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Encouraging Students to Drop Mathematics
Coryoth writes "The BBC is reporting that students in the UK are being encouraged to drop math at the senior levels. It seems that schools are seeking to boost their standing on league tables by encouraging students not to take 'hard' subjects like mathematics, in favor of easier subjects in which they are assured good grades. The result is Universities being forced to provide remedial math classes for science students who haven't done math for two years. The BBC provides a comparison between Chinese and UK university entrance tests — a comparison that makes the UK look woefully behind."
There will be a clamor to drop standards based testing because it is "bad for education" instead of summarily firing the administrators and teachers involved.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
If you read TFA, it actually states the Chinese test is a entrance exam but the UK test is while studying in the first year at uni. I learnt the knowledge to answer the UK test school at 14. I have not idea how to start the Chinese test.
Sooner or later, they will realize that they don't need the US to manage them, and will proceed to cut us out of the loop and leave us with a bunch of middle-manager types that don't produce anything besides TPS reports.
Note: I know that the article was about the UK, but things aren't any better over here in the colonies. Our school system needs reform, and I don't mean the "No Child Gets Ahead" act.
If you're so mentally destitute that you need remedial math classes going into college, you're likely not majoring in the subject anyway, or in any need of what would be considered "hard" math classes anyway.
How many people outside of fields like engineering and other math-specialty careers even need to be able to do much beyond the basic four functions anyway? Sure, it'd be nice to have a general populace well-versed in all subjects, but at this point in time I think that's little more than wishful thinking.
...to see that a country that was the home of mathematical geniuses like Alan Turing, and inventions like the Colossus computer would discourage students from taking math in high school just for increasing test scores. If they want to improve marks, they should be working harder to teach the students rather than discouraging it. Running away from the problem will not solve anything. England sure has changed a lot over the past few decades...
Look at the BBC entrance exam comparison. They show us one question given on a Chinese university entrance exam, and another from a British first year university exam. We don't know anything about the percentage of students who correctly answer either question, so the comparison is meaningless.
Yeah because being excluded from a low paid, under-valued, un-respected career is a massive incentive. You can earn more money plumbing or driving underground trains than you can as a scientist in the UK.
This news post reminds me of Dumbing Down Our Kids by Charles Sykes. Here's the list:
Rule 1: Life is not fair; get used to it.
Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will not make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you screw up, it's not your parents' fault so don't whine about your mistakes. Learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way by paying your bills, cleaning your room, and listening to you tell how idealistic you are. So before you save the rain forest from the bloodsucking parasites of your parents' generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades, they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
Everytime I tell someone I have a math degree they usually respond (proudly) "I Suck at Math!" On occasion they will go into a long conversation about how bad they were at math ... I wonder whether it would be acceptable for someone to proclaim "I can't read" and then talk about how they couldn't even read a book to their 4 year old child at night.
Your earning potential in the modern world is largely dependant on your Math and Language skills; regardless on whether you think you are wasting your time because you "suck" at these subjects, you need to learn the material for your own good.
The solution is obvious to anyone who actually took the math courses. You weight the grade in math courses differently such that a B in a hard math course is worth more than a A in basketweaving. Make it so the maximum GPA anyone can attain without a math course is 3.5. I know this seems like witchcraft, but trust us math geeks.
Perhaps your understanding of the usage of the word "encouraged" is the issue here. It is perfectly normal to say something like, "the entrance requirements for UK universities (which take into account only GPA and not which classes are taken) are encouraging students to drop math classes so they can go to a better school.
I faced the same choices in the American public education system and I chose the hardest courses I could. The result was that a student who took primarily shop courses graduated with highest honors & I graduated with a 3.0 or something. But I already had 11 credits through advanced placement courses.My story is very similar. I obtained a 3.8 or something while being the only student in my class to take every AP course offered. The high honors went to other students who took easier courses and they probably had a better choice of schools and scholarships as a result. The one really big difference is that in my state some schools had begun correcting for this issue by crediting AP classes higher than regular classes. Taking the same classes and getting the same scores in a nearby city I would have had a GPA of 4.7 (which I only learned after seeing another person's entrance info listing a higher than 4.0 GPA and trying to figure out what was going on).
