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How US Schools' Culture Stifles Math Achievement
Zarf writes "I'd like to file a bug report on the US educational system. The New York Times reports on a recent study that shows the US fails to encourage academic talent as a culture.'"There is something about the culture in American society today which doesn't really seem to encourage men or women in mathematics," said Michael Sipser, the head of M.I.T.'s math department. "Sports achievement gets lots of coverage in the media. Academic achievement gets almost none."' While we've suspected that the US might be falling behind academically, this study shows that it is actually due to cultural factors that are devaluing the success of our students. I suspect there's a flaw in the US cultural system that prevents achievement on the academic front from being perceived as valuable. Could anyone suggest a patch for this bug or is this cause for a rewrite?"
Make it financially rewarding to learn and teach math.
That will just make little Johnny feel stupid! So, instead, let's just make everyone stupid and pretend they're not. In no time, we won't even know the difference. Now, where's my Brawndo?
For what it's worth, my mathematics professor saw this. And she polled our class this morning in lecture, seeing who was an immigrant or of immigrant parents. And most of us were. :\
Exactly. When NFL quarterbacks get millions and top-of-the-line math teachers get a few tens of thousands, guess which way a physically fit but also smart student would go.
Who knew that youth culture frowns on academic achievement and prizes athletics above all else? This is a startling revelation!
Maths are simply not lovable
I suspect there's a flaw in the US cultural system that prevents achievement on the academic front as valuable
You think? Anybody paying any attention to the current presidential election will see the Republican Party attempting to portray education = bad, ignorant= good. (Dumb) people buy it. It's a serious cultural problem in there here United States.
I don't respond to AC's.
It's the reason people are so against.. reason.
Let's be proactive about it, too. Let's start with children, by teaching them that religion is a problem, instead of a solution. Let's treat religion as a mental disease like schizophrenia. Let's go ahead and remove the first amendment "freedom of religion" clause and actually make religion illegal and dangerous.
Nothing good has come from religion that can come without religion.
good luck with that.
It's unfortunate that even in politics, some group will try to say that if someone is highly educated, they are labeled as "elitist, cause they ain't like us folk."
You never expect irony, do you?
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@iyfwrestling
Homeschooling.
Need an automatic screenshot taker? Try here.
I bet if he knew what lengths those people go through to sell themselves, what malleable whores they are when you get right down to it, and how he'd be expected to be the same if mathematicians were treated like sports and theater and music, he wouldn't want them anywhere near him.
If you're a great mathematician, and someone needs a great mathematician, it doesn't matter if they hate your fucking guts, they still need to treat you with respect and deal with you. That's one of the perks of the field.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Schools do more for teachers than for students.
I agree that the culture we expose our youth too doesn't really encourage kids to learn math and science. I doubt we're capable of turning our culture around though. It is pretty much depressing, but I guess that will make me an even more valuable employee. I just might have to learn another language.
"The right to do something does not mean doing it is right." William Safire
It is. The article talks about that. It just isn't publicized.
Knowing math is an easy way to float to the top in economics and finance, two very lucrative fields.
While this may seem very partisan I think it's timely and as such I'm going to risk getting modded down by right wing zealots.
The GOP has increasingly become a huge fan of this 'dumb is good' type of culture. For a number of reasons. It's not that they don't want any smart people. Rather they just don't want everyone to be smart. If your smart you can see though a lot of things that they would rather you not. Now the same is true to an extent of people on the left. And even some in the center. However no party has embraced this idea of keeping the populace as a whole dumbed down as the right wing/GOP.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/opinion/10brooks.html?hp
David Brooks does a great idea in showing how this mindset has been honed over the years.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Math isn't cool. Reading isn't either.
The is no improvement possible in education. The system operates under union rules. There will be no changes except those changes that help the union.
Your goal for better math education and a higher value for math achievement is not useful to improve things for the union.
Today? Was it ever otherwise?
I come to this as a "child of Sputnik:" I entered elementary school in 1957, and I can tell you that the "culture of American society" as found in any public schools I ever saw never came anywhere close to encouraging academics of any sort, much less mathematics. And these were far from poor schools or inner-city, they were districts where college graduates were the majority of parents.
I know some very sharp people from my high-school graduating class. They fall into two categories: those who were socially successful and those who made the mistake of letting other students find out that they had brains.
Example: Lynda Carter (yes, Wonder Woman) is now known as a very sharp businesswoman. Forty years ago, she was the quintessential airhead.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Even at the college I went to, a small, private liberal arts college that highly values education, sports achievement is made more visible by school. I was a music major, and computer science major; music majors are very busy with extra-curricular activities, but there is no Music Major Academic Achievement award. On the other hand, the school honors all athletes with high GPAs, because of the difficulty in balancing sports and academics.
