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."
Disclaimer: I'm an American, I have not had any experience with the British education system.
But I noticed something peculiar in this article, there were no examples of students being encouraged to drop or avoid math as the title of both the Slashdot summary and the BBC's article state.
What I did see was that there were observations of Universities having to implement remedial math. Ok, and also that students were choosing not to take hard courses so their GPA remained high.
So what?
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.
If you're shocked that students are getting to college and needing to take remedial math, you fix the problem. the problem may be that your system encourages them to avoid math courses so give them an incentive to take them. A simple incentive is letting them know that any of the engineering sciences are going to be further away from their reach if they avoid the classes early on.
The 4.0 student who took shop as his electives is still in my hometown working on cars possibly missing a finger. I'm working half way across the country on computer systems for probably better pay. Ironically, in the end the only thing that matters is if you're happy.
Again, I didn't see anyone person or school official steering them away from math, just the potential problem of the system. Make the consequences known to them and if the student is your child, show them some encouragement!
My work here is dung.
So, basically, people who suck at math are advised not to waste their time and everyone else's money, pursuing something they suck at anyway.
What's the catch?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I'm an engineering student, and have always kind of thought that, and of course made fun of business math with all the others. But, I've been doing a help session for business math for a couple of years now, and let me tell you, some of that stuff is important and fairly difficult beyond your basic four functions.
For instance, lately most of the questions have been over car and house payments, interest, and trying to basically handle finances. This is not simple four function math, and it's very relavant for what normal people need to know. Another topic that is covered heavily is probability. While the average person may not need to make statistical studies on a regular basis, they do need to know what a bell curve is, how standard deviations work, and have a basic understanding of risk management based on probabilities of risk.
Sure, most people don't need calculus, differential equations, or even trig. Hell, most of the time engineers aren't going to be using calculus all the time (but of course we need to have it as background.) However, there is some complex and difficult math that is important for succeeding in business and keeping personal affairs in order.
Many studuents in the U.S. take higher level math. Not nearly the numbers, but many do. Some of us actually enjoy it and get it. For those that do not "get it" we don't provide an avenue.
:) I don't have the answers to replace it, but I think we should start talking about it.
When we all got to be 11-14 we stopped caring about school as much...not all of us of course, but many of us start to think about all the other things. From which clothes to wear to sex. School becomes and after thought for many. Then when we get to high school and need to start focusing we've already screwed ourselves.
Part of this I think is to the inadequacy of 1st thru 7th grades. We learn basic arthimetic, how to spell ( I didn't do so hot ), and some stupid life sciences. It is so general and does nothign to prepare us for the harder stuff.
Would it be so hard in the first grade when we propose _ + 7 = 11...fill in the blank to instead say X + 7 = 11. What should X be. When the kid says 4 why not then show them 4 = 11 - 7...x = 11 - 7. Basic algebra is not that much harder then the math we learn in the first and second grades, but we wait till the 7th grades when most boys are getting boners looking at their teachers.
Even the act of calling these classes harder is creating the problem. Why is algebra harder...it really isn't if presented right. Calculas is a bit tricky I'll admit, but I think if kids had a better foundation it wouldn't be that hard.
The same is true with science. I don't remember a dang thing I learned in the 7th grade about science. I think the teacher was boring me with the scientific method or something. Looking back to the thrid grade I don't even think science was on the menu. Shouldn't we have diagrams of atoms on the class and tell kids this is what everything is made of. Our minds where like sponges and we where being hand fead.
The importance of younger and younger education is becoming appartent...if you don't like to learn by the time you hit 10th grade and don't have parents pushing you to anyways you probably are not going to make it. Instead of testing kids we need to determine how much they are enjoying class.
Don't get me started on the A-F grading system
Even worse, a surprisingly large number of elementary school teachers are these sorts of people, and they teach their hatred and ignorance of mathematics to new generations, crippling their early mathematical development, and repeating the cycle.
This reminds me what happened to me. In sixth grade towards the end of the year the students met with guidance counselors from the junior high to decide on what classes to take and the one I saw said I should take algebra but because I didn't know how to do square roots he couldn't let me take it. From then until tenth grade I took as advanced a math class as I could without taking algebra. Then about 6 weeks after my tenth grade year started because the teacher I had for math took my homework out once he collected it and ripped it up in front of the class I got pissed off. I grabbed all of my books and stuff then went to my guidance counselor and told her I had to get out of that class. She looked at my grades in math then said I should of been taking algebra. I told her what I had been told before, that I couldn't take algebra because I didn't know how to do square roots, but she said you learn to do them in algebra. Again I got so pissed off, if I had been allowed to take algebra in 7th grade I could of taken AP Calculus in high school.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Right now US schools are churing out corporate zombies that are discouraged from taking "uncool" and "too hard" classes like math and science. The Chineese and Indians are slowly surpassing Americans in talent and ability, while US schools are focusing on turing out MBAs.