Root problem we're really discussing is bureaucracy versus an accurate depiction of a student's abilities. One could argue that the ability to properly manipulate the bureaucracy to have the highest scores is an indication, if that is the kind of intelligence a student is supposed to be demonstrating. The sad truth is, in the world of academia being good on paper is usually a lot more important than being intelligent or competent and both students and parents realize that and make choices that reflect that reality, to the detriment or real learning.
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The people who provide the education should not also provide the certification.
Degrees and certifications of all types should be provided by a taxpayer-funded institution who's standards are under public control. The role of the university, then, is simply to prepare you for those tests.
That would destroy the incentives for grade-inflation and also give more meaning to the certifications themselves (no more of this "does a degree from this university cover the same material as one from that university" business...)
I think the issue is that high-schoolers don't always have the foresight to take important, basic classes like mathematics which will help them throughout life (budgeting, building a fence in the back yard, painting the house, yes, all need math) There are outstanding examples, like yourself and many others who do choose to challenge themselves. But many high-schoolers, and their parents unfortunately, do not choose to do so. That is the 'so what'. These kids need classes and they don't all have the maturity and insight to pick them for themselves. And jobs after college aren't as cut and dry as you make them ... IT people are a dime a dozen. As someone else already mentioned, plumbers and electricians are not, and don't fear outsourcing. (Myself, I was torn between CS and engineering entering college, I ensured my job security by getting a degree in aerospace engineering ... there are some things that can't be outsourced, like our military's missile design and development, and designing space hardware ... )
First, I'm not sure how "representative" these two questions are of British and Chinese education. Perhaps they're comparing a "basic competency" test from a British school to the entry exam for a top Chinese technical school.
Regardless, as a mathematician, I think that the Chinese problem looks "complicated" but not especially interesting. Sure, it seems more impressive than the British one, but they both require nothing more than basic geometry and a bit of trig -- the main difference is that the Chinese problem involves a significant amount of "grinding out" calculations, but it doesn't really require any insight or understanding. It's really not much different than doing page after page of long division, or working out a nasty Sudoku puzzle. It's much more interesting to prove something surprising about a basic geometric figure than to prove something boring about a complicated geometric figure -- that is, unless your sole interest is in cranking out engineers to do "worker bee" calculations like this, rather than trying to learn more about reality and how to calculate unknown things.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
In my High School, the A students were those who put the most time into everything they did. The best athletes were usually the A students. The best musicians were the A students. The student council were A students. The B students weren't too bad either. Maybe they watched a little bit more TV at home.
The C students were the linemen on the football team, the bench-warmers on the baseball, softball, and soccer teams. The fill-in trumpet players.
The D students were always smoking near the back doot, smoking by the tennis courts, smoking in the parking lot.
The F students were smoking near the back door on Monday's when they would show up at school. By Wednesday, they were in "special" study hall, sleeping at their desks. Or, maybe they never made it to school.
I know of several A & B & C students making a fine living, nice families. D students, one is a murderer, in prison somewhere. I didn't know many F students...
You are insane...maybe you're fed up with your job or whatever, but I know a mechanic who is doing everything he can to get his son through engineering school (his son is currently a mechanic also), so he can get a white collar job.
Get a clue, go work on a car or in a factory for 8 hours and figure out how much spare time you have when you get home for "some fun programming".
"I told you a million times not to exaggerate!"
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house."
R. A. Heinlein
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
In the UK, the standards-based approach has been bad for education. This is the view of people I know involved in staff recruitment (I work in software dev). It is also the view of people I know involved in the university scene (I live in Cambridge, UK, and many of my friends are staff or postgrad researchers at the university). And it is most certainly the view of people I know involved in teaching at school age (those that haven't simply left the profession in disgust, that is).
