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Discouraging Students from Taking Math
Coryoth writes "Following on from a previous story about UK schools encouraging students to drop mathematics, an article in The Age accuses Australian schools of much the same. The claim is that Australian schools are actively discouraging students from taking upper level math courses to boost their academic results on school league tables. How widespread is this phenomenon? Are schools taking similar measures in the US and Canada?"
This is what you get when schools do what it takes to look good. While they are too blame, the blame also lies on governments and parents who are looking for schools which turn out the most graduates.
Ideally a rating system should be based on the "quality" of those grades. What I mean by this is that the maths levels would be broken down into categories from easy to advanced. A school should be given higher marks if they manage to turn out a few good maths students as opposed to many low level maths students. I am not sure how this could be made to work in reality though.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
That's ridiculous--the moment there's even a shadow of that problem, you weight upper-level classes with a 1.1 or so. The idea is not to punish someone for taking a harder class, after all. (High school math was probably trivial for all of us, but it isn't for everyone.) My high school weighted honors classes at 1.05 when they averaged them into your GPA, and AP classes at 1.10; a similar technique would work here.
Maybe not intentionally. But the way math courses are setup discourages many otherwise capable students from being successful in the subject. My middle school district did a poor job of coordinating math courses with the high school district. As such, I was behind by the time I reached high school and struggled the whole way.
Couple this with the ridiculous "integrated math" fad that plagued countless districts (at least in California). We barely covered trig functions, factoring, and other critical topics. (Anyone else have a thought about integrated math?) High school physical science courses did a poor job of incorporating math.
In college, I changed to a geology major that required calculus courses. Having struggled with math in high school, I had to start from intermediate algebra and work my way up. At least college math curriculums were organized in a logical and relevant fashion. It helped when the professor said, "Yeah, pay attention to this because you might have to derive the formula for centripetal acceleration in a physics course." Connections are important, especially when dealing with abstract math concepts.
My friends had similar experiences and, not wanting to blow a year taking bonehead math like me, decided not to explore their interests in astronomy, physics, chemistry, and other math-intensive subjects. It's a shame, really.
There needs to better curriculum coordination at the middle- and high-school levels so kids understand the importance of math and have a foundation that preps them for college. I understand how easy it is for a student's math foundation to get ruined. Such foundations, at least in my case, take years to build. Oh yeah, and (excessive) testing doesn't help -- but that's a whole other rant! If you want to encourage kids to take math, do a good job of setting up the courses in the first place...and tell them how important it is!
Math still has its place. If you want to go to graduate school in humanities, then you may still need some advanced math. In particular, many students from medicine, political science, humanities, and the arts, do advanced multi-variate statistical studies as part of their post-graduate studies. Understanding the tools used in these advanced statistical studies typically requires first or second year statistics skills. If you want your Master's degree, you need your undergraduate math.
As such, a significant number of undergraduate degrees require "Math for Humanities" or "Statistics for Non-stats Major" courses. It is a good idea to keep math throughout high school. It gives you many more options when you reach university.
Indeed. The NCLB folks need to realize that if you only teach what the least capable students can learn, the class will only be taught what the least capable student can learn.
(IANAL)
If you never learned calculus or any higher maths, how do you know that you would have never used them? Math is used for all kinds of research in history: population extrapolations, statistical correlations, dynamic modeling, hypothesis testing, etc.
You're like a blind person who has found ways to cope with what you're missing, but that doesn't mean that you wouldn't benefit from sight.
That might be true, but why doesn't the "well rounded education" argument ever come up when math and hard science classes are in jeopardy?
There's no shortage of people willing to defend the liberal arts because a well rounded education is so necessary to being a good person, but they're strangely silent when attendence in technical courses is dropping.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Great. While we're at it, let's also drop the "core" classes in English, diversity, and art history that engineers have to take.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
When you are being bred to be a bunch of mindless controllable sheep?
A country of dishwashers and burger flippers dont really need an advanced education.
Eventually it will backfire of course, when the country slips into place as a 3rd world nation that cant even support itself. But until then, it keeps the ones in power, in power.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
True education has been replaced by the ersatz education of testing and scoring, which is one big, complex game which has little to do with the true advancement of knowledge.
It helps to think about this in economic terms (by the way, feel free to shoot me down here, I'm not that good with economics). With fewer new schools being built and more students wanting to go to college because it is increasingly a factor in one's success, there is a lot of competition to get into college. One would think that more competition would result in brighter kids in college overall. However, colleges are increasingly complaining that incoming freshmen are not prepared for work at the college level.
However, we do not select freshmen based on factors which will lead them to success in college, such as reasoning, curiosity, or perseverance. We select them mostly based on grades and test scores. The tests test the student's ability to solve brain teasers. They are easily subverted, and there are myriad non-cheating ways to game the system in order to inflate your score. Also, classes are increasingly being taught to the tests, because that's what the parents want.