Only if you think "school", which is only loosely correlated with "education", is the key to a successful future.
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.
I don't know about you, but the biggest drones I've ever known have been the types get the straight As and live to regurgitate information on school tests. Every decade we have stories like this about other countries that are going to surpass the United States because of how much better they can cough up answers on tests (the stories have been happening since AT LEAST the early 70s in my memory). And yet, it never seems to happen.
Why? I'll tell you why. And apologies in advance for this generalization. I know there are exceptions, but here is where the kernel of truth lies:
F-C students are the drones of the world. The A students are the ones good at memorizing, yet become drones when they get into the real world, because memorization only takes you so far. The B-B+ students tends to be the ones that are cruising through on their way to somewhere else. They don't care enough about school to get As, but are smart enough to get Bs without working hard.
It's in the middle where you have the smart AND creative people. They are the ones that move the world. Say what you want about the United States, but the one thing we do well is breed independence. You can't teach that, it's cultural. It has to be bred early.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
If you look at the base on the Chinese diagram, AD == 2 and DC = 2rt(3). Divide by 2, gives you 1 and rt(3). By Pythagoras, AC**2 == 1**2 + rt(3)**2 == 2, therefore AC == 2.
So it's a 1/rt(3)/2 triangle, which is exactly that "30, 60, 90 crap". I actually didn't find a single "unusual" angle in there (aside from the construction in the last question).
It might be less obvious, but the math is basically the same.
"Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
Right. I'm an English student, 18 years old, moving onto University this year. I've just finished the Maths A2 syllabus (advanced level). The last topic we did in pure mathematics was three dimensional vectors. I've just glanced at the question, but if I'm not mistaken, the first proof requires the following vector law: |a||b|cosx = a_1*b_1 + a_2*b_2 + a_3*b_3 ...
Where |n| is the modulus of the direction vector of the vector equation and modulus being the square root of the sum of the three squared position vectors
Where a_n, b_n is the corresponding coordinates of the vectors
And x is the angle of the intersection of the two position vectors, so proof would mean x = 90, therefore cos90 = 0, so you're proving that a_1*b_1 + a_2*b_2 + a_3*b_3 = 0
Mathematics in Advanced Level can actually be very involved. Integration by substitution involve trigonometric identities. The article talks about Chemistry students and a lack of maths knowledge.
I think the problem may lie, judging from my Chemistry advanced level classes, in the fact that a lot of my class mates expect to be spoon fed right answers to questions. They don't like to think on the subject. They become deceived into thinking that Chemistry is just learning reagents and conditions and what goes where, and then subsequently move onto Uni thinking that there will be more of the same when in fact there is more inductive/deductive reasoning. More maths.
In terms of maths skills needed in the sciences, Physics > Chemistry > Biology
"Second, you are insulting about 51% of the world's population."
Had to think for a second, but THANK YOU! You just proved my point.
So, what is the difference between insulting 1 person and 51% of people (which is a lie by the way, and insulting on its own merits)???
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
This is what happens in a country of a billion people where atleast 10 million students graduate out of high school every year and half of them want to be Engineers and atleast 100,000 are capable of scoring 100% on any tests administered, unless they are really hard like the IIT-JEE.
The idea of entrance tests is to filter potential candidates and that needs to be achieved with whatever means necessary for a given population.
The focus on facts and details in math education is deeply worrying to me. I've written on the topic, and I have to say that I find many of the comments here worrying because the continue to perpetuate the confusion. It is as if we were teaching history by simply getting students to memorise names and dates (which, sadly, is all to common in many schools), or assuming that teaching art history is about getting students to be able to tell you what colours are used in famous paintings, or expecting an education in music to result in nothing more than being able to rattle off names of symphonies, who composed them, when, and in what key. High school algebra is not (or at least, should not be) about making you memorise the quadratic formula, it is (or should be) about teaching you how to use formal reasoning, such as algebra, to arrive at complex results (such as the quadratic formula).
For anyone interested in different perspectives on mathematics, I keep a blog on the subject which provides a wider view of the subject which ought to supplement the details and skills that are currently the focus of so much math education.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I'm assuming that these are standardized timed exams, in which case factual knowledge is more important than the speed at which one can make logical deductions.