I think even this trite example shows the sports-focus in a lot of schools. It's an achievement to be involved in sports on top of being a good student; it's a lesser achievement to be involved in music on top of academics.
Fixes for this? I don't know if it's just money. I think a focus does need to come away from sports. Part of that would be money (grants/scholarships for sports), but I think part of it is a culture that values entertainment and physical activity over, well, *thinking.* Even history seems to be going out the window because of fear of being politically incorrect or offending some people group or minority. Math and science are not taught because, IMO, kids don't "like" the as much, by default, as arts or sports (this coming from a half music major, mind you). This has definite effects on "thinking." "Thinking" is NOT always fun, but I think kids need to be taught that not everything that is necessary and good is "fun."
But that doesn't go over well in an entertainment-focused culture/society/world... nor an educational system that is more designed to please the kid than teach the kid, and more designed to push a worldview or agenda than real knowledge and the ability to think and come to conclusions based on factual knowledge, not interpreted evidence.
Unless we bring back lynch mobs.
Those were the days.
It already is; people just don't see the connection. Strength in math has done wonders for my career. It has allowed me to take on projects that would not otherwise be available to me.
The problem is related to probability in a way. Success at sports is highly rewarded but difficult to achieve (as defined by a standard of playing in a professional league at a national level). In academics, success (attainment of a graduate degree) is easier (number of people able to reach the goal) to achieve though still a difficult task.
What would promote "stronger" academics would be a pay grade within the academic realm for achievements.
Also, keep in mind that the patent and copyright system were designed to do exactly what you are saying. Promotion of the arts and sciences is why people are supposed to get exclusive rights to "their" idea. It is up to them to profit from it. There is an opportunity for success, but the problem is the link between the success and the academics is missing.
and to rile the anti-MS crowd a bit - Bill Gates is considered by many (of the non-programming crowd) to be the biggest nerd/genius in this respect. That is what a competitive academic environment would entail.
(sorry for my over- and mis-use of parenthesis)... (actually I'm not, but thought I would appologize anyways).
When all else fails, try.
I had some truly great math teachers. Makes no difference if you have to choose between number theory and nookie.
Horse, water.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I agree, in the US, it's not "cool" to excel academically. Our society tells its young what is important by the amount of money you are paid. Look at the salaries that sport and entertainment stars get. Ask many students what they want to be and these occupations are very high (if not at the top) on the list. Until US society gets its priorities straight, we will continue to decline.
Back when I was in high school, several times each year quite a bit of time was wasted in school assemblies. These always recognized the various sports teams, even the ones that were really not that good. It wasn't until my senior year that any academic achievement was recognized at an assembly. We had two students who (one that year, one the year before) had gotten perfect scores on the SAT and the academic decathlon team brought back a trophy. The two who had gotten the perfect SAT scores later told me that they would have rather not been singled out at the assembly. Never mind students who were going to various math and science competitions and bringing back awards. Who cares about that? (Not that any of the students really cared about anything at the assemblies. All it did was shorten the classes so that nothing meaningful could be done in any of them.)
Remember RFC 873!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTby_e4-Rhg
Potato farming?
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
At High School here you can choose if you want to continue with more *advanced math* or continue with english/german/french, athletics, economics, society & politics etc.
Most students choose something like society & politics because it's *easy*, and most student avoid math because its too *difficult*.
Where does the negativity come from?
One reason: In this country, the rewards don't justify the effort put into becoming a good mathematician, scientist or engineer. Their financial rewards are relatively small, they are highly expendable and the job security isn't good. I am an engineer and lost a job recently that is now being outsourced to Taiwan. Another reason: Kids spend a lot of time in front of the TV and you'll rarely hear of an educational program outside of PBS, the History Channel or the Discovery Channel. Most TV programs today glorify hospital and courtroom dramas. The message: Its cool to be a doctor or a lawyer. Another reason: Many teachers in grade school don't REALLY know math or don't know how to teach it.
So set up and teach your child math at home.
Ron Paul?
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
For God's sake, everyone, you're racist if you think this is genetic! Okay, it's not the school system, but it's still the culture. It has to be.
However, one major tenet of Negro culture is the disdain for academics and learning. In Negro culture mathematics is perhaps the most scorned of all academic endeavors. In the parlance of the Negro, to excel in mathematics is to "act white"
As a footnote, let us examine the list of great mathematicians and physicists who are Negroes:
My thinking exactly....as soon as someone starts earning 7+ figures, is on TV, gets endorsment money from calculator companies, and all the chicks they can handle, then people will start migrating to and excelling at mathematics in droves.
Trouble is, you don't generally get famous and rich solving derivatives.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
As a just recently out of highschool into college student, I can tell you that anyone with a head on their shoulders has known this for awhile now. In America being smart in young culture has often led to downfalls. I know that throughout my high school career I often had to dumb myself down to fit in with my peers in my non-Advanced Placement classes. A peer who can't understand your vocabulary tends to start to shun you rather quickly.
