Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
...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...
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.
The Chinese test is actually very similar to the UK one; it's based on a similar triangle (1/rt3/2 instead of 3/4/5). The trig is virtually identical, they're asking for mostly the same angles, and you don't need that much more knowledge to answer it.
I don't think the comparison is that fair - there are plenty of easy questions in UK exams, but you can't pass by answering them all, you need to do the harder ones too. The Chinese one looks harder, but it's not, mathematically - it just needs a bit more knowledge of terminology, and a much better grasp of spatial reasoning.
"Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
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 Chinese one looks harder, but it's not, mathematically - it just needs a bit more knowledge of terminology, and a much better grasp of spatial reasoning.
... the chinese one is harder spacially and terminolically, but not mathematically? I would argue that those are a part of math. Furthermore, three dimensions *is* more difficult mathematically than two.
So
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Here's an analogy: Two history questions: one asks you to write a short essay discussing the rise to power of Queen Elizabeth I, and the cultural impacts those events had, both at the time, and through history; the other asks you to list dates associated with Queen Elizabeth I, and the names of some famous people alive at that time. One of those is actually testing your grasp of history, and the other is mindless regurgitation of facts that will probably soon be forgotten. The difference between those questions is very similar to the difference between the math questions. Both questions require you to know the same "facts" (names and dates), but only one actualy asks you do any history.
Mathematics is more than just facts, it is about logic, and reasoning and abstraction; just as history is not just names and dates, it a is about how those people events tie together and influence each other, and how they influence us. Don't confuse mathematics with facts about mathematics.
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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.
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.
Mathematically? Not vastly - it's just a logical extension. The real challenge for English students (speaking as an English student) is that even up to A-level, one is not taught to tackle new problems - only the same problems with different numbers. OK, that's exaggerated, but in general, you know exactly what type of question each one is, and exactly which methods to apply. There's very little original thought required. If English students were taught a bit differently - required, for example, to derive methods themselves, then even if they didn't have the knowledge required for the 3D trig question, they could work it out from first principles because it really doesn't (seem to - I've not completed it) involve more complicated maths than basic trig.
On the other hand, the question from the first year university course baffles me, since it is unbelievably simple. So, although similar amounts of mathematical knowledge are required, it is definitely true that the Chinese question is of a more appropriate level. I (heading for university in September) could do it in seconds. I am now going to attempt the Chinese one.
im in ur
Because a lot of history teachers want you to regurgitate facts, rather than learn history and be able to understand it. I love history, I hated my history classes.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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.
But please ignore this, and proceed being alarmed. It's certainly easier than thinking.
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