Instead of putting on a pedestal those who thoroughly understand what is being taught, more attention needs to be paid to those who do not understand. Figuring out why they do not understand is step one to the solution, step two involves finding a method to help them understand. I have seen it too many times before, children who see that they are not as quick and bright as others in science and mathematics and just give up. They are left believing those are subjects for the "smart" kids. Often with brilliance comes arrogance, this needs to be stopped at an early age.
or maybe just a root...
...not the other way around.
Most math and science teachers (US Elementary & High School) do not have degrees in Math or Science.
The problem is that it is very tough to get talented teachers to remain teaching. Moving into the private sector is much more profitable.
We need to overhaul the system so that Mathematicians and Scientists want to be teachers...
Many parents put their 1-3 year olds in front of a television and it permanently rewires their brain to process information faster. This can be good if the children are pursuing a future in media, sports, or interactive electronics. It also makes it more difficult for them to sit down and read a book or focus on things that don't provide much feedback. As a result, we give them drugs to help them concentrate, but that's not the answer.
There are two easy solutions. One is to prevent the stimulus from affecting them at such a young age, which would help them to focus on traditional book and pen studies. The other way is to allow them to watch tv and create new interactive curriculums to not necessarily compete with television and internet, but to embrace it. After all, we are becoming more connected in this world, and the young minds rewired for the digital age may fare better in a world with ever increasing information overload.
I thought the question was more in regards to training young children, in which case the issue is very different. There is some indoctrination needed for people to learn to do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division well.
Beyond that, I think you are mostly right.
In general, I think the matter would be aided by a little more focus on raw logic at some level. It's hard to teach, but learning a little raw logic allows you to understand the majority of math with ease, and is essential to most all science.
Some kids learn best byh reading, or writing, or seeing, or hearing, or doing. Nothing will work for everyone. A good balance of courses, or even well balanced courses, is the best approach.
-Tim Louden
Convince the destructive little buggers that if the learn the principles of building it from you, you'll give them the materials to build their own trebuchet.
After they've learnt enough engineering to build it, then let them learn enough ballistics to accurately destroy stuff.
(Yes, I'm emphasizing engineering over science; tinkering and getting one's hands dirty cements the memory a lot better than simply trying to remember something. More fundamentally, most people and nearly all kids learn to value science for what it can do for them. Valuing knowledge for knowledge's sake alone is the province of a tiny and despised minority of really annoying poindexters like myself.)
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
You are thinking "Ok, kids arent good as math like people of my generation, I know the solution! Lets force them to be good at it by drilling it into their brains brute force. This will make them so good at math!"
Problem is, it also will make them hate math. It will make them less likely to actually use the math. Where do you think the current generation of kids came from? Our parents were taught just like you how t hate math and when the time came for us younger generations to learn math our parents were the ones telling us how useless math is.
So really, if you want to help people learn math try making it useful. Timestables are about as useful as using a quil to write your papers instead of Microsoft word. Calculators are a tool to make calculations easier, to reduce the burden of the calculation part so a person can focus on the actual concept.
You want us to focus on the calculation because you enjoy or remember all the calculations and expect every human to be just like you. When you can remember every single note in a song you've heard and play it back on the piano will you really be a better musician ? No you'll just be someone who can copy what they hear note for note and you'll still know nothing about the art.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
In lots of countries that do not speak english, french, german or spanish natively, children have mandatory classes in a foreign languages (most often english). In my country, we begin at the age of 10. Children are excellent at learning languages, the younger the better.
An interesting idea is (I don't know where I heard about it, possibly Nicholas Negropontes "Being Diital"), that if we could present scientific problems and issues to them in a "natural language", and they could interact with each other, do assignments and work with computers in that language, perhaps that could be a good base for an evolving understanding of technical issues?
Perhaps the gap between the logics of math and science and the rules of a language is too large, perhaps there are lots of didactic challenges that cannot be supported by a language. But it's an interesting thought to think in languages rather than equations.
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Geocrawler error message.
Especially Mathnet. I had basically outgrown the rest of the show (although, I did learn the word Googol there long before the search engine), but I'd still tune in to watch the Mathnet part of the show. For those who didn't watch it, it was like Dragnet, except with math, and it was split into 5 parts over the week (each about 4-5 minutes).
A while ago I read that if you go to different workers and ask them what maths they use in their work, most of them will say "none, really". If you then ask them about their work, you will discover that hairdressers use ratios, as do cooks, painters use areas and volume etc: but none of these identify them as "maths".
Treat it as such.
Too often I see teacher after teacher who treats math with disdain and as something you can just memorize a few techniques and have down cold.
These are the kids I see shake with fear when they have to synthesize to answer a problem... in an Advanced Engineering Mathematics course in college.
Teach it as if it were a language--through immersion; by teaching fundamental concepts and then building on those (rather than our current backwards system); and teach the rules before you teach the exceptions, special cases, and other things of that nature (e.g., how did you learn how to take the determinate of a matrix?). Teach application--teaching them about matrices is pretty much worthless unless you talk to them about systems of linear equations. Force them to apply this language in situations outside of the ones that you have taught.
Deemphasize memorization and emphasize understanding--Don't make them memorize trigonometric rules, teach them Euler's Equation and about imaginary numbers.
Respect the students ability to learn mathematics. E. B. White said the following: "No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing." This is a fundamentally true statement that applies to teaching--if the teachers hate the subject and don't know it all that well themselves, then they aren't going to trust the students ability to learn it.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
You cannot control a kid and make them like what you want them to like. Some kids will like problem solving and some kids wont. Currently math is problem solving.
I like math, I hate problem solving, I hate memorizing useless calculations, formulas, steps and rules. I like logic, I like thinking, I don't like calculations and brute force memorization. No one on earth can change my likes or dislikes. The only thing which you can do is simply make the math more likeable to different types of people instead of just making it fun for problem solvers.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Even though we have seen kids learn difficult topic more easily by using a computational approach to learning, most instructors are reluctant to introduce these new ways of thinking into their curriculum.
Maybe because your "studies" are flawed and biased, because you are peddling a money draining proposition to an already beset educational system?
Maybe because other studies have shown that "advantages" to calculator/computer based "learning" disappear when you remove said tool from the poor victim^Wstudents hand?
Maybe because the simple formula of hands-on teaching, and LOTS of homework problems, is a time-honored proven formula to training young minds?
I'm not a luddite, I'm an autodidact (and college-educated... though that's not where I was taught the self-teaching skills. that was done in elementary/middle/high school but there you go) and I've NEVER, ever gotten any benefit from any canned teaching application. They stress context dependent, formulaic responses over conceptual understanding and rote practice.
Sheesh.
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
When I was younger I used to watch Bill Nye, Beakman's World, and Newton's Apple. I loved these shows and they were the first things to spark my interest in science and technology. These shows stand out because they are both entertaining and educational (the dreaded edutainment :) ). They kept my interest because they used humor to help teach. Note, all those shows are aimed at different age people, yet I enjoyed them throughout my elementary school years.
Now that I am in high school, I still think entertaining, funny videos are a great way to learn. The more sexual innuendos, the better. For example, thanks to the World of Chemistry video series, I'll never forget that pv=nrt. Hell, my brother won't ever forget because I have talked about it so much. Here is what happens: They are describing the gas laws and say how pv=nrt or, to help you remember it, "pervnert." Then they cut to a clip of a guy in a trench coat walking down the street. He approaches a women, "Excuse me miss." He flings open his trench coat wearing only a sign saying pv=nrt over his genetalia. As he makes a twirling motion with his pelvis, the woman shrieks and runs away. Now I'll never forget that equation. There are also sexual innuendos and hidden jokes in the series, which really keeps your attention. I imagine this would immensely help those that don't enjoy chemistry.
In conclusion: funny videos that keep kids' attention work wonders. Suit the videos to the age group.
Kids are exposed to television, radio, video games, high-pressure sports, junk food, back seat DVD players, and plain old bullies at school. If you want kids to learn, there needs to be some time each day spent in a calm, relaxed environment where they can read a book at their own pace, sit and think, daydream, play act, just the normal stuff kids do.
Adults are under so much pressure and stress that they seem to be preparing their kids early for a life of pressure and stress as well. Everyone I know who has kids makes sure the kids are occupied and entertained every waking moment. When I was a kid, the most refreshing and insightful moments often occurred when I was just sitting in a chair, staring into space, sometimes thinking, sometimes not. That's when you make a mental connection, that's when you "get it". Taking away the free time and relaxation is what makes science and math difficult for kids. It probably makes other subjects difficult too, but you can get by in a lot of subjects by just memorizing. We can do better.
Coincidentally, next week is TV Turnoff Week.
"Instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those few instances where it is almost entirely superfluous." --Gibbon I went far in school, specializing in math and physics. I give my teachers a lot of credit, but I had to extract everything from them. I think there's nothing teachers can do to help poor students. I think methodology is a dead end.
Seminars for Endorsement of Science and Math Educators
I noticed this caption under one of your graphics: "Need to plot that function of two variables? Make a surface plot! The surface plot tool can use cartesian (x and y) or polar (r and theta) coordinates." Most students will be too confused to go any farther.
People who went to the regular classes like me were bored out of our minds and had to learn to teach ourselves. Whiz kids need to learn the same thing. In the long run if you don't, you will fail out of college while the kid who went to the boring easy classes but who learned to go to the library and research on their own will do well.
Whiz kids should be expected to teach themselves or have their parents teach them. If your mother taught you to read earlier obviously you don't need the extra attention in class, let your mother teach you other stuff and buy you books while the kids who don't have mothers to teach them can use the school as a resource.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
I am a student at high school, and like most high schools in my country they are desperate to use computers at every possible oppurtinity. They specifically make us use them in maths and science. After 5 years of using computers with these subjects i, and my fellow pupils, have learnt little or nothing from our Information Technology lessons. These lessons are seen purely as a `skive` and no real work is done.
I would much prefer to do some real pen/paper work in Maths/Science.
I swear, school districts have gone nuts over calculators. For some reason, teachers have got the nutty idea that it is more important for kids to understand the concept than it is for them to do the problem. I have personal experiance with school districts that have special calculator math books to teach kids how to use one. Sorry, if a kid knows how to do math, a calculator is pretty easy to figure out.
I have substituted in Algebra classes where kids didn't trust the provided answer key to a test because I didn't use a calculator to figure out the answers.
Teaching a kid about a math concept and then having them use a calculator to get the answers is like trying to teach a kid to read and have a computer read the story to them. It's insane. Working problems by hand helps fix the concept in the head and lets the wheels turn and discover new concepts on their own.
If you want to make a real difference, teach the teachers how to take math and algebra topics and apply them to the real world. Especially with algebra, the trick is to teach them take the principles being taught and figure out how to use them for the rest of their lives. It is a silly trick, but my High School Math teacher taught all his classes how to multiply two 2-digit numbers together in our heads using a simple algebra trick. for example 25*83= 2075. It takes a little practice but it is the same technique as figuring out (ax+cy)(bx+dy) (hint FOIL)
The best science teachers I ever had used the text books as a guide to helping us explore our world and see the lessons being taught in our everyday life.
In my opinion, the problem with science and math education, especially at the middle/secondary education level is the way we train teachers. They spend 4 year of college being taught education theory and taking some science/math on the side. So we end up with a bunch of people who believe anyone can teach anything that happen to know a little science or math, but with no depth. The correct approach would be have them spend most of their college careers getting science and math degrees and minoring in education. I wouldn't get rid of the student teacher program, I think that is actually the only worthwhile experiance an education major gets in four years of college. Just change the emphasis on their class structure. (would probably apply to any High School level teaching job for that matter)
Steven Pinker had some interesting things to say about learning math in one of is books (probably The Blank Slate, but maybe How the Mind Works). I'll try to regurgitate what I remember.
Mathematics is not natural. Children are natural learners of language - they pick it up as easily as breathing. Mathematics is not like that - we didn't evolve an innate facility with complex math like we did with complex language. We have to work at it. (Well, 99% of us do). Teching math the same way as teaching English is not likely to work well. With math, you need repetition and lots of examples until the students feel comfortable with each concept.
Math is relentlessly cumulative. If you don't master arithmetic, you will struggle with algebra. If you didn't grasp algebra, you're going to be lost with calculus. And so on.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Throw away tractors - bring back oxen and handplows.
I remember a whole slew of apple educational programs between the years of 1982-1985. While my memory is kinda vague a few actually are noteworthy. One was a simulation of traveling in our solar system at diffrent speeds using a bicycle, car, and light speed. The geology department had a nice simulation on the process of blasting to find oil. And the ever popular lunar landing simulation which didn't seem so far fetched as we were planning to go back to the moon at some point.
Basicly the software was pretty simple, where you are given basic instruction usually related to a recent lesson. Then you apply what you learned in a simulation.
One of my favorites was "Agent USA" by Scholastic which you played a hero represented by a little white hat with feet, and your goal was to travel the country via the train system and prent the fuzz bomb from turning everyone into little fuzz bombs. The game was most excelent for learning geography as to win the game, you had to navigate to state capitals to find out where the fuzz bomb was.
And the nice thing about software, at least free software, is you can get it off the net and play it at home, it being NO cost to teachers and schools.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Throw away computers - bring back times-tables and logs - make people *think* again. Nick
On one hand, I agree with that, but there's a whole question of "marketing" math to kids.
Computers break the monotony of math classes, and that's essential as kids become more and more accustomed to high-stimulus activities like TV and video games.
The problem with math is that, before you get to anything interesting (like Calculus), you've already got to have a huge background knowledge. And, take it from me (6 university-level math courses later), the only way to do that is practice. Doing homework problems. Boring as sin, but essential - if you do all your homework, you should expect an A+ in the course.
So, what's needed is a way to make simple homework problems interesting, so that the student sticks with it.
That's a nearly impossible task.
I think math is one of those courses which requires a hugely good teacher or professor. A bad one will turn you right off the subject and make you dread doing the homework. A good teacher or professor will make the class interesting and be fun and friendly enough that you'll feel guilty if you don't do all your homework.
That was always the best motivator for me to get good math marks - liking the teacher enough that I wanted to do well for him.
Which is shit, because you're dependent on the quality of the teacher rather than internal motivation.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
While I have certainly not visited all secondary education centers in the united states, having looked at various textbooks and talked to many of my peers in college has given me some insight into the scientific education process.
I must say that I am utterly disturbed by the conceptual poverty of pre-collegiate science education. The emphasis in many classrooms is on learning facts about the universe, rather than learning the methods which all us to obtain these facts, and understanding of what we see around us. Names of constellations, plant phyla, and obscure scientists help one "understand" science in the same way that memorizing the name of every Pope helps you "understand" history. In reality, science is about methodology and critical thinking moreso than anything else, and honestly it is that part of science education that truely benefits people in their everyday lives.
At my high school, we had a course called "reading" which was manditory for 7th and 8th graders (it was a junior/senior HS). My mother almost had me removed from the course because it was such an egregious waste of time... It was supposed to "encourage" people to read by forcing unimaginitve drivel down their throats rather than allowing them to explore books for themselves. Rather than spend 10% of my time at school on this nonsense, I owuld have much preferred a class for everyone in critical thinking.
Imagine how exciting such a class could be. Instead of spending time reading boring textbooks or doing busywork, the class would be given real-life problems to solve collaboratively. Also, it would be taught how to reason about arguments presented in scientific, political, and social arenas by disecting and debating current event topics. Throw in a dash of formal logic, and an emphesis on participation and thinking rather than getting points for giving teh answer the teacher wanted, and I think we'd have a real winner.
