Slashdot Mirror
Math Skills Survey Shows U.S. Lags Behind
3l1za writes "The New York Times reports that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has released its results (pdf) for a test of mathematical skills given to 15 year olds in 40 different countries. A few apparent anomalies: The US kids rated 28th of 40 (so in the bottom third) while the Czech Republic, which spends in education 1/3 of what the US spends, ranked in the top 10. Further, only about 1/3 of US kids reported that they did not feel as though they were good at math, whereas about 2/3 of Koreans reported this--and the Koreans ranked in the top three. 'Mr. Schleicher said that students in countries that emphasized theorems and rote learning tended not to do as well as those that emphasized the more practical aspects of mathematics.'"
Now someone is going to tell me that I can't eve count to one!
We = Lazy. Leave us alone and quit picking on us :)
All those numbers in the post are hurting my head.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Our American Football programs are still tops!
Math is hard.
Moo.
"Rarely is the question asked, "Is our children learned"."
Bart Simpson is clearly to blame for this.
The New York Times reports that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has released its results (pdf) for a test of mathematical skills given to 15 year olds in 40 different countries
.375 years old). Something's fishy here.
Um, according to these figures the average age of these "children" in each country was barely five months old (15/40 =
You didn't win? They MUST have cheated!
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
He doesn't appear to be missing many. They seem to be failing in unison. At least Bush got them working together.
I was looking at the countires that are ahead of us, and i saw Latvia. I thought to myself "Latvia? How the crap did we get beat by Latvia? I don't even know where Latvia is!!". I don't think i could possibly be helping us get better in our standings....
Only your math skills.
*ducks*
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
The answer is to outsource our math tests to an offshore company. There we can not only raise the averages, but do it at a fraction of the cost (which they will be able to calculate for us).
--
"Me fail English? That's unpossible." - Ralph Wiggum
Way to be down on the US man, except you forgot one thing - 28th out of fourty just doesn't work out to being in the bottom third, no matter what country you are from!
And you would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those damn SlashDot readers!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Johnny has 5 apples. Suzie has 3 apples. Bob gives one of Johnny's apples to Suzie. How do you think Johnny feels?
Damn, dude - you should know by know that it's two plus two that equals four... no wonder we're behind in math, with this sort of disinformation wandering the internet...
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
No problem. Diebold has agreed to supply all students with new "counting-machines" based on their highly precise voting machines.
To ensure success next year, they've also volunteered to tabulate the scores from all countries.
So don't worry, starting next year, the US should occupy the top three positions, followed by its closest allies. France, China and Russia will be lucky if they make it in front of Iraq.
So this just means that if this survey was performed by americans, then the results could be way off.
Think about that one without making your head explode.
And he is GREAT at math. He knows that 1 cry + 1 poop = 1 diaper change and 2 boobies = 1 lunch
A tap broke in the flat of a professor of maths. He called a plumber. The plumber arrived, in 15 replaced a pipe and charged the professor 1/4 his monthly salary.
"My god! So much? But it didn't look difficult at all! You must earn quite a bit more than I do!"
"Sure, just become a plumber and you'll earn as much as me. No, seriously, there is demand, and the job isn't really hard..."
So the professor became a plumber. He started repairing leaking taps etc, earning a lot of money for very little work. And it lasted until one day when the union decided all the plumbers need to know at least basics of maths, so there will be a training...
So, the training starts, the maths is extremely simple, just like for kids. And then the teacher calls our professor to the blackboard and asks him to write the formula for the field of circle.
And professor, in terror realizes, he forgot.
"Okay, no panic. I'm a math professor, I don't remember the formula but I can derive it."
So he starts calculating the formula, splitting the circle into infinitely many pieces, filling whole blackboard with calculations, integrals, derivatives... finally comes up with minus pi r squared.
"No, that's wrong. Field can't be negative. There must be a mistake somewhere." So he checks his calculations once, twice, can't find the error. And whisper arises in the classroom filled with a crowd of plumbers. Finally he starts recognising the words in the whisper, and everyone in the room whispers "Exchange limits of the integral! Exchange limits of the integral!"
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
And steal our milk money, too.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Yes, I did indeed manage to post this in the wrong thread entirely. XD Oh well. I lose at slashdot.
*is run over by rotten tomatoes*
an American with PhD's in Math and Physics? Stupid American. -South Park
I think the most useful thing would be to test schools and group them regardless of country so we can try to figure out the common elements among them. Insisting that all the educations in the United States are as similar as all the educations in Monaco is ludicrous.
This is a superset of your idea, which I think is a good one.
Well, since I didn't have access to a computer in 1975 it would have been kind of hard to write a program.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.