The argument about standards-based testing would have merit if the approach worked in practice, but unfortunately, we can clearly see now that school league tables have not had the desired effect. Instead of motivating schools to teach to higher standards, what they have actually done is motivate schools to play the system.
Today, schools will encourage weaker students to take subjects where they are likely to get better grades rather than more difficult subjects, as with mathematics in the case of TFA. Similar things hold for sciences, modern languages, etc. This is caused, in no small part, by giving all subjects equal weight in the statistics (give or take special statistics for things like English and maths, which they play around with every couple of years).
Today, schools will focus on teaching pupils to pass their exams with as high a grade as possible, not on teaching pupils their subject and letting exams simply be a measure of how well the pupils have learned. Revision is all about exam strategy now.
Today, schools will actively discourage pupils from taking courses where they may pass but without gaining a high grade. No grade at all damages the averages less than a D or E grade, and so doesn't corrupt the school's precious "percentage of examinations taken that were passed at grades A*-C" type statistics.
The bottom line is that instead of teaching pupils real understanding in key subjects, and playing a role in their personal and social development along the way, today's schools are simply machines geared to generating exam passes, and today's pupils are simply fuel for the machine. Consequently, you can get straight-A students who don't know their subjects. You get universities inventing their own entrance examinations and/or stating bluntly that they will ignore certain A-level subjects entirely when considering applications, simply because otherwise everyone applying is a straight-A student and the admissions tutors can't distinguish between them. And you get people applying for jobs with great qualifications on paper, who can't do now with an A-level in a subject what someone twenty years older could do after gaining an O-level.
This isn't education, it's product marketing for the New Labour administration. And like much of marketing, most of it is simply lying with statistics, and finding excuses to deny a reality that is self-evident to any qualified observer who takes the time to look.
And as for firing teachers, consider this: so many old-school, teach-the-subject veterans are now leaving the profession (often through early retirement deals because they are much more expensive to employ as teachers than green youngsters fresh from university) that all the accumulated wisdom of generations of teachers is rapidly disappearing. We are being left only with youngsters who have found trendy new methods like synthetic phonics to increase results (no, wait, that one's decades old!) and think they're very clever. Unfortunately, the ones who are very clever rapidly get disillusioned and leave the profession, as several highly qualified and very smart friends who graduated in my university generation all did within two years of starting work as teachers. You don't have to fire anyone in this scheme, because the good people — young and old alike — have already left in disgust.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
There is an inherent flaw in the weighting system used for honors classes in MOST schools. This happened to me...
Freshman year of high school we were encouraged to take at least one hour of study hall. Not being interested in wasting 55 minutes of my day, I decided instead to take an extra elective. So, out of 7 courses, 3 honors courses (weighted at A = 5.0) and 4 courses (weighted at A = 4.0) was my freshman year.
Fast forward to the end of my Junior year.
Even with straight A's all the way through, I noticed that there were several students with higher GPAs than me, high enough in fact, that I would not be valedictorian (still able to graduate with honors, though). As I began to investigate, I noticed the difference was that these other students had taken the same honors courses, but always kept a study hall.
So, my GPA for one year would be: ~4.43 And the others: 4.5
Keep this in mind when your kids get into high school!
I know, I know... WAAAAAHHHHHH!!!
So is anything you learn in school....
That point does not only apply to Math.
Unless they teach gun handling at US schools ;-)
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I can't truely speak for the whole nation, but in this little corner (Newfoundland) the situation is much the same. I haven't heard of people being actively asked/told not to take mathematics, but I know that the majority of people (~55%) of students entering MUN (Memorial University of Newfoundland - largest university in the region) fail the standard Math Placement Test and are therefore either required to do creditless math courses in order to continue with any other math/science courses or do a degree which does not require any math credits.