I believe that such a class would help science education more than spicing up material, or adding yet more pictures to the textbooks. More importantly, I believe that this kind of class would be much more generally useful to people in their everday lives. I believe that teaching people to make more rational decisions is good both socially and economically, and will allow people to be better citizens. Also it might cause people to take less of what the President/CNN/NY Times/Popular Science says as truth.
Maybe someone out there managed to take a class like this. If so, perhaps you could share your experience?
Cheers,
Justin Wick
To be defined as a whiz kid you had to have learned to read and do math earlier. Guess what, earlier does not mean you'll develop into a smarter individual as an adult. Kids who pick up on stuff earlier should get extra attention?! So what about the genius who is in a regular class who may not have picked up on things early but then surpasses everyone in class later on like during highschool?
The problem with the current system you mention is that everything depends on how well you do in the first few grades. This decides what track you go on and you'll usually stay on that track because there is almost no mobility off of this track until college.
Why should we favor one track over the other? The track system does not track intelligence it tracks development. Child A learned to read earlier than Child B, but Child A may never learn to read as well. Child B may learn math way later than Child A, but Child B may someday be a genius while Child A may simply be a kid who learned stuff early.
A lot of scientists including Einstien did not learn early, they were late in development. The only important thing is how far you develop not so much how quickly. There is currently no test to figure out how far a person will develop, we only can figure out the rate of speed.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Back in the early 80s, there was the TI-99 and it had some math games on it.
I played that for hours on end, it helped me through all my math up to Differential Equations.
God spoke to me
Hey, I worked with ya'll a few years back- Richard Whitney, if the name rings a bell. I personally think that the Interactivate program set was a great idea, and that it only has one problem- kids who aren't curious won't learn. They just won't, not even if there's an amazing program with an easy interface and lots of variables to play with. Aim for the kids who want to learn no matter what. On a personal note, I'm graduating from Johns Hopkins this year (BS in BME) and I've been accepted to the Tangible group of the MIT Media Lab (http://tangible.media.mit.edu/). G'luck w/ reviving the project.
Making Math and Science kid friendly? Call me a curmudgeon, but that's a lost cause.
If you're not a prodigy, Math is difficult. Science is difficult. So what? Work hard and you'll get it eventually. Yes, its essential to have well designed curricula and competent teachers, but I think the primary problem facing educators today is the attitude of kids. A lot of them just aren't willing to put in the effort to learn. Why? Lots of reasons, but I'd say the biggest one is that affluence breeds complacency. Give kids a kick in the butt and they'll learn just fine.
I have a perfect memory when it comes to spoken words. The best way to learn for me is to hear something being said. So why do we even need classrooms? Just sell me the audio tapes. Because everyone else is just like me, lets outlaw books.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Interesting that you should portray problem solving as something people never have to face. I think most people have to solve problems every day. Even when you suggest that the math topics taught in schools be decided by a survey, this is itself a math problem, one that has to be carefully formulated and solved and the solution analyzed from multiple perspectives in order to properly interpret the results. So I wouldn't write off the problem-solving approach just yet.
There are three basic problems with the idea of using "only types of math people use":
1. Who gets to decide who "people" are, and who gets to decide what I "need" to know? Who is it that has the right to decide this, for me or for my kid? If the majority of people don't use Calculus, and therefore we stop teaching it or the concepts that lead up to it, how do we know we aren't short-changing kids who could do great things with it? We should think very carefully before vesting someone with the power to decide for us what is useful and what isn't, and therefore what will be taught in school or not. (Yes, I'm aware that this is actually the current situation in public schools. That's why I'm not too keen on public schools.)
2. This line of thinking becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy -- we stop teaching trigonometry, for instance, and so there are no longer any people who know how to use trig, and therefore nobody around to think that it's useful. But this doesn't imply that trig isn't useful. It just means that we've made ourselves too ignorant to notice.
3. Don't forget that education doesn't exist merely for pragmatic reasons. We don't restrict our learning only to what "people need to know". Education also allows us to apprehend beauty in all its forms, enlarge our ways of thinking, and make connections between different areas of study. Education is literally "leading out" -- in this case leading out of ignorance -- not just 12-16 years of job training.
the materials that the school provided forced an atmosphere that "lets make this so easy that even the people who don't try/care can do it" which drove so many to boredom, that we just quit trying all together.
Kids like challenges, and enjoy overcoming something that they didn't know how to do. Math and science is just a playground full of things to learn. (or at least I looked at it that way)
I think kids should be _more_ challenged, and less kid-gloves and padded this and 'Addy-the-plus-sign' thinking. Tell the kids to build a box no higher than 2' tall and 4' wide. Watch them figure out how to use a ruler, find the materials, discover what they need to accomplish to do the task. More often than not, especially if you start at a young age, I think you will find that kids develop character traits such as teamwork, dilligence, abstract thinking. Maybe their box looks like a pile of wood at the end, but experience is much more valuable in this case.
To contrast, kids in the colonial times by the age of 12 knew how to read and write latin, knew right from wrong, and had already learned all the core mathematics, language mechanics, etc.
My $.02
'/dev/wit' is not available.
Basic math and english? So you don't think having some sort of idea about history is important to living in a democratic society?
Maybe this explains a certain mindset in a certain country (yeah, you know which one I'm talking about)
toward teachers. My gf recently graduated w/ a Bachelor's of Fine Arts, and is getting secondary certification to teach art K-12. She's smart and educated enough to continue to a Master's of Fine Art, and eventually be a prof at the college level, but her heart is in teaching young kids. We talk about the things she learns while subbing, and in her certification classes, all the time. Here are two of my observations:
1) Teachers are not given their due respect. These men and women EDUCATE OUR CHILDREN. Except for immigration and home schooling, every single American citizen 15 years from now will have learned the fundamentals of everything from a teacher. Every economic, political, scientific, artistic, social, religious, and ethical decision made will be influenced by teachers. This is such an important job, it's mind boggling. Every engineer who designs some new widget, every writer who writes a new story, every doctor, lawyer, machine press operator, and dog catcher will have been taught by a teacher. And yet, schools are more and more places for babysitting and teachers can barely even afford to teach. I'm an engineer, and I feel that my education and expertise justifies my high salary expectations. Why don't we expect to pay teachers high salaries too? Think of the return on investment...how many lives does a teacher touch?
2) As for public schools, No Child Left Behind is an abomination. Teachers and students have known for many years that the economic prosperity of a school district is directly related to that district's performance on state mandated standardized tests. Now, with the NCLB crap, the poor schools that can't afford the best teachers, supplies, facilities, programs, etc, get financially punished for doing poorly on standardized tests. Teachers get fired if their students don't pass. Curricula focus solely on "teaching to the tests". In some Texas schools, science is not taught until 5th grade because that is when it first shows up on their state mandated tests. The teachers don't have time to teach science to 4th graders because they have to focus all their energy and resources on the tested subjects or risk losing state funding or their jobs.
As in using software?
Writing software?
using calculators?
None of these replace the 1::classroom and 1::1 or 1::n for those who don't pick it up. There are still too many (particulary parents) who hear "computers|PC" and believe it's inherently more powerful a tool for their children. And, that their child|children are more powerful academically, both now and in the long-term. I believe this to be true even if the kids play Pac-man. The parents aren't particularly concerned with what it is, only that computers are in the classroom.
This conjecture is backed up by interacting with close relatives involved in the educational system and asking them very specific questions.
More seriously, I think that science education in public schools at the grade school level is appalling. In high school, the teachers are at minimum expected to have a college degree in the subject that they teach. I remember one woman telling us that she hated science, so we wouldn't be doing too many science units.
Soap bubbles are way cool.
I think SOMEONE has some issues with their math or science teachers...
I once had a math book written by Asimov, sadly I can't remember the title...
Anyway, it explained math topics so well, that I often gave up explaining stuff to the x (current/wife, doesn't care about math), and just found the relevant explanation in the Asimov book and let her read that.
She would usually go "Ah, why didn't you say that from the beginning".
(In hinsight I would probably say that I could have done as well as Asimov if I had had a whiteboard...)
TC - My Photos..
Actually, I think you're mistaken, in some respects. Granted, there should be a larger focus on statistics, a field which is commonly misunderstood while being quite essential to understanding the world around us.
However, I and everybody that works in my lab happen to use both statistics and multivariable calculus on a daily basis in various computer modeling projects of the environment that we complete. By not teaching essential math such as algebra and calculus, we would only limit students and decrease the opportunities for students to reach higher levels in both the academic and business worlds.
You can teach logic through chess. A very fun way to introduce a kid to logic. You can teach logic through video games, through activities which are actually fun.
There is no fun way to teach calculus or algebra. There never will be a fun way to teach it. Chess is fun because its a game, chess is fun because the rules are simple. Mastering chess requires just as much memorization and logic as mastering calculus but for some reason I have a much easier time remembering the openings to chess than memorizing the steps in calculus.
Why? Because chess is actually fun. The problem solving is a game, its competitive, and enjoyable.
I enjoy solving chess problems when its a game. I do not enjoy solving chess problems when its listed in a book with chess notation and in the "please solve for mate" format. I like using math when its useful.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Read a fascinating article here:
http://www.timetabler.com/textbooks.html
Basically it says that the books studied in English usually have a much lower reading age then the science/maths textbooks used by the same age group.
If you go from reading a book in English class that you can understand easily - with your teacher explaining the difficult words - to a harder book in science, with no help from the teacher to understnad the book, science will naturally seem harder then other sobjects.
Ahhh, Sock puppets, where!??!
Force-feeding memorization is the quickest way to end the technological dominance of the United States. If you do not believe me, travel the world and ask "What country produces the best engineers?". (I said engineers, not computer scientists, there is a difference.) I'll promise you, over half the time the reponse will be the US. The reason for this? American students generally know how to think, but this is changing for the worse.
Over-Memorization will produce better test scores, but worse educated students. I can get any computer to memorize a log table, but I cannot teach a computer what it means. If I teach a personwhat a log table means, they can go look up the values when they need them, or they can generate one themselves.
Okay, I feel better now, flame away.
...is going to be important in there somewhere. The United States is harshly anti-intellectual--people can be openly proclaim total ignorance in the most basic of basics of science and math and there is no negative social stigma. It starts at a young age: ask a kid what they think a scientist is like and you get a pretty negative charicature of someone you don't want to be like. It continues on to adulthood too. I remember some drug commercial a while back where the actor said "I don't care how many scientific studies say X, I want to know what my doctor takes." and that's pretty typical. Nobody likes "eggheads telling them what to do." You need to include good role models of scientists and mathematicians. Not just what s/he did, but who they were and what they were like. Like Richard Feynman: you read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" and it's like the guy's a crazy brilliant beatnik physicist who hung out in clubs, did paintings of naked women, and loved to freak out psychologists. Or at least a more rolemodelish Rosalynd Franklin, breaking down barriers to women in science in the 50's. If you make mathematicians and scientists more human then people will be more willing to look upon them if not positively then at least not automatically negatively.
Games. Not math exercises thinly veiled as games, but GAMES. When I was a kid, Rocky's Boot and the followup robot game taught me more about electronics, physics, math, programming, and logic than most of my straight math classes. There were also a few games, such as "math blasters," that were fucking awful and I hated playing. Most educational software is crap, and there's a reason kids never play those games. They're designed by teachers to educate first and entertain second, instead of looking at both goals as equal. That's why Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail were both successful back when I was in the target audience, they were both greatly entertaining.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
If I can share a moment of my inner geek, I would say one of the things that most improved math, not to mention reading, vocabulary and critical thinking skills as a young lad was Dungeons and Dragons. My dad introduced my brother and I to the game when we were 9 and 7 respectively, and we would invite over some of our other friends to play.
No it wasn't exactly calculus but it put numbers into a less serious context and it really made it a lot easier in school to feel comfortable with math. I think that a lot of kids have problems with math because they can't see how it can be used or how it fits into the real world. A great number of the scenarios my dad came up with challenged us to solve puzzles, some of these were logic problems, some required coming up with creative ways to use ordinary objects, some were essentialy algebra problems hidden under the façade of an ancient puzzle lock or something like that. And as for vocabulary, how many 9 year olds can use the words opulent, prismatic, or eldritch in a sentence and actually know what they mean?
And we all bathed regularly and went on to lead more or less productive lives in case anyone would like to volunteer any stereotypes involving black trench coats, virginity, and body odor.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
Disclamer: We homeschool our kids. We've got hundreds of dollars worth of zome stuff.
-- ac at home
Simple. Make the information relevant.
For example, instead of teaching ratios in proportion, have students scale a cookie recipe to feed the entire class. Then have them make the cookies (off the top of my head; don't whinge about lilltle kids and hot ovens). Figure batting averages in gym class. Predict the max altitude of a water rocket.
From personal experience, I didn't appreciate algebra (polynomials in particular) until I studied calculus. Up until that point it didn't help me accomplish anything than arithmetic did.
I tend to think that someone should start at the goal of the task -- say, build a model rocket and predict its performance --and work backwards. Let the students build one without instruction in such a way that they are bound fail and the only way to succeed is to actually .... learn. I know, it's been done but it's often the exception rather than the rule. When was the last time you had several labs before your first lecture? Why bother with a dry boring lecture in the first place?
"Where's my other sock?" - A. Einstein
Just teach math to the kids with talent and interest. Quit wasting time on the don't cares and can't do its.
There is too much time and effort wasted on the unable. Let them go into crime and/or politics instead.
and kinda creepy
Spending seven or eight years to teach basic arithmetic is ridiculous. Kids should be taught algebra as soon as they're cognitively able to understand it. Surely most kids will be at a stage where they can handle algebra before middle school, yet some schools apparently wait as late as high school to teach it. Stop underestimating the kids, and start teaching them what they can handle.
Most Americans hate foriegners and actually tell to them to back to their country. Many Asians, Mexicans, Africans, Indians all come here and go to colleges such as MIT, get a degree, get a nice job and then get told on TV and by their neighbors to go home, get out, and leave the communities.
When the US is actually accepting of foreigners who are not white, perhaps these foreigners who arent white will actually stay here. This has been a problem with this country for a long while, its almost like the problem the jews faced in germany. Sure some germans may have wanted Einstien to stay in germany and work for hitler, but do you think Einstien really wanted to stay in a country he knew wanted him out?
Think from that point of view and you'll begin to understand the reasons why people just come to the USA to get an education and go back to their home country. Obviously an Indian or Japanese feels more comfortable in their own country than in ours.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
I really don't care for math, it's one of the many things that school made me give up on, always making me do a problem one exact way. then the next teacher I got would force you to do the same problem only one way, which differed from the first one you learned. and so on. None taught the real concepts of math, none taught why you can solve a problem with the method that they taught.
I got pretty lucky when I started college, naturally I had to take remedial math and got a professor that knew what he was doing. The first thing he gave us was a sheet of paper, with the rules for math, and said something along the lines of "as long as you don't break a rule, there's no wrong way to solve a problem". Then he went on to explain the rules and give examples.
There's 27 rules. They never change. Math really is simple.
But I still don't like it, because of past experience.
I found have found it helpful if I was taught better ways at visualizing things. If you can visualize something easily, it is easier to manipulate it inside your mind.
France? I mean, they just don't know when to give up, despite history telling us the answer should be "immediately."