The more complex the problem, the more ways people can solve it, and the amount of time it takes varies more.
Do you penalize the kid who takes more time coming up with and applying complex trig identities rather than applying easy geometry?
The problem comes in if you only have 15 minutes to write the essay. Basically one tests how well you memorize facts, the latter tests how well you memorized an outline that your teacher gave you. I remember in our teacher led AP US History Study Sessions we planned out the "answers" for most likely DBQs. I could have come up with something complex on my own, however, sometimes time limits don't allow me to fully think things out; and you don't get credit for just an outline of a really thought provoking essay
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
As an undergraduate reading Maths at a UK university, I am appalled that the BBC would publish such a mis-representative and biased article. Whilst I understand that there might be concern over a decline in students taking Maths post-GCSE, the content of the article is hideously extreme and clearly very far from actual standards of maths.
Notice that the RSC has quoted the UK Maths test as being from a Chemistry degree. If the question was from an actual Maths degree, then you would see something like this: http://tinyurl.com/ynnasn (a question from a first-year geometry module I took).
It is not stated, however, for which subject the Chinese entrance exam is for. I highly doubt it is for a Chemistry degree at all. Even if it was; before I went to university I considered a degree in Chemistry - at the time I could easily have answered both of the maths questions. The questions posed to me in my entrance exam (albeit for a Maths degree) were far beyond the difficulty of the ones quoted in this article. As well, I could have easily answered the UK question back in year 7.
I do not doubt that the standard of education in China is at a similar level to the UK and USA, but the facts have been severely warped here. Mirroring the quote at the end of the article, I also believe that the RSC's attack is nonsense (though I would cite bullshit). This article reminds me of another published by the BBC last year, of a CS professor who had defied the mathematicians and could divide by zero. Sensationalist rubbish.
As a physics TA (for non-physics majors), I can say that the Chinese question would send my students running for the hills, whereas the British one wouldn't bother them too much. Also, the British question requires only very simple geometric and trigonometric principles, while the Chinese one requires a reasonable knowledge of vectors (at least that's the only way I could think of solving the last part). Too, at each step it involved good spatial reasoning and required you to think about the principles behind the question, not just say "Oh, a right triangle, use SOH-CAH-TOA!" If you actually have to understand what a dot product means physically, isn't that better than memorizing the definition of the tangent?
I would rather be killed by a terrorist than enslaved by my government.
Rule No. 12: Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic. Next time you're out cruising, watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That's what you look like to anyone over 20. Ditto for "expressing yourself" with purple hair and/or pierced body parts.
Rule No. 13: You are not immortal. (See Rule No. 12.) If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven't seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.
Rule No. 14: Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school's a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you'll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now. You're welcome. #14.
On the contrary, I'm only now just beginning to enjoy myself in college. School was BS most the way. Stupid people all around living their sitcom lives whining because our math teacher gave them a fork and knife instead of zooming the spoon with baby food towards their mouths ("open up!!!" \(^_^).
For once I'm being challenged with something so difficult I'm struggling for my life just to make C's [at Georgia Tech]. I'm not smart, anything but really; I'm closer to D's than I am B's. It's just primary and secondary school was such a joke, even someone of my [mediocre] caliber was bored. A waste of my and a lot of other classmates time and childhood; the others it completely ruined; they grew up thinking life was supposed to be that easy. Now I'm surrounded by brilliant students and it's heaven.
I choose who I hang out with (went to a small private school with spoiled kids who specialized in putting the different kid from the class down), I spend my time doing what I want, when I want. When my laundry and room get so dirty that I get sick of it (or my roomate says something but we're mostly cool on that front) I clean them; not arbitrarily because mother says so. My Co-op at SITA that pays $16/hour is easy hat 9 to 4:30-5, paid lunch; and I'm just working up the courage to take initiative and ask for some real work as I'm still absorbing processes and business sense from coworkers.
Sure it's hard working 5 days a week and worrying about whether or not I'm going to afford the rest of college, but you trust God with what you can't handle and just take your bites one at a time. Next bite is class this summer: sure, I'm terrified of the 4-credit-hour-but-25-hours-work-per-week classes, but at the end I get through it and know crazy cool stuff like how to program a PSTN switch or MP3 decoder in Matlab. At the end of these harder classes I KNOW I'm capable of just about anything because I had to learn just about everything. Incredible confidence boost when talking about synthesizing digital signals and manipulating them (something I learned last fall in a DSP class).
But I digress; I agree with the other rules.