So we have a lot of B.A.s around here.
And now for a joke I'm going to get modded flamebait for: What did the B.A. say to the B.Sc.? Do you want fries with that?
Godless heathen.
"I Suck At Math" doesn't usually mean (I hope!) innumerate. People with normal literacy skills are no more equipped to write War and Peace than people with normal numeracy skills are equipped to do differential calculus. However, the ability to compose meaningful email messages with correct grammar does not require the author to have an English degree any more than 99.99% of jobs require mathematical skill beyond basic algebra learned as a 14 year old.
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Math is very practical. However, you choose to not use math. What's your car's gas mileage? You know you have to drive 3 miles east and 4 miles north (the roads are all east-west and north-south), how far is that as the crow flies? There are many times someone that doesn't need math would have opportunity to use math. The more math you know and the better you are at it, the easier it is to use it on a daily basis for things people don't think of as math related or to gain bits of knowledge others would miss.
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This is happening in the US too; it's just parents and teachers trying to get students into "good" colleges instead of schools trying to boost rankings.
Students here in the US are being encouraged to take fewer, lower-level courses than are offered at their schools because "an A in standard math looks better to colleges than a C in higher-level math." Sadly, this is mostly true.
This is mostly due to the grade-point-average system and due to grade inflation. Colleges often summary-reject students with a GPA lower than e.g. 3.0, without looking at what classes they took. This leads to the common scenario in U.S. education:
In many US high schools, A no longer means a student is extremely bright and talented. As are average. A C is nearly failing. Students who aren't getting As complain to their teachers (and engage their parents to complain) as though they're failing the class.
This problem is compounded by the difference in a class's difficulty depending on teacher, school, and date taken. At my school, "IB Calculus I" is taught by three teachers. One doesn't teach well and gives amazingly hard tests. His students tend to have Cs and not know what they're doing (through no fault of their own). One teaches well and is a total hard-ass. His students are probably the most well-versed, but they also have Cs. One teacher gives open-note, multiple-choice tests. His students are generally clueless and have As.
A college has *no way* to tell which students are which, since the class is the same on transcripts. This Is Broken.
Colleges need to take a closer look at what classes a student took and other methods of aptitude testing before they accept or reject students.
Encouraging students to drop mathematics?
... "making new art history majors daily".
... at least at a subconscious level, I'm pretty sure that's going on with a lot of 'em.
Hell, the establishment has been doing this foerever!
What is the primary function of Statistics, Calculus and Diff-EQ classes in most universities?
Answer: weed out the "non-hard-core engineers", in other words
These subjects don't have to be hard. I realize that after going through the hell it took to get through them. In college at least, these things are presented in a way that is INTENTIONALLY OBTUSE.
First there's the shitty textbooks, which are intentionally shitty, in an attempt to sell a)study guides, b)subscriptions to "study help" websites.
Then there's the professors. Some are great. I had exactly one truely great math professor in college for Calc 2. Sure the material was challenging, but the approach wasn't, which is more than I can say for the rest of my math professors. They're sole motivation seemed to be to throw up barriers to understanding. Why? Hell I don't know for sure. My guess is at the core, it has something to do with being in the situaion where you have to daily give the knowlege away that makes you valuable in the marketplace
Almost nothing we teach in maths below graduate level is newer than 200 years old.
We should have learned how to teach it propperly by now.
Students have been "encouraged" to drop maths all along, so what's the big deal that we're saying it out loud now?
But please ignore this, and proceed being alarmed. It's certainly easier than thinking.
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Math is less about using calculus in 'daily life' (although you can argue that you do; compound interest, for one) and more about learning reasoning skills necessary for critical thinking. Euclidean geometry won't necessarily make you a better architect (although it's a great advantage), but it'll help your mind train in the process of logical reasoning.
That is why math is important.
More than mere navel gazing.