Simply pay kids who get good grades a stipend. Each A should be worth say, $50. If I were paid like this, I'd have stopped playing video games and tried to get all As on my report card. Problem is we don't want to invest money in schools, we would prefer to pay military officers. This is not a country of intellectuals, this is a nation of warriors. Nerds/Intellectuals are considered losers in school, and our culture makes outcasts of these people while offering no support for them.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
I'm a college math professor, and I deal with this same problem with 18-22 year olds. I am convinced that the problem here goes a lot deeper than altering the content or presentation of math and science:
1. Many students today have profound problems with basic information processing: reading, writing, listening, paying attention, taking notes, etc. Students in my college classes have flat-out not learned how to read a book or article for comprehension of details or write a summary of a section of a text they've read. Even short math questions present problems; the problem will say that the interest rate is 3% and a student will come up to me in a panic saying that they weren't given the interest rate, until I point it out to them. And let's not even begin to talk about the quality of their writing. Now, this is not all students; and this isn't to say that these students can't learn how to do this sort of thing. But the fact is, they haven't. Perhaps in other classes this lack of ability can be mitigated. But in math and science, things are VERY detail-oriented and every jot and tittle has some kind of special meaning. So if students have a hard time processing information in general, then they're going to have REAL problems with math and science. And there's really no way to disconnect math and science from the basic fact that students have to read and understand things that written about it.
2. A lot of college math programs that train teachers are guilty of teaching math in a pat, uninteresting way that doesn't capture the beauty and power of the discipline. Same probably with science. So future teachers go away thinking that they can just teach a curriculum out of a box and that's OK. They often don't get the sense that the curriculum won't teach itself -- that THEIR personality and grasp of the discipline is crucial.
3. Standardized testing has sucked the life out of public education. Here in Indiana, students have to take a qualifying exam called the ISTEP in order to graduate from high school. In some cases students are taking the ISTEP 4-5 times throughout their education -- that's once every 2 or 3 grade levels! So students are being taught that education = testing, and that what they learn in class is very important for passing the test (including SAT's, etc.) but they can just purge it all after the exam is over. There's little sense of the value of education and the idea that it can (and should) last a lifetime. Math and science build on themselves like no other disciplines, which leads to trouble when you're teaching a Calculus class and you need students to remember stuff from Algebra II, which was two years ago. They figured that stuff was no longer necessary.
4. Someone's already mentioned the social stigma associated with math and science.
So I think the problem here isn't with math and science but the way young kids are getting basic thinking skills in general.
Did ADD exist before the advent of television and radio? Perhaps we are subjecting things to our infants that permanently affects how they think and react. Parents, after becoming frustrated with how they cannot cope in an educational system that is entirely different than the environment their brains formed in, then treat it as a disorder.
Study of young children links TV to attention deficits
Young children who watch television face an increased risk of attention deficit problems by school age, a study has found, suggesting that TV might overstimulate and permanently "rewire" the developing brain.
For every hour of television watched daily, two groups of children -- ages 1 and 3 -- faced a 10 percent increased risk of having attention problems at age 7.
News Article
I'm not saying that it is wrong to sit infants in front of TVs, but it is a problem if afterwards we stuff them into a traditional box they won't fit in and use drugs as a crowbar.
Why do a lot of People want to be elementary school teacher? Well it is partially due to the fact that they like little kids and want to teach them stuff. But is is also because on the those majors with a good chance of getting a job right after collage that doesn't require advanced math. Because the Elementary school teachers usually hate math and science themselves they pass on the negative feelings to the kids. And they basically pass on bad math and science habits to the students. Sure all 3rd grade teachers can show their kids long division but a much smaller number of those teacher know why long devision works, this is actually hazardous because the kid who doesn't get long division the teacher doesn't have any alternate ways of showing them how to do it. Having the kid for homework doing literally hundreds of math problems doesn't help to. This only makes math seem long and boring. As well most teachers seemed fixed in their examples. I remember being taught negative numbers in school and the teacher will not deviate from using the money example for negative number, I was reprimanded because I was showing the kid how to use negative number using temperature as an example (which most kids in the North East US could understand). Part of the trick to making math and science kid friendly is to make it fit in the kids lifestyle. Sitting down solving math problems is not part of the life style but using math combined with science to help kids create and use their brain and understand.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The other classes are simply a complete waste of time and only harm a person by preventing them from doing as well as they would have done if they focused on the basics.
From a country which went to war on no evidence I'd say how about dropping maths for some history.
You can't learn math or science its not allowed its wrong. Watch em I bet the first thing they do is sneak into your study(book shelf or what ever) and start reading about Math and Science.
We call the reversin' the phycological
So you do mean finding out how consciousness is manifested in the thalamus, transfering that over to silicon, and building a versatile computer around that?
-I am an elective eunuch.
.... to develop educational software that could take a person from basic math (k-8 level) through algebra and on to calculus and beyond.
Most kids don't learn well from chalk-and-talk lectures that seem to begin at ever younger ages in our teach-to-the-test school system.
My ideal math system would be for anyone who needs a little bit more structure than simply reading a book by themselves can provide, whether they want to pursue a single topic or a general march through maths.
What I'm thinking of is a program that would do everything from assessing the starting level to suggesting further areas to explore in various applied topics. You would have to be very careful not to incorporate any kind of prorietary testing or content, but there are tons of older and classic math texts to mine that are already in the public domain.
This would solve some of the problems with math instruction by non-mathematicians. Think about kids in space. How did they learn math in children's science fiction of the early space age? Some kind of software that customized instruction for each learner.
What I envision is something like the best of Stanford's EPGY math courseware without the Math Races (or you could opt in for math drill if you like). One of the beauties of the EPGY math program is that it is multi-threaded. You can move ahead in areas that are strengths and catch up on other things that need more work.
I've been looking at commercial packages, especially those designed for homeschooling and I'm not finding anything as user friendly as what I have in mind. It would also provide multiple starting points and paths through the material. Say a kid (or adult) gets interested in trajectories as a result of hearing about potato launchers, or from reading Backyard Ballistics or another Ballistics website. A math newbie of whatever age would have to get through at least early algebra. Some people could start right in and play with simulations or be directed to local groups with launch-related activities. (Hmmm...hopefully not groups on some homeland security watch list...) Links in the system would bring them back to the goal topic of interest from time to time to see their progress, or would send them on to other areas.
Another feature of this program would be to incorporate the potential for multiple styles of learning. Also, once a concept was grasped, mindless repetition would not be needed in the form of worksheets and drill. Instead, you could move right along to the application of the concept.
Certain paths could follow the content outline for things like AP calculus, providing equivalent instruction to a good AP math course in a traditional classroom. Those craving external assessment (or trying to save money on college tuition) could then take a test and prove to the world that they had conquered AP Calculus.
I'm thinking that Python might be a useful starting place...any ideas?
My other idea is to have a city-wide or national or global math problem of the day, with the radio anchors yukking it up about possible solutions the same way they talk about the weekend's new movies. Problems could be on different levels, something to intrigue a different group each day.
is to get new teachers in there. the newest crop of teacher coming out of school have been trained with the latest methods that have been shown to work better than the old "lecture, memorize, practice, do it cause I said so" methods most of us grew up with.
I am not condoning dumping all the old fogies that don't want to retire, but just know that the new generation of teachers are open to new ways to teach.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
One flaw with this reasoning is that any response to a survey on what math people use in daily life will be influenced by what the people know about math. My own experience is that being reasonably mathematically fluent, I see places where I can use math to make sense of a situation or solve a problem. Part of that is undoubtedly my personality. However, the basic point still holds: if you don't know the mathematics, you won't ever use it. For all we know, if everyone were mathematically proficient, the "math we actually use in life" might be much richer and more extensive than what it is now.
start with the segment of society that condemns intelligence. To swear, to drink and not be good at school is to be popular. It's the envious/jealous in the guise of jokes blue collar workers make on white collar workers.
When you make it positive and popular to be smart and honorable, then it'll be fun to persue. Remember, you can't change what math and science is, so you gotta change what's considered friendly to kids.
Why is it that all, or even most kids must be interested in and capable of skillfully doing science and math?
These are subjects that are widely considered (by adults and kids alike) to be BORING, probably because the bulk of content in a school environment is totally context-less, or at best hypothetical information manipulation that has no relevance or meaning to the practitioner.
There is just no way to get around that. You can make science interesting entertainment in a "Mr. Wizard" way, but to learn it? Well, that can't be done passively. It can be made more "fun" by having the teachers perform comedy skits like monkeys every day, but is that the best way to attract competent teachers? It can be made more interesting by making the material relevant to the student's lives, but as you increase the relevance to a prepubescent's life the potential complexity goes through the floor.
These are not new issues. The "real problem" is that the march of progress has obsoleted "general science", and the concretized phlanges are have such high entry-level knowledge required that some degree of specialization is necessary to even experiment, let alone advance science in that area. And so the level of science and math doled out in the education camps must keep increasing, to keep the Ideal of natural philosophy as a unified discipline whole.
Kids aren't getting any smarter as the generations go by; is it any wonder that the increasing complexity crush is having a marginalizing effect?
I wouldn't be surprised if 'science' and 'math' were removed entirely from secondary school curricula in the not-too-distant future, and relocated in Gifted & Talented programs.
Making a Science and Math Kid, Friendly.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
The problem with the way math is taught in public schools is that it is taught and treated as if it were a game of symbol manipulation for calculating various arithmetical functions: addition, subtraction, etc... This is great and all, but there is far more to math than that.
What about teaching some simple concepts from logic, set theory, and category theory?
Why are we stuck in the math is numbers approach?
Well, see, just because it works better doesn't mean we should use it. The teachers don't know how to use it. How would the teachers learn?
-----------------------
You are what you think.
Pseudoscience, superstition, religion, new age, paranormal phenomena, all popular as ever.
Hmm, sure, let's stick to the old conventional methods. They seem to work wonders.
One day in my advanced physics class, we were getting pretty bored and stressed. We were studying relativity and our instructor asked us to figure out how much plutoniom would be needed to completely vaporize a lake in our neighborhood. We man a number of basic assumptions to simplify the problem, but still had a good bit to figure out.
;)
We found it interesting to use geometry to survey the lake, and figure out the volume of water. Then we had to calculate the energy required to boil (vaporize) the lake, then the mass of plutonium required. As I recall it took 2 class sessions (once to measure, another to calculate in class) and emphasized our ability to use what we had learned in class, or ask questions about things we didn't understand.
This was almost 20 years ago, so maybe this approach wouldn't go very well in today's schools.
I don't remember much about relativity (I'm a Comp. Sci. guy now) but remember that we figured it would take only about 1/8 teaspoon plutonium to boil away that nearby lake. Of course, we never tried it
Suncoast Linux - Sarasota, FL
You are downloading some torren and you have leeched 764 megabytes and seeded 432.
How many megabytes before it's even?
What are your leech/seed ratio?
As a graduating physics major, I can say that much of the problem has to do with a mindset that there is only one "right" way to teach the subject. Going to lecture and watching the prof do endless calculations at the board was NOT why I went into physics, but rather because I was interested in learning more about the natural world. I get more enjoyment out of observing natural phenomena, reading about an interesting concept, or using a cool interactive program (e.g. Atom in a box ), then going to class. Strange that very few advanced physics classes actually attempt to demonstrate the principles they are trying to teach or force students to come up with creative explanations. Even in laboratory classes, we are simply expected to perform a cookbook experiment and write up the result basically by copying the lab manual, we are not asked to observe and describe new phenomena.
Teach kids about the heroes of science. When Oppenheimer finished the bomb, everyone wanted to take nuclear chemistry and physics. When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, everyone wanted to take physics. When Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, everyone wanted to take biology.
The kids need to believe in themselves; there are so many people along the way who will tell them they can't do it, they can't solve this or that, they aren't smart enough. What they need is encouragement.
Who named the Mars rovers? It was a little girl from an orphanage. Wow. Not so obscure compared to Oppenheimer. Science is the one law - the ONLY law - that we are all united by. Religion and politics have failed at this. And if the kids can leave your classes with an appreciation for that, they'll stay interested and determined for the rest of their lives.
Over the years, the best teachers I had were the ones who took the time to show how concepts are related. For example, early in science I can't remember what level it was, but I recall that I had been introduced to the concepts of the cell, the molecule, and atoms. While we were busy learning what all the components of these are, I remember asking how these were related to each other, and not being able to find a good answer. The best science teachers I've had would introduce concepts through story telling, then introduce facts, and always left time for question/answer period.
Very similarly, I found math was always introduced to me as a bunch of unconnected "units". It wasn't until I reached University, and took courses like Discrete Mathematics, and linear algebra, that I really became interested in math Until then, I had always done very well in Math, but I hated it. In disc. math, I had a particularly shall we say "eccentric" prof, very completely the stereotypical clumsy professor, who I found very amusing, that helped very much. But he would apply my favourite science learning method (through story) to his lectures. He would always start a talk about a proof we were looking at by telling about the time it was discovered, and how things "didn't fit right" before this proof that we now take for granted. About who the guy was that wrote it, things like that.
I think the main thing that bothered me about the science & math that I learned pre-university was that nobody ever revisited previous topics. Once a chapter or unit was done, it was done except for a brief review 2 weeks before the exam or whatever it was we called them.
And for god's sake, don't confuse any more young students with the voodoo known as "cross multiplication", teach them the real math behind why that trick works, its not complicated, it won't confuse them more than this just do it because it works crap.
You really want yo improve the education system?
Get everyone off the teachers.
They are there doing a thankless job. Literally. If you think that teachers are only in it for the pay you are a flaming idiot. If you think teachers don't care about the students, you are a complete moron.
As I teach in Ohio, let me tell you a few things:
We have no funding. Our local community just failed an emergence levy to raise money, and the state is coming in and cutting jobs and activities to balance the budget. This is the same state whose funding of the public school system has been declared unconstitutional 4 times (and still is).
If you do not meet certain criteria established by the state legislator, the district sends a note to parents saying that you are not qualified to be in this position. If you don't pass the proficiency tests by 70% or more, you can lose your job. And teachers have no say in if a student passes of fails anyways as a parent has the final say.
Of course parents don't help anyways. Last week I had a parent come in and furiously demand to know why her daughter was failing suddenly, despite the fact that the student has been failing for 3 quarters and the intervening intrums, not returned calls from us, not come in at our written requests for meeting and never once shown up to an of 6 parent teacher conferences.
And we can't discipline the students and they know it. A parent gets the final say in that too. We can't touch a student for fear of law suits, can't berate them, and can't force them to do anything.
I don't like the kids to use calculators, by the state says that we must provided them. I've got kids in the 8th grade who can't read, and I'm expected to teach them 8th grade english and get them to pass the proficiencies of I'm the one facing repercussions.
The problem is that there is NO RESPONSIBILITY for the kids or parents, and no support for really teaching the students how to think and reason beyond rote memorization to pass the tests.
Basic math and basic english should be the primary goals of school. The other classes are simply a complete waste of time and only harm a person by preventing them from doing as well as they would have done if they focused on the basics.
So history, civics, foreign languages, art, science, computer science, literature (as separate from grammar and composition - which is what I assume you mean by English), typing, and geography are "a complete waste of time"? That's quite a troll you have going there. I suspect many people feel the same way you do. Maybe that's why the masses are so easily swayed by the demagogues on television. They aren't aware of the actual political, historical, and economic ramifications of our current policies or agendas.
Just because you can read doesn't mean you can read for comprehension.
As a 14-year-old boy, I think this subject is very interesting from several points of view. I have to admit I rather disagree when it is said kids are math- and science-friendly, but then as has been said it is not surprising that the situation has turned out this way when you consider the sad culture the moronic majority of the population is plunging the country into here in France -- having seen several previous comments, I see the situation is not so different in America either. For example, in my class, a lot of the children are drawn to the idiotic reality TV shows (we even have a Celebrity Farm, a show in which one is able to view celebrities living in a farm and vote one out each week) and the teenagers seem to find the boring lives of others more interesting than theirs ever could be. This truely is sad, but this said group of people is the same which doesn't bother working much at school. Now I have not done a psychology major so I am not in the best position to ponder on how this crash in TV quality has affected childrens' work so much, but I would think this is due to a generalisation and banalisation of this moronic culture, developing into a way of life: doing nothing while watching TV to see others doing nothing. I would say that this tendancy to slack off has affected how the said children tend to percieve other activities in life, schoolwork included. I am pretty sure if one was to exclude children from watching such trash on television, they would not have such a tendancy to do nothing and not use their brain actively as is happening now.