The main cause of all this is that academic achievement gives you no social status amongst your peers until later years in your life. Hours spent increasing your knowledge and academics are hours wasted improving your social standing, and can lead to complete cuts from social communities, ie, how 'geeks' are truly born. The sad fact is that in most young cultures the driving force are the most 'mature' (in a twisted sense of the word) ones. The ones that go out, party, and experience the darker sides of the world the fastest, are usually the ones who take up the reign as the popular crowd. And are usually the least inclined to diligent study.
Michael Sipser is one of the most friendly mathematicians/theoretical computer scientists I've ever met. I am sure he is helping MIT's math department greatly, and maybe even the US and world.
A long long time ago, after my funding fell through (long story), I unofficially attended a semester at MIT taking a few math and computer science classes. I cleared it with all involved, and no one really minded my sitting in, although a few people just tolerated me.
Even though I was almost totally unofficial, Sipser took the time to meet with me and talk about my taking the class in depth. He even wound up writing me letters of recommendation for research programs and grad schools, and followed through about them! Although I "earned" the letters (I'm not bragging by any means - it was a real class, but not an excruciating one; I'm just saying that it wasn't soft-hearted charity), I didn't realize at the time just how far beyond-the-call-of-duty this kind of support was, and how fortunate I was to get that opportunity.
If you're an MIT student, take Sipser's complexity class - it's awesome. If you're not an MIT student ... take Sipser's complexity class - it's awesome! ;-)
It might not be a surprise then, that he has an incredibly well-written (although typo-laden) and accessible intro book on complexity theory, the standard for beginning undergrads, in addition to his papers. He really cares about his subject, and further, the teaching of that subject.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
When a math teacher can get millions of people to watch commercials and thousands of people to pay $40 to watch them teach math for 2 hours, then they'll get paid as much as pro athletes.
Some use of mass media might actually make this closer to reality. The best math teachers could teach millions of students using video and the Internet -- with lower-paid local assistants to help one-on-one and answer questions.
But the current union structure of education makes experiments like this impossible. Unions don't want one teacher teaching thousands of students. They want the maximum number of union teachers teaching the minimum number of students. It's not about quality. It's not about productivity. It's not about achievement. It's about expanding the union payroll and nothing else.
I think it comes down to what's fun and what attracts girls. Which are somewhat inclusive.
If you're physically inclined you can attract a lot of attention (and thus popularity and girls) in school by becoming a star athlete. If you're not physically inclined then you can do the same by getting into the arts. Pick up an instrument, start doing drugs and attract a different kind of girl and become popular that way.
If you go into math and science most of the girls (and the people having all of the fun) will label you a nerd and want nothing to do with you because you are associated with courses that they find hard and boring.
I didn't know very many kids in high school who really thought about money all that much. Some of them had part time jobs to pay for their weed and dates but thinking ahead to making tons of money and being rich was something that you did via a) fun (playing sports or an instrument) and b) luck. Maybe my position is unique because I went to an arts school and played in bands but most of us figured we'd end up starving junkies trying to "make it". Money just wasn't something that we thought all that much about.
I don't know what the answer is. You're not going to make math and science fun for people who don't like it. The real issue is that it doesn't have mass appeal. I know there's going to people (I'd be one of them) pulling their hair out and screaming "WHO SAYS MATH ISN'T FUN!?" ... but the majority of people who I know simply don't like it. And thus it's not culturally popular. Of course this doesn't answer the question of why adults and mainstream media doesn't encourage academic excellence. Only why most kids don't chose to excel at it.
I don't know how many people over the last 10 or 15 years --- probably 20'ish --- I have discussed America's math problems with who when I said that culture was the source of the deficiency told me that I was wrong and the problem was the way that we teach math is "dull", "boring", or "not hands on enough" or "not practical and relies on too much memorization". This was especially silly to me considering how American math classes are like Disneyland compared to other countries' curriculum, yet those countries continue to produce excellent math students.
For crying out loud - MAKE IT INTERESTING. I remember doing what I referred to as "Math for the sake of Math". Show how it's useful - the easiest way is through teaching Science. And separate the students that have talent from those who don't. It's not about leaving the "dumb" ones behind - having no talent in math/science doesn't make them dumb. These people probably don't care about the subjects anyway. Just don't hold back the ones who could go further.
Do this and you will also be able to attract better teachers. I know multiple would-be teachers that won't teach because of the level of nonsense related to disruptive students that must be dealt with over and over again. Disruptive students are often ones who have become bored because they're studying things they aren't interested in.
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
Look it up sometime, particularly in the US with regards to government (i.e.: taxpayer-funded) schools, which have almost zero accountability to the taxpayers themselves. