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."
someone else has as messed up an education system as the US.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I heartily endorse this. If I suck at maths then so should everyone else.
Isn't enough that I ruined a pony, making a gift for you?
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.
Anyway, I didn't take any math in school, and it hasn't impaired my reasoning at all!
Crow T. Trollbot
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.
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.
I can't tell you about schools in the UK, but I know for a fact that this scheme would not work here in Ontario. Universities keep an "unofficial" ranking of the academic standing of high-schools throughout the province. This doesn't mean "this school has a really high average!". This ranking takes into account subject focus and quality of education. For example, a high-school that has a large number of graduates with high averages that go on to study in Engineering, Medicine, Physics, Math etc. are given a high rating for academic subjects. Schools with a large number of graduates that go on to study Music, Literature, Art, etc. are given a high rating for the Arts.
You could almost think of this as a normalizing factor (I like to call it alpha). They multiply each student's graduating average by their school's alpha, and it is this normalized result that they use to rank students for acceptance.
Aikon-
We'd do it because poooo widdle junior got his feelings by the purple colored (god forbid we use red, that looks... stern!) F on the Math test. What's ironic is that the grade inflation and self-esteem fanaticism are creating overly confident students. They're built up on their own self-worth and esteem, and low and behold, we're having a problem with people with malignant narcissistic personalities...
...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.
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
I learnt the knowledge to answer the UK test school at 14. I have not idea how to start the Chinese test.
*Shrug* I learned the stuff for the Chinese test at 14 in 9th grade geometry class in a US public high school. Your mileage may vary.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
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
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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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
But please ignore this, and proceed being alarmed. It's certainly easier than thinking.
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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.