In my opinion, math and science are already kid-friendly. It is just a case of the children being voluntary to approach these subjects in an optimistic way, something which is becoming rarer and rarer these days as the kids are becoming progressively less math- and science-friendly, as I said in the first paragraph. Any child willing to enhance his or her knowledge on these topics can do so easily, as I think there are an infinite number of resources suited to their capabilities which are available to them. In my case, for example, I was pushed to improve my math skills when I got interested in more serious programming (as I have currently started learning C++, which I find somewhat more interesting than just placing controls on a form as I did with Delphi). Of course, I am not omitting the fact that the motivation of the teacher can change everything in the stance of children towards math, but if we cannot change much, let alone anything, in the educational system, then the responsibility of changing the childrens' stance towards these topics rests in the hands of the parents; the latter can do so much more to get their children to be motivated in the instruction of math and science, and for example a good start is to raise the children in the omission of the wave of "crap" television -- but without an excess of tendancy towards elitism, which could get the children rejected at school. I believe parents should show the children at the youngest age how fun math and science can be, how vast these topics are and how important they are later on.
Math and science are already kid-friendly -- I think the balance has to reside on the other side, by having the children be math- and science-friendly; I believe that for this, kids have to understand the value of these subjects as soon as they can, and for the most part I should think the responsibility of having the children understand this is first and foremost in the parents' hands.
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect" -- Linus Torval
So wait... you're saying there exists this country where Mathemeticians and Engineers -- "geeks", essentially -- are held in higher social esteem than businessmen, athletes, and entertainers?
A culture where geekhood beats money, athletic ability, and fame?
And this is where? Can I move there?
Are you sure you're not mistaking slashdot for a country?
Tweet, tweet.
Kids more Science- and Math-friendly, you insensitive clod! ... ?
What do you expect when parents are forced to pay for the government schools and kids are forced to attend? Why do liberals always imagine that force inspires the forced?
As much as Barbie annoyed me, I was never the target audience. I was the target audience for GI Joe. I would watch the TV show every day after school. I had at least fifty dolls... err... action figures and a dozen vehicles. I even had a bunch of the comic books. Solve all problems with a gun. Guns guns guns. Shoot the bad guy.
Personally I think Pokemon was a step up, but they're all fluff. That's fine. So are most movies. Fluff can be fun. And that's the point of the toys: to have fun. Sure someone's profiting from child-targeted marketing, but I sure had fun with my GI Joe dudes.
For most of late teens and early twenties, I was a pacifist. Go figure hunh? Today, I believe violence should be mostly avoided but not in all circumstances. Too much study in history to believe that aggression hasn't caused more problems than it solved. Also too much study of history to believe that voilence solves nothing. Case in point: Winston Churchill vs. Neville Chamberlain.
But my point is, don't blame Barbie. It's a children's toy just like GI Joe. Kids believe a lot of things. Young children go for the old Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, and Tooth Fairy gigs for years. Older children go for the toys marketed to them on TV. Almost all of us grow out of it and are not unduly scarred by the experiences.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Realize that we're all different. Not everyone will learn and understand math and science really well. Just let them off the hook to do some other more practical handson job, and make sure they never reach a position of power in the scoiety, this includes the power you have as a voter.
You mis-spelled mnemonic. Memetics is the study of names. I believe you're the one who needs a sound beating.
I think the topic you are dancing around is:
Stop glamorizing the politican, sports player and musician, on orders of magnitude over the scientist, engineer and general tinkerer.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
I can tell you from first hand experience what TV has done, because I was one of those kids at age 1. My parents didn't do it, they were both at work. The babysitter believed TV was good for you. I started to notice trouble studying after fourth grade, but I was extremely good at music, movies, computers, and eventually the internet: everything I mentioned in the original post. This was 10 years before the whole ADD thing became famous. I consider my increased visualization skills a gift that eventually paid off, but I certainly didn't need any drugs.
Who is going to pay to keep an ever increasing portion of society drugged? Should healthcare and insurance be raised? Should parents go to jail if they refuse to drug their kids? I think we need to have a serious look at our society to find the best way that different people can be live productively instead of claiming they have problems because they don't fit the norm of yesteryear. After all, we're the ones who outsource the care of our children and our elderly to managed care centers. If we don't have enough time to raise our kids, what about combining daycare and nursing homes so that the elderly can impart their wisdom to the children? We spend way more than any other nation on healthcare and yet we have a lower life expectancy than some of the others. Who knows how much of this is a solution creating problems to solve to justify its own existence?
I've toyed with the idea of creating a 'Maths Fleet battles' minatures wargame game using semi-realistic physics (ie vectored movement with momentum, I came up with a neat string and circle system for in game use, the string represents your current vector the circle the places you can be at the end of your turn given your ships delta-v). The idea was to set up game mechanics that can be minmaxed but only if you apply the right maths (the hard bit would be to ensure that there was lots of near optimal configurations it would be very dull if there were only one true ship!)
An example problem could be "Which is the better weapon system Quantum cannon, Probability bomb or Matrix destabiliser?" (average damage of one could be calculated via calculus and the second is a subtle probability problem and the last a quadratic equation).
Basically the idea is to show how the dry maths learned in class has a 'real world' application.... I learned to solve quadratic equasions and do matrices to this day I still don't know what they are actually used for
I rased the idea (in rather more depth here in rec.games.design
Crummy textbooks and the prima donnas in charge of education. I teach beginning and intermediate algebra at a community college. The (terrible) books we use do not have the old four-place tables of square and cube roots. It is the policy of the math department (over which I have zero influence) that the students are not allowed to use calculators. So, they are confused about these mysterious numbers, and rightly so. Just how big is sqrt(1359) anyway? They had no idea. I taught them how to extract a square root the long way, using pencil and paper. Some of them appreciated it and told me it made sense. They now had a way to concretize these symbols into decimal form. I mentioned this to my supervisor. She said that it was a waste of our valuable class time to teach the method. They didn't need to know it.
So, to summarize, the books are liberally sprinkled with radicals, but the students are not given tables of the values, nor are they to be shown the method to compute them, nor are they allowed to use calculators to compute them. But they are expected to formally manipulate them. What a wonderful state of affairs.
Alas, my favorite subject gets watered down some more.
Rather than parroting tired excuses for not performing, how about performing?
Why should a kid learn math and science? Why not learn how to be designated a victim and make excuses instead? It's easier, and if it were up to people like you, it would pay better.
If someone had made me learn C, how to use a command line, and how a computer works, I'd be eternally grateful. As it is, I don't have the time right now to teach myself or find someone who can, so I'll remain ignorant. Which is too bad, because I can think of nifty things I'd like to try if I had that knowledge, but that opportunity is denied me, because I'm lacking in the basic knowledge. That's what school is about: first, give them the basics in everything, or at least enough of a taste to present them with an idea of what can be done. Then, more in-depth training allows them to go further with what they find interesting.
If the majority of people don't need math, the majority of people also don't need to read literature or learn to write an analytical essay...they'll never ever have to do that in their jobs. But, we teach them that because of the underlying concept of critical thinking and analysis, which is also a major part of math: reading story problems and distilling that text into equations that sum up the situation, for example. It's a different flavor of application and uses a different specific skill set, but it is the same thing.
Brief tangent: I'm reminded of CS Lewis' Narnia book The Horse and His Boy, in which the land of the Calormenes is described as a place where instead of essays, students are taught to tell stories, which is a far better idea because, as the author says, everyone always wants to hear stories, but as far as I know, no one ever wants to read the essays...
And as for problem solving, life is a problem. Math points out (or should, at least) that usually several different methods exist for approaching and solving a problem, and all eventually arrive at an answer, albeit with different amounts of effort along the way and some with interesting side effects too. I think that's a lesson more applicable to life than how to write a haiku.
There is no real practicle (like spelling? heh) use for most math things, (FOR most people)_
but the point of math isnt to get the answer,
its how to solve problems, step by step.
i was never taught from that angle. they were more concerned with applying the rules, then explaining why each step is done.
'just do this, this and that and theres the answer'
my teachers brought it half way by saying the work is important, but they should have gone further and got the point of how it works.
thats why i always hated math when i was younger.
once i was taught properly, it all made sense and i aced the classes. (with a lot of hard work though, math was never my strong suit_)
The idea that most kids need to learn math and science is idiotic. We will NEVER repeat NEVER "win" any sort of job contest with india or china by educating ourselves more - only a profession as idiotic as economics would even bring up the idea Whny cant most people use calculators ? This idea that math needs to be learnt by a majority of the studentry is a geek bias. If yuou ask physiscists, they will bemoan the total ignorance of the studentry, unable to grasp the concept of the trnasistor. similarly, biologist think you need to know about dna, muscicians think you need to know about scales, etc Would we even be having this /. discussion if the topic was music ? But music is far more importatn toa HAPPY life for more people then math.
I think the reason math is not kid friendly is because for most people it us useless and boring, about as important as knowing about the Sung dynasty of china. You really don't need math in real life - I would wager dollars to donuts that a knowledge of cosines is required by 5% of the populace.
The only reason we have math is to serve as a separtor, becuase we have a competitive rewards based society.
Are we allowed to reproduce the materials?
Are the curriculum materials available under a Free Documentation (or Creative Commons) License?
Have you ever thought on publishing your curriculum materials on WikiPedia?
I had a psychology professor last semester who mentioned studies trying to figure out why American students were so bad at math as compared to many other countries of the world. The basic conclusion that they seemed to be reaching is that we're trying too hard to make math fun. That is, a discipline such as math requires mind-numbing amounts of repetition but since kids don't like that, teachers often shy away.
Then again studies also showed that Japanese students, for example, who absolutely rough up Americans in math scores as children generally have about the same scores years after they're out of school.
Isolate the math gene, put it in viral form, then spread it across the globe.
If you want something less "Andromeda Strain"-ish, creating role-playing games where math and science are integral parts of the story would be fun -- "Where in the Multiplication Tables is Carmen Sandiego?" or something like that. There's no reason why math and science problems can't substitute for some of the puzzles in a game -- it's not harder to learn than the "magic" system used by many games, and it would be every bit as fun learning how to actually make gunpowder before firing that nice new cannon as it is finding the proper proportion of mandrake, eye of newt, and holy water for the "holy handgrenade" spell.
The same method won't necessarily work for all children - in fact, I can tell you for certain it won't - and the same method won't work for the same child between different subjects.
There is no one answer, and any system that practices uniformity in teaching is doomed to fail for 50% of any given class.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
We teach it by having people solve pointless problems which they will never face and never remember the solutions for unless they are one of the rare people who actually enjoy solving problems and who actually enjoy working through calculations.
I think many in the school system today forget that learning math changes you in a way that language and other classes just don't do. Through abstraction, math changes the way you tackle problems in your daily life, amongst other things. The concrete problem you're trying to solve might be directly useless for your future life, however indirectly it might help you a lot.
At least that's my take on it.
I remember watching Mathnet (a spoof on Dragnet) on that show. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Oh yeah, I even remember them using Apple II computers (not //c). I even remember subscribing to the magazines! I was totally into the computer programming stuff as a kid. :)
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Now, I have the theme song in my head (from here):
Three
Two
One
CONTACT!
Contact, it's the reason
It's the moment
When everything happens . .
CONTACT
Let's Make Contact!
Three
Two
One
CONTACT
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
In today's world, Arithmatic is a joke. It doesn't matter if you know that 50x50 = 2500 in your head. What matters is APPLICATION for solving legitimate problems. No one cares if you can mentally solve 2x + 3 = 4 or do the deteminant of a 3 by 3 matrix by hand but when you can apply those concepts using a calculator it is good. The right answer is what matters.
I tutor mathematics -- no, actually, I tutor people who want to learn mathematics (all ages). The problem isn't that math and science need to be made *friendly* or that students need to change their attitudes. The school system provides a poor interface between the subject matter and the student. I would like to see a school promote an organized program for self-paced learning in math and science with teachers serving as one of many resources. Of course, then I'd probably be out of a job.
It's not easy for us you have assocaiative intelligence rather than the ability to memorise whether you're an adult or a kid.
... but then again most jobs are rubbish.
I had to retake GCSE Maths after getting a D. I got a C on the retake.
I'm still rubbish at basic maths but really good at statistics.
I wish I could have done the the stuff I was good at.
It's about choice and freedom imho. Most jobs don't require much maths
ps. Why do computing courses favour physics and maths?
A blog I run for the wealth
I agree with this completly.
I never really thought of myself as bad at maths (though I have an entirely legitamate hatred for geometric proofs, which seem useless). I'm good at logic games like chess and so forth. But I always had a hell of a time with the mathmatical notation. If you write somthing out in sentence form with a picture or two, I can understand the concept. But when folks start into using greek letters, I get lost. Math texts rarely seem to make enough effort to teach and reinforce this vocabulary.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
A lot of parents, children, educators, administrators, and politicians do not take education seriously. For these parents its an requirement and a day care. For the kids its a requirement and social event. For the educators and adminstrators it is a paycheck with guaranteed employment. For the politician it is a jobs program the gets votes.
The parents and children cannot come around to see school as a means of success and education until the people who run it similarly convert. BOTH teachers unions do nothing to promote education and everything to promote their own existance. School boards are a joke, most operate at the behest of the unions and no elected school board member, and even appointed ones, will dare challenge them.
What then is required is simply making the students prove they are learning something and then holding them back when they don't. This works in conjunction with having the schools PROVE they are teaching children. This will require teachers who KNOW what they are teaching. This will require administrators who SHOW support for teachers who succeed and either help or remove those who don't. It will require that students who do not want to LEARN are separated from those who do. It should be demonstrated to students that it is a PRIVLEDGE to learn! It will require a Teachers union that serves the students or does not exist at all.
Students who no longer are treated with kid gloves but instead are provided the means to realize that a good education is a privledge and something to strive for will generally do so. This have been proven many times by special schools, an example of which are charter schools.
Throwing money at schools CANNOT work until the money is actually spent for the direct benefit of the students. In nearly all cases it is not. An example is the Atlanta city school system. If you looked at it from a dollar per student ratio you would think that it had the best environment. Alas that is not true, they are administrator heavy and heavy with tenured teachers who do not teach.
Another common problem is that systems cannot pay to keep good teachers in schools that need them. When a teacher gets senority they can move where they want. Outside of dedication and spirt of the teacher there is nothing that school systems can do to give them benefits for staying where they are needed. The unions stamp out attempts for special pay and performance awards.
Learning Math and Science isn't rocket science. Seems to me a lot of us did just fine. In the last 20+ years schools turned into jobs programs and babysitting social clubs. Its time for parents of children and taxpayers without to demand better schools. This means standing firm in face of union entrenchment. This means parents volunteering at schools as many need all they can get. It also means not falling for the lie that it requires money. Money doesn't do anything, money cannot accomphlish anything. Its people that do things. Its also people who are doing things to keep the current system in place.
Accountability is the first step. Until you change the those who lord over the kids nothing else will be done
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Interesting that you should portray problem solving as something people never have to face. I think most people have to solve problems every day.
Okay- when was the last time you had to solve a quadratic equation as part of your daily life?
6x^2 - 4x = 8
GO!
The replies are already copious, but I feel that it's necessary to put my opinion in:
Every one would be MUCH better off if we all had a much better grasp of more advanced math. You state that people should be taught statistics, but not calculus. You are aware, aren't you, that the more advanced statistics (indeed all of statistics that uses a distribution) relies on calculus for its foundation.
I never took calculus, but now that I am in graduate school trying to learn some more advanced stats, I REALLY wish I had had calc in high school or college.
(For those who want to gainsay me and say stats doesn't use calc--let me ask you this: when was the last time you looked at the equation for the cumulative distribution function? It involves integrals. So does the formula for Item Response Theory (being based on the cumulative distribution), which is what we use to measure adverse impact in tests. Not convinced? I'm surprised.
My point is that I NEVER learned integrals in pre-calc or algebra, but at this point REALLY wish I understood them. I think if our society had a better understanding of math and probability, we would be much better and avoiding marketing traps, hollywood glitz, and make better voting decisions. If we understood Chemistry and Biology better, we would probably be healthier and drive more efficient cars. If we understood physics properly, there would be less car accidents. But all this would have to start at the earliest level.)
My personal goal is for all of my children (I have two now) to be able to do math such as addition/subtraction/multiplication and division before they hit kindergarten. If at all possible, I would like them to also understand algebra at some level. Sound impossible? You're not thinking openly enough. The kids can do it, and do it well. It's absolutely possible for 3rd graders to do fairly advanced algebra, but they don't because teachers don't have the mindset that that is a goal. Parents are equally to blame.
If I can get my kids to understand binary by the 4th grade, I'll be happy. To those who say kids can't be that well informed about math and still be social--you're wrong! I know some really cool people here at the uni who are extremely popular, but understand math and physics much better than I ever have. These are kids who are acing statics and dynamics, but still hang out with the other frat guys (not that that's the pinnacle of social desirability, but hey, who's judging?).
My point is that people use math a lot, but they would use it more if they understood it. Maybe if kids had a better grounding in math at an early age, they would grow up and actually use it! This would change our society, because then we wouldn't have so many ppl who could have had a good education wasting their life away working for minimum wage.
My favorite example of this is those people who are content to work at Joe's Corner Shop for the rest of their life, because they feel that they are academically unable to do anything else. They always got mad when I told them that it wasn't the place for me--I didn't want to work there for the rest of my life. Frankly, I still don't understand why they would. 10 years from now, I can go back, and it will be the same folks--still making $8 - $10 an hour. But maybe if they had had better math/science grounding at an early age, they would be more interested in doing better in life.
Sorry for the rant, but I get steamed about this::WE NEED A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF MATH && SCIENCE!!!! Thank you.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
I'm dead serious. I grew up deeply resenting school, feeling like I was on a treadmill, and (disregarding all the non-academic factors, e.g. bureaucracy, asshole teachers, schoolyard bullies, etc. etc.) 90% of what I hated was grades.
I'm a National Merit Scholar. SAT score 1540. #4 in my HS class (a LARGE one). The works... however, as "smart" as the "system" seems to think I am, I detested school due to the constant pressure to get good grades.
To this day, I've found that-- particularly in math and the 'hard sciences', where there is Only One Right Answer, I can only truly focus on learning anything when I am not being graded. FOR WHEN I AM BEING GRADED, I ONLY THINK ABOUT THE GRADES...
Note that to this very day, I have nightmares about failing Calculus classes. Literally, nightmares. Truly I'm not the only one out there? The stereotype about "school nightmares" is that they all revolve around one being naked in school. My "school nightmares" are about failing Calculus and Physics!
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
There are many groups out there looking for ways to integrate technology into the classroom to grab the students attention. I work for The Concord Consortium, a non profit company that supports a number of NSF and DOE projects that find different ways to help students learn. We have written opensource java software to help students visualize genetics, molecules, and math; we study HOW students learn; we spawned off an OnLine Virtaul HighSchool which is now it's own organization with 6000 students; and we are always looking forward for new ways to keep students interested and learning.
We are working with PBS on a professional development project aimed at improving Algebra content knowledge and teaching practices.
On a different note, Maine a few years back initiated the Maine Laptop program, where every year every school in Maine gets laptop's for all of its 7th grade students. Technicaly in 5 years time all Middle and High School students will have computers.
-Ben
-=Down Syndrome in Maine
I am an undergraduate philosophy major with three courses in logic under my belt. I was always a good math student in high school, although I have not taken much math in college.
recently, I have been tutoring one of my cousins (an 8th grader) in mathematics, and the approach I have taken is this:
I started with elementary logic, having her analize arguements for validity, and moved into more abstract deductive proofs, showing that the underlying structure of things she says and does in everyday life can be compared on an abstract level.
Then I began to work in the derivation of geometric equations, so she could see where they came from.
Our educational system is far too focussed on wrote memorization, and I believe teaching logic and mathematics with the assistence of computers can show students that mathematics is about the investigation of truth and analysis. This approach has given her confidence in mathematics, because she sees that she can approach and analize any equations she gets to really understand it.
math fails in this country because students see a) no applicability, and b) do not understand the calculations they are asked to do.
The biggest problem I had with math was that the books weren't written in plain english, they were very technical, very dry, and simply not written for kids.
I really feel sorry for good teachers who have to work these these tomes. A little plain-english in math goes a long way towards understanding. If you listen to most questions and answers in a math class done verbally you'll see that a lot students are simply asking the teacher to translate the book and its examples into something they can understand and apply.
Some opinions:
Start with classroom work. Teaching should focus on the problem solving aspects of each discipline[1]. Math and science are learned best by doing, so make sure students are given an appropriate number and level of problems to work. Students often want to complete their work in the fastest way possible, so make sure that they have to learn the material in order to do so. Minimize the use of calculators[2] to prevent trial-and-error problem solving and cheating(not having fancy graphing calculators will help with cheating in other classes, too). A basic scientific calculator should be good up to university calculus, and a four function calculator should be good up to high school algebra and geometry. Science is tied to math, and should follow suit. Frequent in-class work will help keep students up to speed between homework assignments. One of my physics teachers in college gave us a very basic three question quiz every day on the material we were supposed to have read in the book. Something like this might be a good idea. Always respect the students, but understand that most of them will not be terribly motivated on their own.
On the curriculum level, treat math and science with more respect. Require four years of each from *every* student, as is already done with English and social studies. Don't let anyone fall behind -- provide remedial courses, if necessary. Make sure that the curriculum allows time for teachers to review material that might not have been learned in previous classes. Offer different course sequences for people who need to go faster or slower, but don't let "I'm just not a math person" be an option.
On the school/district level, make sure that math and science departments are adequately staffed and funded. Teachers need to receive appropriate respect, compensation, and benefits for their work. They(and administrators) need to be free from parental pressure to inflate grades and pass failing students for non-academic reasons(eg to meet no pass-no play standards).
On a large scale cultural level, the "Math and science are hard!" meme needs to go the way of the dodo. It is my opinion that no single factor damages math and science education more than the belief that it is acceptable to fail.
The above are not quick or easy things, and may not even be possible. At the very least, they give something to work towards. Since the Asker's organization is working on the classroom and curriculum levels, those are problem good places to start.
Less well-founded opinions:
Glamorization is not necessary(most fields aren't glamorized, and suffer no shortage of workers) and may even be harmful if reality doesn't match fantasy.
Gifted students need special attention, but should not be the sole focus of or reason for improvements. I realize this won't be quite as popular with the Slashdot crowd, but I believe that everyone needs education, regardless of how smart[3] they are.
Complete privatization of schools will not fix education, because it doesn't solve the cultural problems or the lack of qualified teachers.
[1] Memorization gets a bad rap, but sometimes you really do need it. You have to memorize Newton's laws to learn physics, you have to memorize that "==" is comparison in order to program in C, and you have to memorize algebraic operations in order to learn math. Things like memorizing multiplication tables are not so clear cut, but my personal belief that is being able to do basic math in your head is a far more useful skill than most people give it credit for, and more than outweighs a few hours of work. And really, how hard is it anyway? In the time you spent learning multiplication in elementary school, you probably memorized more than that by accident.
[2] I don't mean that technology should be completely removed from classrooms. Graphing calculators and computers are useful tools. But when the tool does the problem solving *for* you, you're not actually learning anything. Students need to learn how to thi
Visit the
need to know maths? Or are you by any chance talking about children?
I'll just say I agree wholely with you.
The grandparent says that 'we need to focus on the basics.' What he fails to realize is that Calculus and Algebra (among other things) _are_ the basics when it comes to math. Lots of statistics is based on Calculus underneath. And if you don't know algebra, I don't know how you'll follow much of anything of importance in a discrete math course.
Sure, you could teach people the results of discrete math and statistics. "When we have this distribution (which you don't really understand) and you take the average, you get this." Then you're students will just have to say, "Okay, I believe you," because without Calculus and Algebra and such, there's no way they can derive that result for themselves.
We'll end up with a society where some people know how to derive the results, and the rest have just memorized them. And I don't remember the last time I've heard anyone say that memorizing a long list of facts was more fun than understanding a little of why those facts are true.
I've come for the woman, and your head.
concepts are more important.
Being forced to do problem solving is tedious and boring. Being forced to do it without a calculator is just needlessly frustrating. And if you don't know the concepts you can't do the problems at all.
"Show your work" are the magic words. When you pop in an equation to a calculator it just spits out the answer. If you require students show their work they have to apply the concepts to go step by step but they don't have to manually multiply and divide complex numbers which is just tedious and pointless. The net result is that they can do the homework in a reasonable amount of time and learn everything they need to know.
It's often the case that I work backwards from the answer to the question in order to try to understand how to solve the problem. If you require a student to show their work then the answer doesn't give them an out. It's an additional help so they can be sure they got the right answer and better understand how it works.
Forcing students to focus on specific problems is why students get completely lost when going from Java to another language. They don't understand the concepts. They wasted hundreds of dollars learning syntax.
I know quite a few languages because I learn concepts so the learning curve going from one language to another is minimal.
"They spend 4 year of college being taught education theory and taking some science/math on the side"
At ASU they spend 2.5 years getting a liberal education with a large dose of Math taught at a watered down level. They then spend 1.5 years learning how to actually teach.
It's sufficient for teaching because at least in HS you're teaching at a level well below your capabilities and you teach the same thing over and over and over. A Math teacher builds their math education in the classroom.
The problems with teachers is not that they don't know the material. It's that they can't relate the material in an effective way. Being overly educated in the field doesn't help in any way shape or form to be able to relate the lower level material.
It doesn't matter one bit if I know how to do function pointers and what not if my job is to simply teach variable pointers and linked lists.
And I don't need 4 years of Computer Science to be able to teach linked lists as the crown of a high school comp sci education when you learn how to do those in the first or second semester of a Comp Sci degree. Knowing how to write an OS does nothing to help me teach students how to write a program that stores and traverses a list of numbers.
Knowing how to teach is the only thing that helps there and that's why it's emphasized over higher level material.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Once we find out the math people use most in daily life that should be what we teach in school. If we want to learn any other math then we specialize in math and learn it in college or in AP math.
I'm an Engineer, the math I use most is Statistics. I rarely use calculus, does that mean I should not have learned calculus, vector calc, liner algebra? No, I needed those things to understand fundamentally the science I use on a daily basis. The equations I learned in school are basically discriptions of what happens in processes and systems I work with. Understanding and solving those complex integrals and differentials in school gave me insight and lets me understand my experiments and processes.
And complex math is not just the domain of engineering/science. Economics uses algebra and calculus to essentially break things down into simple math equations. Using a math equation is a good way to describe complex systems in business, nature, etc. and can give better perspective and predictions.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Another sad fact is you cannot take the child of a high school dropout and make them a PHD, they will just not have been raised that way. However, if each generation actually improves upon the last. If kids are told in school that it takes an education to get ahead, that they WILL work at McDonalds if they drop out. That kid's (great)grand-children can/will be PHDs or harder workers or what have you.
You might be interested in these books: Teach your baby Math and Baby Signs.
I got my sister the Baby Signs book, and now my nephew who's just over a year old, is already proficient in baby ASL and making up his own words!
From personal experience, I think if the teacher is strict and doesn't let the kids misbehave, the kids learn.
I had a math teacher who was really mean, the kids in the class never talked unless he said they were allowed to. That was the only time I ever picked up anything in math. Every other teacher I had, all the kids would just talk. Even if *I* paid attention, the teacher would pause every few minutes to tell the kids to shut up, and I end up not learning anything.
I also think teachers need to crack down on cheating. It's just too easy to cheat now a days, at my school at least.
Try this.
There are only a few so far, and quality control (grammar & spelling) is somewhat low, but I was in contact with one of the creators today and they are getting ready to produce more, of better quality. Of course these are only a starting point, they do not go into detail about the "hard science" behind the stuff they build.
Another thought, along the same lines, would be Larry Gonick's cartoons as seen in Discover magazine. Again, mostly a good starting point for discussion or deeper research.
I think a big point - that has been pointed out before - is that many people don't understand the underlying uses of being taught all the subjects in school. Let me talk about english.
Many english teachers go about the class similarily to a basic math class, here are grammar rules, here is spelling(memorize now), her is how to write a business letter. This is all important. However, it is a really boring way to present the material. I am currently taking a composition class in college. I also took a similar composition class in Seinor year HighSchool. I dreaded the HS class. We spent all this time on rules, periods etc. We would get a stupid article and talk about it's style or something. I don't even remember.
Now my college class teaches the same thing. I actually look forward to this class, it is my favorite class this semester(and it's not my major). We spend class discussing various controversial topics. We then write papers based on our opinions. We talk about why citation is important - not to prevent getting sued(which is true) - but because it strenghtens your case. My professor indicates that if you say something, and can find anyone else who thinks the same way, it strenghtens your position... but if you can find a well known person in the field to quote, it makes a big difference.
My point here is that the class teaches you why you want to know how to write, how to express yourself well, and how to support your points. We don't spend weeks on MLA or APA methods, we aren't tested on the exact form of citing a periodical in class. The forms are in our textbook - the teacher assumes(correctly) that we are able to read that. Then he does check our citations in our papers. One thing I've learned in college is that the most fun classes, the classes were I remember the most and learn the most are the ones that deemphesize rote memorization. They figure that in life - you can look in a book for the details. The important thing is to understand when you need to do that, how to find the proper "book" and how to apply and use the concepts - the specifics will naturally follow.
A lot of parents, children, educators, administrators, and politicians do not take education seriously. For these parents its an requirement and a day care. For the kids its a requirement and social event. For the educators and adminstrators it is a paycheck with guaranteed employment. For the politician it is a jobs program the gets votes.
I think that this statement is not at all limited to education, but is an accurate description of the ultimate flaw of democratic societies.
When people feel they have no duty to the state, and ultimately to the future citizens of that state, you get this result.
Do you really think any politicians in any democratic style care about anything other than getting elected? The last thing they want is to raise children with any sense of duty, honor, and loyality otherwise they will be quite aware of how corrupt their entire nation has become.
Accountability is the first step. Until you change the those who lord over the kids nothing else will be done
This will require a revolution.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Example: BASIC CLASSICAL PHYSICS, FORCE/MASS
Task:
Design a water balloon launcher from common materials (pvc pipe/surgical tubing/etc) that can hit your teacher with a water ballon at 100 yards in one week. You get 3 shots, the closest one determines your grade. You must set your device acording to the the settings in your submitted white paper.
Total Week's Grade breakdown:
Hit the Teacher: 33%
Device Analysis Whitepaper: 33%
Written Exam: 33%
Hit the Teacher Grade Scale:
A+: Hit the teacher
B: Within 25 Feet
C: Not even close!
D: Show up with a non working device
F: Fail to show up, or show up without a device
Lesson plan:
MON: Force - Basic laws of physics.