As a teacher in China (private school, the only time I got into the public schools is when I was training the Chinese teachers) I can safely and solidly say that the Chinese education system "sucks".
No time is given to thought or creation. Everything (Really, everything!) is rote memorization. If Chinese students from the same high school are asked to write an essay on a topic then you get back multiple exact copies of an essay that almost (but not quite) fits the designated title, with varying opening and closing sentences used to shoehorn the text into compliance. Parents and students are often angry and puzzled when I grade such items lowly as the essay is one of the approved ones issued by the schools. Exceptional cases aside the students are usually unable to summarize, explain or answer questions on the essay they have just handed in.
This is not even a matter of bad teachers or bad textbooks. It is a cultural belief that knowledge comes from studying the past. That new is lesser and that all answers can be (must be) learned from the legendary sages of the deep past.
Mathematics is marginally more progressive in that textbooks are updated, but even so the students are given proofs to memorize and regurgitate on the test papers.
I am no longer asked to give training sessions for the English teachers of the local schools ever since I flatly refused to acknowledge any benefit in their efforts to teach students English by giving them phonetic books of (badly written, unattributed, incoherent) English short stories and poems to memorize, interspersed with the recitation of English grammar rules in Chinese.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
Also note that there are much fewer universities per citizen in China than in the UK, so Chinese universities have a much larger pool of people to choose from - and can therefore require higher levels of knowledge and still get as many students.
Sorry, but I abhor this article, and using these two questions to judge the quality of their respective country's education systems is just stupid. There are no specifics there whatsoever about how hard the respective questions are seen to be. The question from a first year British University course is a low end question which would be set to check a baseline of mathematical knowledge in the undergrads, something that the examiner fully expect everyone to correctly answer. Because it's a University diagnostic question, I also doubt that cost saving when it comes to marking was ever a deciding factor. Equally, we don't know if the pre-entry question from China was aimed at the brightest or dumbest of students, though I'd guess closer to the top end. My point is that it would have taken only a different spin and different questions (say, from the STEP papers, which are also pre-entry examination papers for Cambridge/Warwick maths applicants) to make a story about how British education was much better than maths schooling in China - only it wouldn't make as good a story.
All an entrance exam has to do is rank candidates. The difficulty of the questions within a subject area has no effect on the test's usefulness, unless the body of questions strays into the extremes of simplicity or difficulty, or the number of questions is too small.
What makes more sense is to compare qualification exams -- what you need to get out of secondary school. Alternatively, if one exam covers fields of knowledge that another doesn't, that probably means something. If the Chinese exam includes calculus and the British does not, that would tell you something.
Finally, you have to look at the body of students being tested. For years we had conniptions in the US over declining college entrance exams - despite the fact that the tests were deliberately recalibrated every year with full knowledge of the likely statistical result. The reason for the falling scores was that a much larger percentage of students were going on to college. Every year, more and more lower scoring students were making the attempt.
This is not say Chinese education might not be better than UK education. But we can't even conclude, just by looking at the tests, whether it is any different.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
No time is given to thought or creation. Everything (Really, everything!) is rote memorization.
Do not worry, since us British instituted the national curriculum a few years ago our schools are moving in this direction too.
I read Physics at Uni and I can say that I was also given long mathematical proofs to memorise. There was precious little emphasis on learning to derive the proofs for yourself unless you were enrolled on the MPhys (Master of Physics, 4 Years). I was only reading for a BSc (Batchelor of Science, 3 Years). When I asked about this I was told that due to the Maths syllabus for schools being made easier a modern MPhys is only equivalent to a BSc from twenty years ago.
The problem is that nowadays in Britain almost everyone is expected to study until 18. And what they study is mostly decided by a curriculum that is decided on at a national level. This is just daft. Some subjects like Maths, Physics and probably others are too complex even at this level for someone without any real interest in the subject to grasp. You can remove the hard bits but this just makes the subject boring for the people who do have an interest in it.
The fact is that all the league tables rating schools in Britain are a joke. If you want your kid to get the best education possible it doesn't matter what school (discounting private or boarding schools, these do seem to do the trick) you send them too, all that matters is that you foster an interest in learning in them from long before they get to school, and then reinforce the school system at home by encouraging academic pursuits rather than just allowing them to watch TV until their eyes drop out.
Addendum - For those who do not live in Britain the national curriculum was introduced to supposedly enable a fair comparison via school league tables. The idea was to give parents a choice about where they sent their little cherubs. Then the failing schools would empty out and eventually be closed down when the numbers of pupils attending got below a certain level.
I dont read