Therefore, there is increased competition, but due to highly imperfect information on the part of the colleges about which kids will perform best, they make worse choices as to who gets in. Furthermore, because the kids are less prepared, and there's nothing to do about it, they must make the courses more remedial. And then, everyone in the educational system gets stupider.
Screw math, we need a class on general problem solving and trouble shooting. In IT we have to understand *everything* in order to help someone. My CIS teacher told me "The client doesn't know what he wants or needs, you need to find this for him" and the client being the owner/CEO/whatever. "my speakers stopped working" = the *green* plug is plugged into the *blue* port next to the *green* port.. WTF?! This is your average person. How can the speakers stop working if they couldn't have worked in the first place. We need people capable of figuring out stuff on their own and researching. Once we can start getting this down, math will come naturally. The only thing I've learned as IT is "Never underestimate the stupidity of average intelligence." I love working with and helping people... but wow.. it's never ending
NCLB does not divert resources away from teaching. It influences what is taught. If one happens to think the standardized tests actually test what we want students to learn, then this is a good thing. If one happens to think the standardized tests fail to measure what we want students to learn, then it's a bad thing.
In either case, however, the solution is to make sure the tests are measuring the right things. There are a lot of people who feel the tests aren't doing that - so let's fix the tests.
What we should NOT do is abandon the whole premise of measuring progress just because the tests could be better. (I'm not saying you did or did not advocate this. But a lot of anti-NCLB folks do just that). The only real way to know where a school needs improvement, and whether attempts at improvement are actually working, is to get some sort of empirical evidence, which pretty much boils down to testing.
The value of the math content in a curriculum is more than just "useful math", in the same way that composition, literature, art, science, and history courses have value far beyond the explicit content. It's true that the specific mathematical skills that are taught in high school and college math are not necessary for most people. However, the rigorous logical analysis and problem solving skills necessary in mathematics are absolutely essential to an educated person.
I've forgotten most of the specific content of my literature courses, but they were part of how I learned how to read critically. I don't remember much from my college chemistry courses, but they helped me to think scientifically. I've forgotten many of the details from my history, art, and social science courses, but along the way I learned to analyze and appreciate the world around me.
The purpose of an education is to learn to think, and mathematics is a crucial part of that process.
Stick it to da' man: factor a polynomial!
Funny but also kinda true. Math is a gateway to Critical Thinking or Logic. The kind of accuracy and clarity you get with math isn't something that most modern governments really want to encourage in the populace. Not the math itself, but the kinds of thinking you learn by way of math. It's much easier to sway them with a convincing soundbite than to actually have to have a through and logical understanding of an issue. Factoring a polynomial teaches you break things down into clear components in a much different way than you will get if you are only ever exposed to literature,history,and civics. A well educated thinking man is going to be a politicians toughest constituent.
We are all just people.
No, you're not a former Math teacher. You're still a Math teacher, only now you're a math teacher with integrity. That's a former school. You're still a Keeper of the Flame of Knowledge. That building used to be a place where Knowledge was passed on. Now, like me, you're probably making the money you should have made as a teacher doing something else. And, yes, our world is poorer for it.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
This isn't about each student's ability to gain admission into college. The schools are doing this because when students get good grades, the school gets recognition and money. If more students take harder classes and therefore get lower grades, the school gets less money and less recognition. Therefore, make everyone take classes they will get A's in and all is good.
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
You would absolutely love having a background in EE.
It makes the difference between shopping for a CD player and saying, "Oh, so they put fun inside" and "it's still going to be limited by the sensitivity of the DAC, so I don't need to pay extra for the oversampling."
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
I'd give you +1 insightful moderation points if I had any.
The best teachers we had were those that had the entire syllabus on glossy workcards (glossy to stop them getting all torn and smudged). In that way every student could more or less work at their own speed. If anyone missed or fell behind a lesson for any reason, they could quickly catch up by working at home. The worst teachers were the ones that made everyone work in lock-step from the blackboard - mainly wordy subjects like history.
The best books were the Lett's study guides for A-levels. They had the entire syllabus for every exam board listed on the front pages, along with each module in a separate chapter. Combined with past exam paper questions, anyone who
wished to learn a subject could simply work from home in this way.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
In *general* (not in *all* cases but in the majority of them) people tend to do whatever they have been given incentive to do. When you judge the success of a school by how many A's they give to their own students, you have given them just as much incentive to exercise statistical manipulation and practice grade inflation as you have to provide an education.
I believe that the people who test students, and the people who educate students, should be different people. The educators should not be able to rate their own success by giving whatever grades they please to their own students. Instead, the public school should only provide the education. Then, at the end of the year, the students are sent off to take some standardized tests which are graded by people who do not work for the school board, and who focus primarily on objective criteria.
Since the educators will no longer be able to determine the grades, and since the grades will still be used as a determination of the success of the educators, they now have to focus their efforts on the providence of a good education (rather than the grade inflation and what have you).
I think it would help. It would create its own set of problems (schools trying to expel special-needs students rather than help them, for example), so it is not a perfect solution. But I do think it would help.