Airtable demo.
TUE: Acceleration - how not to break a balloon.
Falling egg demo.
WED: Orthoganality - how far will my balloon go?
Falling monkey/plastic dart demo. (Dart shot straight at stuffed monkey from 20 feet -- monkey released at same moment trigger pulled.)
THU: Air resistance - non-ideality
Feather/Bowlingball in vaccum demo.
FRI: HIT THE TEACHER! +
whitepaper due +
weekly writen exam
When I was in school, and even when at Cornell, I was always irritated because I never got to play in the Chemistry lab much. Oh sure, I got to do a few titrations, a PChem lab that involved copper recovery... but we never got to make or see Thermite demonstrated. We never got to make our own polymers. It's really irritated me that there were probably kids in the 50's that got more chemistry lab experience than I did because a favorite aunt bought them a childs Chemistry lab with "1001 Chemistry Experiments!" -- no longer available due to concerns about poisoning, no doubt.
Every subject can be made fun in this way, though for some subjects it's not immediately obvious -- and not everything has to involve building something or spending money.
Computer science is more fun if you're making a game -- combine this with English and write an interactive adventure. Math is more fun if you are analyzing baseball. Learning unit conversions and how to work with fractions is a blast if you are making a cake using directions that have units of cubic miles instead of cups for flour, light years instead of inches for pan size, and millenia instead of minutes for bake times.
The tricky part is being creative enough: Most people can make one or two of these lesson plans, but enough for an entire basic education?
To solve this problem, I've actually wanted to start a new education program of my own. Call it the Basic Education WikiBook. The book would be world-contributable, reader editable, and would contain one or more creative lesson plans for every subject from K-12.
If every person that worked with the BEWB contributed one really good lesson plan, one really good nemonic, or one really good web/java based lesson, the end result would be one of the world's best basic education textbooks.
Well, maybe after I'm done working on one of my many other inventions and have made my own million bucks. I wouldn't be at all disappointed if someone stole my idea though... (hint, hint!)
-Chiem Ma cwm9@cornell.edu
Many posts here have made the following points that I will respond to collectively:
Points made by others:
1. Calculators have caused many people to have bad arithmetical skills.
2. I like Vedic math. Here are some linkies.
3. Math focusses on problems that most people don't need to solve. Trigonometry and calculus are mostly only useful to people going into the sciences.
Counterpoints:
1.
Yes, and this is not a problem. Many people seem to be under the false impression that mathematics is about arithmetic and numbers. No, it is not. There are certain branches of mathematics which studies numbers, but these generally do so from a high level perspective. You might be surprised to know that there are many Phds who will occasional screw up their arithmetic. It's just not that big of a deal now that calculators are available to check work.
That said, it is convenient to not have to reach for your calculator every other moment. It is also true that at some point children are asked to memorize their times tables and various arithmetical algorithms. It is nice to see that they were paying attention. It is *nicer* to see them doing well in calculus or linear algebra. To a certain extent higher level math classes depend on lower level math classes, and to a certain extent they don't. Oh well.
I should point out that calculators are great for any sort of graphing, and that there is no reason to force a human to plot out a graph from a function, especially if that function has more than one independent variable. (being able to sketch such things is still valuable) Furthermore, in college level mathematics there are many problems which a calculator or computer can solve, but that a human simply cannot within a reasonable amount of time. Differential equations pops to mind. Remember, most of the problems you have ever solved by hand have only been toy problems. Real world problems require computers more often than not.
2.
I'll be the first to admit I know very little about vedic math. My impression from many people on slashdot, is that it is a bunch of algorithms for doing arithmetic. Again, I don't see that as especially relevant to mathematics.
3.
Math focusses on mathematics or it should. Unfortunately, there are plenty of people who would like to use math classes to teach "practical mathematics." By this, they do not mean the mathematics you need to do physics, computer science, or any other endeavor in which someone will pay you a wad of cash to take part. They mean they want to teach people how to do their taxes, or do one the the billion other mundane administrative tasks that humans need to do throughout that lives in which they are required to apply to basic formula to a problem.
WARNING: after reviewing this post I have determined that the remainder of what I have written here is a rant. If I had to pick a title for this rant, it would be People: the Suckening. Anyway, Although I'm being a little bit brutal here, I don't feel that what I'm about to write is untrue.
Fine, teach all of the people who can't figure basic shit out for themselves. Spend millions of tax payer dollars educating a generation of McDonald's employees. There were plenty of people at the highschool I went to who apparently went for that idea. Every year, I had at least one vaguely disguised health class. Two of them were actually called health I and II. Others had more creative names. Basically they reiterated the finer points of how to put a condom on, how to sign a check, how to fill out your 1040ez tax form (but teacher! what if I'm making more money than the 1040ez is for? (sic) Oh, I don't think that's going to be a problem for anyone coming out of this school!). I think they showed us how to perform CPR at least twice, 'cause some people are so dumb they will forget how to *breath*.
I am going to suggest something that may be a little unpopular with the dumbasses present. People who don't need science and math education, don't need educa
It was my understanding that the knowledge gap usually appeared later in life. For example, the extremely high attrition rates of women in Comp. Sci., Chemistry, and Physics departments in college (for example) were not due mainly to Barbie and "math is hard" but rather the attitudes of many of the male students and professors.
The stories I've heard... Of girls showing interest in science so the parents buy the boy a chemistry set (or a computer or something similarly scientific or technical). Of girls using the computer in their brother's room. Listen to the stories about teacher's expectations and biases in the classroom.
Read the posts on Slashdot that say, "Women just aren't as good as X as men are." Pay attention to the comments that say, "Male minds are drawn more to Y than female minds." Pay even closer attention to the posts that say, "Natalie Portman" and "hot grits!" No, there's no objectification in here. No, there's no abusive generalization in here. No, there's no ambivalence or outright animosity.
To me, the discussion about the pros/cons of Barbie are like trying to enforce a proper diet for people with major stab wounds. Yes, it's better not to eat so many Oreos, but let's keep some perspective here. There are more women in the sciences today than have ever been, and it sure as shit ain't because Barbie stopped being as popular. There are still too few women in comp. sci., chemistry, and physics, and it sure as shit ain't because Barbie is still popular. No, male chauvinism isn't the only issue. But Barbie?
Please. Some Perspective. Please.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Never mind all this high-tech namby pamby crap, sheer terror and sickening violence made me the man I am today.
Amen to this. I disliked math up until my third term of calc in college, when I began to realize it could be understood as a completely logical system and not just arbitrary rules and problem-solving procedures.
I imagine many people realized this earlier than myself, but elementary and secondary education didn't do the best job of presenting math as more than, say, a solving quadratic equations HOWTO.
Good non-bastard teachers. That's all you need.
The problem is that those old apps and games can't compete with the glitz of modern games. However, when you make an educational piece of software glitzy, it tends to suck.
r mensandiego.htm]. It's not like it can't updated to at least 16bit video for example.
If that was 100% true... then the web games offered on sites like Nickelodeon wouldn't be played. Most webgames are pretty simple but never the less are enjoyable. While graphics improved over the years, the fundamentals have remained unchanged. I imagine that quite a few old PD apple cames could easily be remade using higher quality graphics.
Where In The World is Carmen San Diego is a good example of education meeting enjoyment for kids. I believe it's program run was 1991-1995 [according to http://www.jumptheshark.com/w/whereintheworldisca
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
A big part of getting people into math is ditching symbol phobia.
Math became meaningful to me, and symbol phobia-indifference-nonrelevance vanished when I got to college and studied philosophy.
I learned to think, analyze, and argue rationally.
After a while all of the writing of arguments out became a chore for professor and student alike.
Enter "P" and "Q" and "X" as abbreviations for larger blobs of words. Math-like symbols became less alien, less unfriendly.
A cool course in symbolic logic with software to do proofs with acclerated this.
It always seemed to me this is how math and science grew naturally out of philosophy anyway.
A bunch of people sat around debating and asking questions to satisfy their curiosity.
After a while all the "bla bla bla" gets to be too much so "bla" becomes "x", "bla bla" becomes Y.
You have the beginings of Math.
I don't know if it will work for kids, but maybe the key to bringing math to more people is ditching symbol phobia by making math classes about thoughts/arguments relative to them, showing them that "math" is nothing but thinking, just made less unweildy by using abbreviations/symbols.
Then again standard, repetitive sets of drills and exercises work too.
People learn how to do *something* in math, become comfortable with it, and become psychologically ready to learn more, play with it.
Sort of like programming. You read a little "blah blah" skip to bunch of examples that relevant to your interets, you get comfortable, you play with things, and then you go back to the "blah blah".
Just a thought.
blah blah blah
Steve
i am a 6th grader. i hate it when they ask you "how do you feel about 20 to the power of 2?" also, don't make math hands on. science should be hands on, but not math. Muneer
In grad school I had a job where I worked with a lot of education majors.
It seemed like there was no shortage of cool methods for improving education.
Whenver I would ask "well, why isn't it being used".
The answer I would get is the burreaucracy of the school system.
I don't know if any of this is true or not, but maybe the answer(s) to your problem are already written up in an educational journal somewhere.
Steve
Which for some reason, most american's, particulaly in regard to maths, fail to grasp. Mathematics is a plural word. If you abbreviate a pluralised word, it becomes a plural abbreviation.
In other words, it isn't math (which just so happens to be a very old welsh name, and also, by dint of fate, my name), it is maths. As seen in many, many textbooks, like "Maths For A-Level And Above"
Why Americans seem to get this wrong, I have no idea, unless when the war of independance was on, all the english people in the usa sat down and said "Hmmm, we have to make ourselves look different. Tricky. We look the same, we act the same....I know, we'll stop sounding the same. Let's bastardise the language a bit. Add a few z's here, and lose a few u's there, and we'll be sounding different in no time. We can even start mispronouncing words like tomato, and say Zee instead of Zed. Perfect."
And "American" English was born.
The truth shall always be free: Boris Floricic is Tron.
There are stages of learning and teaching:
passive - teacher talks, kid listens (sometimes)
reactive - teacher trains, kid listens
active - teacher guides, kids make some decisions about method
proactive - teacher advises, kid plans and makes projects happen
Now, where do you think most teachers spend their time?
A few thoughts:
1. The concept of number that most math teachers use is less sophisticated than, say, those of Chinese math teachers (see Jo Boaler's work for more on that). So, how you delimit the subject matters (and, for that matter, our students in the US consistently score highly on creativity in math).
2. The idea that math and science are poorly taught is part of a cultural move to demonize teachers. The challenges to our performance scores in schools are vast (decline of family structure, negative influence of pop culture, rise of drug use over past 50 years, immigration, etc.). Despite this, the best indicator of achievement NAEP (congressionally funded assessment) says that schools are doing slightly better now than they were 30 years ago. This doesn't mean that schools are great, simply that we should be careful about how we frame the conversation (making good schools better vs. fixing/saving/destroying 'bad' schools and shitty teachers).
3. That said, there are lots of ways that teaching and learning could be more powerful, meaningful, and fun. Here's a few in no order:
-let teachers observe each other more to foster a dialogue about good teaching (done often in Asia).
-encourage multiple approaches to the subject.
-de-emphasize the purpose of standardized tests (not that we shouldn't have them, but if the stakes were lower they could measure how students were learning without dictating what they were learning)
-allow students to explore interesting projects in the discipline. This can foster an approach where students are encouraged to think like a professional scientist or mathematician, rather than a plain old person asked to memorize the great discoveries of the ages (this is Jerome Bruner's main point).
4. Finally, to directly answer the question, the reader is directed to check out the work of IRL (Institutes for Research on Learning). Especially the MMAP project. This is a group that came up with approaches for improving math based on a fairly sophisticated social theory of learning (generally, situated cognition), and they produced interesting materials for assessment as well as computer games for learning, etc. IRL closed down a few years ago, but I'm sure their work is still available.
Those that _want_ to learn science and math.
Screw the rest - they can go into management.
A significant problem faced by US
public schools is that education grads
consistently score in the lower 30%
of their university class. And they
usually attend schools ranked in the
lower 50% among comparable institutions.
High calibre students tend not to pursue public education careers. Mediocre compensation certainly
plays a role, but so does the poor reputation
of education programs. ED programs are not
academic per-se, they're essentially prolonged
group counseling sessions.
No amount of advanced technology is going
to compensate for a inadequate instructor.
So the best policy is to forego all of this
"math is fun" foo-fa and tell kids the truth
- math is hard, even mathematicians find it hard.
You're going to have to buckle down and learn
it, and it's going to take time. And YES it's
going to be hard.
yes, this was agreed upon during the first
grammatical congress in 1790.
When I did maths in high school it was generally pretty dull, and only certain things stick out from the drudgery of solving endless problems from intensely boring maths texts. The things that stand out are the things that seemed to be somehow useful to me, and that I would then develop a bit more interest in. inevitable quote...
"Children, if you don't learn roman numerals, you'll never know the dates that certain motion pictures were copyrighted"
anyway, the trick is not only to make the particular concepts relevant to the kids as much as possible, but to add some variation to the way in which these concepts are taught and applied. Even with the vastly primitive computing power of my high school days (LOGO on a 386) I still remember learning about iteration and recursion very clearly, even though I couldn't tell you a single other thing I learnt that year.
This is not to say that computers are some magic solution. As much of a solution as is possible here can be gained through providing as varied and diverse an environment as possible.
And as for those that don't want to learn, whose existence has already been much lamented amongst other posts, simply make it clear to them what their alternatives are; to learn the skills they need to become useful members of society, or to remove themselves from the classroom and the school and any chance of a particularly successful future.
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
Hmmm. So the aim of education is:
Well, that's a laudable and valuable aim, certainly, but there others I can think of:
- To teach general problem-solving and research skills, so that when people come across problems they've not learned to solve directly, as they will, they can work out or find out the solution.
- To teach skills that are likely to be of direct use in employment. (Though this one is less important than many employers seem to think...)
- To get children thinking about the world around them.
- To bring awareness and appreciation of subjects and areas of knowledge that they've not been exposed to, so that they can explore them further if they wish. For example, many children may not otherwise get any real exposure to classical music -- some won't enjoy it much, of course, but some will, and that pleasure can last the rest of their life. The same applies to many other subjects. How can you get interested in science, say, or history, or the classics, if you never hear any of it?
I'm not decrying the teaching of basic maths and English -- they are probably the most important skills, and over the last generation have often been taught extremely badly. Standards of both are lamentable in far too many people.But shouldn't education aim even higher still? Shouldn't it try to balance all of these aims to some extent?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
gteachers like you are one of the reasons lower school sucked. If you can't even think of a reasonable use for the mathematics you are teaching, you shouldn't be a teacher.
How would you feel if in gym glass, your teacher made you stand on your head each lesson for half an hour, and explained that 'it helped stamenia;.
Fucktard.
+1, has a brain
My science teacher said something in passing one day in class as a joke that has stuck with me since, and I will never forget elements 55 and 56 in the periodic table as a result.
He threatened a student by saying he would 55/56 'em if they didn't start paying attention. 55 being Cesium, 56 being Barium. I couldn't help but laugh and sadly, use it whenever I get the chance.
call nusiness majors the title of 'engineer'. They have not earned it. They learned a different set of skills.
Meet fred, the pink rabbit! He's going to teach your kids math!
Fred: Hello kiddies!
Fred: Before we go out playing hide and seek, let's play trigonometry!
Or what?
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
IF capitalism really works, we would have less people in prisons and on welfare in the USA than in the more socialist or communist countries.
Capitalism can only motivate the greedy, and some people just arent selfish enough to be motivated by capitalism. Second Capitalism has never really been built without slavery, communism, or some other system in place before it became capitalism.
No society was ever built from Capitalism but every society eventually transitions into Capitalism. Capitalism is eventually going to transition into Socialism as eventually the losers will outnumber the winners to such a point where it wont be accepted anymore. Karl Marx was right Capitalism does lead to either Communism or Socialism. However if you try to go straight to Communism before building up your society via Capitalism it just won't work. Just like you can't really build up your infastructure for Capitalism without slavery or some type of unpaid or cheap labor.
All of these systems work when applied at the right period in a nations history. When we have enough technology where it makes no sense to compete for things like food, shelter, water, etc thats when Capitalism will cease to work as no ones going to choose to compete when they can live for free off the technology.
Progress leads to technology which leads to higher productivity and this ultimately leads to Socialism. More productive = less labor = less jobs = cheaper products = free products = no need to work.
If we do work, I don't think most people will need to work 40 hours a week. There will eventually be enough people in this country or in this world that there will not be enough jobs for all of us and temp jobs will be the norm.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Perhaps teachers have a problem with introducing this technology into their curriculums because they are perceptive of the very real threat which technology in the classroom presents to them. Schools across the country are continually laying off teachers; in my school district positions are constantly being cut (including the district's affirmative action director), but somehow there was money for a shitload of new DVD players and P4s this year. New technology can be great and useful, but it is only a tool and there will always need to be teachers to use it. As long as funding is too low to give teachers anything but shitty salaries (or fire them), it will continue to be a bizarre choice to invest significant amounts of school budget money in technology....I have to agree with you here. Who would have thought an inbred like yourself would be correct?
If that's true, then what's a "work ethic" and why do capitalist societies seem to think it's so important.
A huge amount of Management Theory (and it's shadow twin, sociology) talks about motivation/extraction of labor.
What it boils down to is; if you pay someone to do work, you're not guarenteed that they'll do a good job of it if they aren't monitored and punished/rewarded based on performance. This monitoring is costly and often difficult to enforce. So you favor methods of management which get people to critique and improve their own work rather than trying to force them through the processes via an adversarial layer of management. And you promote those who internalize these attitudes to higher paying management positions.
The same applies to schoolwork. If you really want to teach the kids, you need to get them to learn even when they're not being materially rewarded.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Too many people see science and math as bodies of knowledge only, instead of looking at them as ways of knowing. You have a lifetime to learn facts and figures, but the earlier you learn how to learn the more sense those facts will make ... the less you'll have to memorize in order to "know" anything.
Your organization focuses on using models and simulations to teach math and science. How good of an understanding do you have about how scientists use models and simulations to pursue their inquiries? Are you introducing models and modeling in an authentic way, or are you just presenting models as additional means of presenting "factual" information?
In my own experience developing science instructional materials and methods, I've found that even science graduate students do not have a good grasp on the role that models play in pursuing a line of inquiry. Too many people mistake them for "reality" instead of "representations". Models tend to be presented as facts and often are not examined for where they fail or breakdown. Most of all, models are almost always presented and students are rarely asked to develop their own models.
If you are using an inquiry-based approach already, having students build their own models and develop simulations can naturally follow from basic inquiry activities. In fact, a lot of "hands-on" instruction fails in that it never gets to "minds-on". After conducting a series of basic inquiries, examining your data to look for patterns or build some sort of explanation is something that can be done by building an explanatory model or developing a simulation to reproduce observed phenomena in a controlled way. That is what doing science is, and I've done it with kids as early as 4th grade.
Using "standard" models still has its place, for several reasons. First of all, children aren't going to understand what a model is without a "model". For example, modeling the flow of electricity as water flowing through pipes is pretty common. If you can guide students through investigations that show electric current is directional and that it can branch, you can present this model as a means for pulling together different investigations under one big idea. The water-through-pipes model has problems, though, and this is something that should be brought out. Although the model has explanatory power, it is not identical to reality and there is a chance that other models might either complement or surpass it in explaining the observed phenomena.
One of the other things that standard models can provide is a "scaffold" for putting together the big picture. Are you familiar with the work of Lev Vygotsky? One of the things he stressed was how we learn best when the target of our learning is (1) just beyond our reach on our own but (2) achievable when given a little bit of help (what he calls the Zone of Proximal Development or ZPD). The ZPD is most often talked about when kids work with other people, but models and simulations can also be used to extend the range of what kids can accomplish. When you can construct an explanatory model, you are building a device to help extend your understanding. If students can't quite build a model on their own, presenting them a model and helping them make the connections between the model and their own investigations can boost their understanding of the subject.
A lot of comments above have pointed out motivation in both positive and negative senses. A lot of the negative comes from people conflating "motivation" with "rewards". There is a lot of research show that rewards can have a negative impact on meaningful learning. Having student develop their own models, on the other hand, can be motivating in one of the most powerful ways: through presenting a challenge. If you have students doing experiments by gathering data in open-ended inquiries, trying to figure
Two Words: Spongebob CalculusPants
I am a college freshman (philosophy major), so my high school days are not too far behind. From this experience, here are some suggestions.
Make the lectures more interesting-sort of like Bill Nye the Science Guy. Sometimes, the hardest task in math class was staying awake.
Relate the lesson to something. I want to be a lawyer, not an engineer. How will I use (for example) slope?
Teach logic before math. As a philosophy major, I had to take a logic class. For some reason, I understand math a little better now that I understand logic.
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
Instead of just showing some cool science thing, come up with a chain of things you need to learn to be able to do the cool science thing.
Better still if you can come up with a cool real-world thing that is an application of each of the steps. That would keep it from looking like the students have to learn a bunch of boring-sounding stuff before they get to something that's useful and cool. (If students are faced with crossing a barren desert of drab theory before reaching the cool stuff, they might well lose interest right there.)
So it'd be "If you learn 'x' you can do cool thing 'y'. If you then learn cool thing 'd', you can use 'x', 'y', and 'd' to do cooler thing 'e'." And so on.
Even in college engineering courses professors tend to derive an equation or a result and only expect students to "plug-n-chug" the solutions on the homeworks. Even the most complex phenonema can be presented in its dumbed down version. Exams we are allowed to bring a "cheat sheet" with any formulas and whatever we want on it. It's not until graduate school that problem sets become a much bigger portion of your grade and that it asks you to derive some results. I have had courses that abstract solutions are needed and there aren't any plug-n-chug problems, but those are exception to the norm.
I have spoken to several international students from Asia about what their colleges are like and most tell me that during their undergrad they don't have homeworks and just have exams. So people can slack off the entire semester and then cram the night before to get stuff done. I don't think they have design projects or classes either. This is unfortunate because their pre-college education are more rigurous than ours. But I have also heard that they don't really do critical thinking in their pre-college education, just plug-n-chug as well.
It seems like we need a system that combines the best from both east and west.
When I have kids (if I ever will) I will most likely send them overseas or send them to Utah. I think Utah is the only state in the US where the culture is favorable to learning?
Check out NASTS, which I wanna say stands for North American Science + Technology thru Society organization (http://www.nasts.org). In short, their approach is to use social issues to teach math and science (primarily science). A classic example curriculum I remember was teaching kids statistics using acid rain pollution as the issue. There was a model where kids would try to predict how many dead fish show up in the local lake because of the pollution. Kids love that stuff.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
If you don't think simply getting up and moving around doesn't require complex math, I suggest checking out the number-crunching power that the computers in any robot capable of walking unassisted use.
How to turn that low-level kinesthetic stuff into the ability to handle this consciously at a symbolic level?
Interesting question.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Instead of making your programs easy, build your programs with tools that let children create, error, struggle and succeed. Do not reward learning behavior with games or treats: your program should make the VERY ACT OF LEARNING fun, since kids (and you and me and everyone else) love to learn new things.
Don't make your programs linear either. No "Answer problem 1, then 2, then 3" crap. Try developing a structure that lets the kids solve a problem that can be finished in different ways and orders. Especially with math, let them learn by experimentation.
Sit in a classroom and think "how cool would it be if the teacher could rotate that graph in 3 dimensions? That would be helpful because I want to see how changing the slope affects the graph." and then make it!
I like einstein's saying
Don't memorize what you can look up
BTW, most of the things you mention about the American dialect of the English language can be attributed to a fellow named Noah Webster. He wrote a dictionary that went on to sell more copies than any other book in the English language, except for the Holy Bible.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
...and be de-legitmizing certain aspects of the culture and practice in "law" of stealing at gunpoint (eventually) monies that are called "property taxes" that go to fund and support and generationally perpetuate what are in essence subsidised "farm teams" for the - for profit professional team sports "leagues".
There is simply no rational explanation for it any longer, anyone who can't see the vast sums and importance given to professional sports leagues "farm teams" in the public schools simply isn't looking hard enough or objectively enough. It needs to crack, be broken, that aspect of property tax waste and criminal abuse has no place in any sort of free and rational society or in any society that has absolute needs for the hard sciences and math, along with the other academic pursuits. It's a pure theft is all it is. Stealing. Wrongness. Instead, what needs to be done is to force public schools to emphasize "learning" over sports (in particular I mean the traditional professional type team sports), and you will see a marked difference in the normal academic pursuits. Younger people can still "play" those sports, just make it paid for by them or their parents exclusively,at faciliities they construct and maintain, separate from the schools and from separate funding that they -the sports "enthusiasts" or "fans' voluntarily contribute to. Or,better yet, if this is so valuable to them and society,maybe they can get "their teams" to slash professional athelete's pays and the owner's pays and have *them guys* pay for it. That goes triple for publically funded sports stadiums as well. Absurdities. Bread and circuses. Delibarate dumbing down.
Our socieity's addicitions to "bread and circuses" is obscene, IMO. Entertainments have a place, but they shouldn't be at the top of the list, especially inside the public lower level schools. They can still play, get exercise, have fun, but enough's enough on dbeing in denial that there is no serious chronic financial exploitation going on here, or over-emphasized outright addictions leading to irrational behavior.
Look at any local "news" around the nation. "news", what's "new and very important, ie, you need to know this". What is "local news"? A mixture of some local round the town news, cool, useful, the weather info, cool, useful, then SPORTS??? Every day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, one third of the non commercial time is "sports" coverage, almost entirely of sports covereage of professional city/regional "teams" or the semi pro "college" teams. Its nuts! Oh me oh my, our kids aren't getting enough math or science!!1!! I WONDAH WHY?
Our society as a whole doesn't respect any sort of academic pursuit compared to "professional team sports" and leading to that is the quite obvious brainwashing and inducements to children to get them addicted as soon as possible. Anything academic is WAY down the list. You get "everynight at THE_BIG_GAME", and once a year the results from the national spelling bee.
I liked sports, played everything I could as a kid, but even then I saw it was ridiculous and I didn't put it over academic studies. I was amazed back then at people's addictions to it, even more amazed now, as it has just gotten of more "importance" somehow to our society it appears.
Best thing people can do to get math and science of more interest to young people,is to not only turn off the tv,but to stop doing that team sports nonsense completely. Just say no, there are thousands of other academic and recreational and physcially challenging pursuits out there. I mean...really.. it's embrassing, I am embrassed for my nation... you just can meet so many people who can rattle off their "teams" best players and what the scores were last year at which game and certain plays and whatnot-yet they cannot identify other nations on a globe, can't recall the name of their representative in congress, have never even heard of important laws passed or what they mean, have no apparent grasp of their own history.. and on and on. There's millions a
This is not intended as flamebait. But I just fine it funny that someone would consult with Slashdot about how to make science and math friendly, when we're still dealing with trying to make our operating system friendly.
I mean, in all seriousness, Slashdot and the OSS community in general would be the last place I would turn to for advice making math and science "kid friendly." We're too tech-minded and used to being geeks. Some kids may find science fun, some will find cars fun. It's just how life goes.
The entire goal of elementary school science education should be to convince kids that science is fun and interesting. When I was in elementary school, the teachers managed to make even the most interesting topics boring by forcing us to write reports and logs of everything we did. For someone who hated writing, this was torture. I think I like science despite elementary school, not because of it.
What incentive is there to learn advanced theory when it is so hard to find a business that wants to hire someone to use the theory? Businesses shy from the risks of exotic ideas. Many businesses don't have the stomach to be the first ones to use a new technology or achieve a new goal.
A solution seems to be to teach students experience with advanced industrial ideas at an early age. This is of course quite difficult without a good background in science, math, sociology, language, commerce, etc. etc. but otherwise students lack any motivation.
The world needs thinkers. Machines exist to do all kinds of mundane repetitive crap. Thinking is fairly difficult though - in high school I welcomed challenging problems but looking back I can see how poor the teaching of hardcore thinking really was. The teachers did have their hands full teaching the cirriculum, which was complex enough that most students struggled with it, and to give them credit, most of them graduated by doing their work and actually learning.
I can't escape feeling that the world will be so much harsher in the near future. This will be a time when average people will have to solve challenging and somewhat unique problems in order to earn their living.
The mechanisms and procedures that produce the goods all around us are maturing. Fewer and fewer people are required to produce the same volume of things. Competing brands are converging in terms of quality and satisfaction. People are being squeezed out of the factories by automation.
There are still a lot of problems left to be solved with intelligence though. It's just that the education system doesn't have the backbone to really shove thinking down the throats of young students. Of course, it also means shoving real thinking down the throats of teachers. That could be the real problem - can public school teachers be taught to think and teach thinking? They know about good thinking. They've seen powerful concepts and methods. They know about the history of human progress, all the triumphs and mistakes. But given a difficult goal with no prior solution most teachers can't show you how to go through the steps to get an answer.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Math. When I go through the supermarket, one brand of pasta sells for $.08/ounce, and another for $0.13, but it's got a buy-two-get-one-free sale. Which do I get? No calculator, and I'm only willing to give myself fifteen seconds to decide before I go for the next item on my shopping list.
Oh, and that "organically grown evaporated cane juice" appearing on ingredient lists recently has been fun.
Okay- when was the last time you had to solve a quadratic equation as part of your daily life?
:-)
:-)
Friday
6x^2 - 4x = 8
6x^2 - 4x - 8 = 0
a=6 b=-4 c=-8
x = (4 +- sqrt(16 - 4(6)*-8))) / 2(6)
= (4 +- sqrt(16+192)) / 12
= (4 +- sqrt(208)) / 12
And I can't do the square root of 208 in my head, so I'll stop there
Twenties Retirement
IMO, your school/education system has several problems :
* treating kids like adults. Stop doing that. Also, do not worry so much about their 'self esteem'. That has to be earned. You should not have to worry about telling a kid that 2+2 is not 5 because you might hurt their self esteem. So, tell those psychiatrists to get lost.
* teach your kids to respect the teachers. basically, punish them everytime the talk trash, call teachers retards or behave with an attitude. In real world they will face consequences.
* yeah, teach them that brains are a good thing, and kids with brains should be respected. It's nto dumb football players and the footballer who nails the most girls who should respect. teach them that the world was built by engineers, not footballers., and that it's doctors who save people from illness, not some punk rock star, and and that it's scientists who discover new things, not junkies.
* teach kids that evenings are for homework, not for watching the gyrations of some teen rock star.
* uniforms in school. and no makeup.
once all this is done, then the ground will be clear for teaching kids about math and science. If not, wonder why other countries have more science and math grads.
Actually, the vast majority of people I know who are brilliant adults were early learners as children. The ones who didn't do well in school usually had problems because they were bored, often because they were in a school that did not believe in tracking for political reasons. Not every bright child is an early learner, but it is a very strong predictor.
That's great, but purely anecdotal.
You give them the opportunity to move ahead when they are ready.
Fair enough, but as stated, the focus tends to be on younger kids for "advanced" classes at the moment, and even if there is an Einstein somewhere in the US, he or she will not be in a good position to get into the advanced classes - he or she would probably do quite badly in maths and physics early on, like Einstein did (and no, not because he was too bored or the material was too easy for him - if you're too bored and find the material easy, you can generally pull good grades despite being bored), and because they would not be "picked up" early, and would probably never be "brilliant" at pre-prepared exams like some of the "brilliant" adults that you know, for example, but I'd venture to say that none of the brilliant adults you know would ever get to the level that an Einstein-type person could get to. That is the point that the parent poster was trying to make.
Often, they were perceived this way because they were bored stiff in "mainstream" classes. When most of the stuff you hear in class is repetition of stuff that is obvious and trivial, it is easy to tune out and miss the stuff that you really need to learn.
This just isn't the case, often. The central issue is: tests prepared for mainstream education don't really prove much. All they prove is that the child in question can perform well at the given types of test. This is even true of IQ tests and SAT-type tests. To paraphrase Kevin Warwick, it would be like marking English literature papers by binding them and throwing them down a flight of stairs, and having the ones that go down the fastest graded the highest. The kids wouldn't need to learn much about English literature to do well in this test, all they would need to do is either write a lot and make their paper heavier, or find out ways to make the paper more aerodynamic, so that it went down the flight of stairs faster than the other papers. So - it would teach the kids something, all right, but would not be an indication of how good they actually are at the subject that is under consideration at all.
Have results-based pay. Then it would be a competition for value among teachers. It is market forces, just like everything else in the universe (that works). As long as the unions control the labor force, the struggle will always be how to pay the teachers the most for the least effort, and will never have anything to do with what is good for the children.
here. read it.
is here. read it. makes sense.
How about changing the method of testing? Unless, of course, you meant: "Make kids science- and math- test friendly."
If all you want is for kids to score higher in maths and science tests, then teach them what to expect in science and mathematics tests and how to prepare for that specific type of test. This was the key difference between the government school I went to between 1993-1995, and the private school I went to in 1996-1997. Of course the difficulty level of the material went up each year, but the methods of teaching were also completely different. It's not that the private school had its students best interests at heart at all, or that it wanted its students to really enjoy and understand what they were studying - all the school wanted, and the school counselor even went as far as to state this, was for its students to score as many Higher Grade distinctions (similar to British A-levels) as possible, and make the school look good. So what was different? Certainly not the depth that the maths teachers went into, just the methods. Whereas in the public school we were taught quadratic equation theory, or trigenometry graphs, or linear programming, or whatever, then given homework and made to do tests, in the private school we were given the theory, then made to do past exam papers, drilled on what to expect in the exams, and taught where the majority of the points in the exam lay, and how to get the highest score possible with only the main sections of the material - in fact, overall, we probably did LESS studying at the private school, and the teachers encouraged this, focusing on getting higher scores rather than actually learning mathematics, for example.
Now, keep in mind that although I am talking about South African high school here, my experience did not differ that much when I went to college in the US between 1999 and 2001. In my final year at high school (1997), I got a B for mathematics (a far cry from almost failing in 1995). In my freshman year in the US, I got an A in Calculus I (partly because I'd done most of it in high school, admittedly), and a B in Calculus II. I don't consider myself a mathematical mind at all, by the way. I got Cs and Ds and sometimes worse for most of my school career. But learning how to prepare for tests and exams really put a different light on the whole issue, and not one that I'm entirely comfortable with. Who are we really fooling here? Are kids that do well in maths and science really mathematically and scientifically minded, or are they just good at performing well on these types of tests? Probably a bit of both - some are really good at, and enjoy, math and science, and some are just perceived that way, because they are better at performing well on standardised tests.
The best way to learn is through a passion to learn, but much of coventional schooling learning is filled with indifference, boredom and coercion. One of the problems is that each person is going to be interested in learning different things at different times and thus forcing everyone to learn in a predefined manner and on preset topics is a sure way to destroy the passion of learning.
I love learning, and I have been a life long learner, I seek to learn more everyday, the internet being a large part of this. I search out something that has recently spurred my interest, and then I link out from that into interrelated areas that I come across, and in this way I end up learning abvout things that I hadn't even initially known about before hand. This learning is unstructured and the path is impossible to predict. For example, I thought politics was boring for the first 20 years of my life, but for whatever reason, I am now very interested in it, and it's basic theory etc.
However if I was presented with random topics, and not allowed to make any choices about what I wanted to learn, or what I wanted to follow you'd be hard pressed to teach me anything. For example, present me with pages of information on fashion and I will be bored listless. I will not want to learn.
Convential schooling has been set up to spit out verified clones to fit into neat little well defined niche areas - "Structural Engineer", "Materials Engineer" etc. This generally works well in terms of verfying someones abilities to perform certain tasks and thus acts as a good safeguard of quality and ability, but it also tends to run against the grain of natural curiosity.
How could we change this? Perhaps breaking up subjects into much smaller pieces. The more specific and limited a subject is, the more likely you will be interested in its entirety. Perhaps you could have a university course split into hundreds of little courses. Each course having it's own pass and fail. You could mix and match course parts to come up with different mixes. Say mixing psychology with engineering and using these combined areas of expertise in new and creative ways.
Maybe there are some other ways to more closely align schooling with a childs or adults curiosity, anybody got any ideas?
Dude, that's so seventies
There's a huge gab between the school and the job market right now. Especially in subjects like mathematic.
I think the school has to inform it students on how the data they are about to process is going to help them getting the job they want.
I myself would have liked mathematics better if I knew that it would help me code those 3D games (this was before 3D games became popular), or writing spicy computer algorithms.
Well, it's true, >99% of the population will never use differential equations (DE) in their ordinary life, so it might seem that it is a total wast to learn those things.
There are two points you are missing.
1) We have a culture with a built in knowledge, if we let only fewer and fewer people learn about DE, then this knowledge will finaly be lost. We must try to keep knowledge in our society.
2) There is no such thing as useless knowledge. Even knowing how many movies Link Kefir has appered in might be of use (in a quiz perhaps?). There are of course some knowledge that are perhaps of a more limited contemporary value, like the thing with actor Link Kefir,but still, aquiring new knowledge, what ever kind it might be, means "training" your brain. And that's the best thing you can do with it. When you learning stuff, you are able to learn new stuff, you can see new connections, etc. That's the same way you learn the commandline in Linux. You use cat, sed, grep, and then you learn about pipes, and you are then able to make more advanced things.
Mathematics is perhaps the most "pure" brain training you can get.And your precious commandline would not exist if people had not been forced to leadn about advanced math.
And a third point,
3) People are lazy, and they need to be forced to learn some things, If we only learned on a need-to-know basis, in a century we would be living in trash, eating what ever we could find on the ground.
Evolution of Language Through The Ages: 6000 BC : ungh, grrf, booga 2000 AD : grep, awk, sed
A very valid point!
There should be more logic and problem solving in school-maths. That is one of the most fun parts of mathematics. So much interesting mathematics can be learned by this.
Many teachers don't know anything about logic, and that's why it is not taught in school.
Evolution of Language Through The Ages: 6000 BC : ungh, grrf, booga 2000 AD : grep, awk, sed
It's also a question of ambition. If you want to understand advanced literature knowledge of advanced science and math are really helpful. It's hard to pick up advanced knowledge in every subject but it shouldn't be as hard as it is right now.
Many students go to school with the primary goal of graduating rather than learning. That means knowing what is necessary to pass exams. That means focusing on the information being trickled unpredictably one school day at a time instead of following a plan that is explained at the beginning. A plan allows a person to move ahead at a very high pace because the goal is well defined. Learning just to pass an unknown exam slows down learning because one is forced to memorize at times instead of understanding.
Let's face it, a lot of people discover at a young age that school is irritating and generally quite stupid, yet they feel too stupid themselves to learn in an alternative way. Most people want to learn, but have little idea how, and often lack the proper resources to.
Learning is hard work. People generally don't put enough energy into exploring possibilities. We need a culture that points out the need to think thoroughly and deeply in spite of the factorial sized information space.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
I'm a university mathematics student, and never liked math throughout my time in the public education system until I chanced upon a friend who did like mathematics and started showing me all a lot of neat abstract stuff. Certainly, it's not for everybody, but people like me wouldn't have even considered mathematics (we'd all be going into physics or engineering) if we relied solely on the school system to teach us the sort of hands-on 'monkey-calculation' approach to mathematics that it does now.
It is this is the sort of non-abstract position that destroys any serious student's want to consider pursuing mathematics or certain aspects of physics as a field of study. I can push buttons on a calculator to 'explore' a graph, but pushing buttons on a calculator don't help me look into the graphs; I just memorize which sequence of buttons to push to get a result that the test is looking for. Working out the derivative and proof for the fundamental theorem of calculus by hand and learning to interpret it is far more gratifying, as you have the foundation to continue exploring more complex concepts and you start building a mental collation of ideas that you can draw from when constructing other proofs. The calculator has absolutely destroyed that; I would say get rid of it all together!
Further, to rejuvinate interest in mathematics, it is essential that the school system not simplify mathematics any further by making it more computational than it is. Removing calculus from the high school curriculum and replacing it with statistics was a bad idea, in my opinion; there's nothing left in the curriculum to bring about even a little interest in mathematics.
But then again, I'm one of those people who taught myself algebra in grade four because it was cool and interesting, and didn't involve computations. I lost all interest in mathematics shortly after algebra was introduced in the public school curriculum. I think students shouldn't be allowed to graduate from elementary school without an understanding of algebra; watching people in grade 9 struggling to understand that 'x' can be any number is quite sad!
Regarding science: I like the way science is taught through high school right now (but we had a designated lab room for each science except physics); and in fact most students who graduated from my high school went into the sciences. In elementary school, however, I think there's some work to be done. Teachers need to come up with creative experiments to get students interested in science -- not the type of baking-soda and vinegar experiment classes repeated throughout elementary school. Everybody does that; it gets boring.
Fair enough, but as stated, the focus tends to be on younger kids for "advanced" classes at the moment, and even if there is an Einstein somewhere in the US, he or she will not be in a good position to get into the advanced classes - he or she would probably do quite badly in maths and physics early on, like Einstein did (and no, not because he was too bored or the material was too easy for him - if you're too bored and find the material easy, you can generally pull good grades despite being bored),
No, if most of the material is trivial or boring, many kids just tune out, or act up out of boredom and frustration. It is easy to miss the material that is new. Einstein is a fairly typical example; he described himself as being bored in school, and he was cited as being "disruptive."
In the 6th grade, I learned statistics -- through M&Ms.
... in middle school. You have to get the explaination down to something that they can see a practical application to, and that they actually care about. Not every kid is going to be an abstract thinker. In some ways, I think it's more important once the kids have a basic foundation, that they work more on how to aquire knowledge, rather than memorizing facts. I mean, to me it's more important that I know why the civil war happened, and a concept of when it happened in relation to the rest of history, than in knowing what particular date some particular event occurred.
First, the teacher broke us into pairs. Each pair got a bag of candy. It was our job to count how many of each color we had. We then had to tell our teacher how many we had, and he had this chalkboard that he kept all of the numbers on, for each group. He got the numbers from all of the other classes in our grade [there were three].
We first started off with basic totals -- how many green in each class? in the entire grade? How many total candies?
From there, we learned to divide to get a mean. We also did sorting to get medians, and counting to get modes. One all that was done, we did variance and standard deviations.
Mind you, we also had to do square roots -- by hand. [And this was less than 20 years ago].
As I see it, it comes down to two major things -- Every person learns differently. You can't expect that some canned lesson is going to work for every kid. You need to use tasks that kids can work on independantly while the teacher can help those that aren't getting it, and maybe explain it a little differently You have to be able to relate to the lesson. If the kid can't understand a practical application to something, it doesn't do them any good. One of my friends in college said he learned geometry through land surveying
Likewise, in physics, it's more important know the general concepts. Some major constants are worth knowing (9.8m/s**2), but the overall concepts of gravity and acceleration are more important.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Try aerospace themes.
www.aata.net is a great place to start.
--- Nothing is secure.
Children today are tyrants, they contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.
-- Socrates, 469-399BC
'Nuff said.
Have the teachers care about when the child learns. Not to treat the children as objects to stuff information into. I learned the most from such teachers. Keirsey would call them Idealists.
Have you read my journal today?
I am a teacher, although not on the K12 or College side. I teach Adult Education, which in Clifornia is technically under the K12 side. But I am deeply interested in all aspects of having all humans better educated, and being better thinking people, and having humanity improved. And for America for most people this starts with K12 (Kindergarten through 12th grade for those not familiar with the acronym) Reading all the replies, there are many good ideas here and good reasons. But they all only scratch the surface. Also, most of them are teacher and student directed, and most of them point out problems, but do not look at the core of why these problems exist, or even more they don't look at how something could be done, and where it should be done, and how anyone is really going to do it. Not that I have the answers. I would like to have the answers; I would like to know where I can put my energies as a teacher and, more importantly, as someone who really wants education to improve for humanity. Who do we need to talk to to improve curriculum? Is it only teachers? What about administration? What about our law makers? How do we intelligently implement curriculumn, instead of having each new Math teaching technique being only a passing fad, where we don't learn anything from what was good and bad about the technique? How do we change attitudes in general? I think those are all questions that need to be addressed to really address this "Ask Slashdot" question.
No lie - to this day (10 years later) they still remember my lessons - these were not super star kids just normal ones. They say it is the teacher that makes the difference - In ny case that was true. -
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
With computers you can more effectively combine subjects in learning i.e. teaching more than one subject at a time by using facets from other subjects in learning a particular lesson to be taught. Using problems that reflect real world usage and solutions that require more than one discipline to solve. Aggregation of learning where the whole years learning experience is tied together rather than broken off into seperate classes with no corelation between lessons being taught in each individual subject through the school year.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
From what i've seen of american schools as shown in movies and serials-kids there seem to get away with things that would result in instant expulsion from schools in India where i live. Wheter it's such regulars as 'the school bully' or the general way in which kids appear to slouch around in class (i dont know how far this is true-this is based on hearsay)-but here-a kid found extorting money from smaller kids, or unnecessarily picking fights, etc has his parents summoned, or is suspended or even thrown out on repeat offenses. And no, we don't go openly disrespecting teachers. Perhaps it's a cultural thing. And no-we definitely do not have a culture of looking down upon smart kids. Other posters have argued that kids should take responsibility for their studies etc. I feel that such an attitude has to be fostered right from the beginning by their parents. Most middle class indians value a good education above anything else in life-and parents too exhort their children to take their studies seriously from an early age. Most kids manage to balance their studies with their social and fun life very well too. I'd say a few social norms over there need changing, and for a start parents of young kids can start supervising their homework and inculcating the habit of regular studies in their kids.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
The great thing about maths from a 'learning' point of view (later on in your maths career at least) is that you can miss loads and just work it out. It's all interconnected in a way humanities subjects aren't ... if I can't remember the formula for the volume of a solid shape I can work it out from first principles ...
YMMV! (alot)
You are exactly right! You should be modded plus 5
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
If you find such a project, please let me know. My organization spends a lot of money on commercial math software.
Sure. It seems so obvious a target for an open source project. And there are many kids (and adults) who aren't eligible for EPGY or CTY programs, or can't afford them unless they are fully-funded, but who could benefit from such an opportunity. Just as the world cries out for more math and science knowledge, the universities are becoming more and more unaffordable. (MIT's Open University project amounts to throwing open the syllabi, which only works for a certain segment of the population.) In my dreams, this open source math project becomes self-regenerating as the students get so into it that they learn to program, do further study, and add ideas, content and problems to it.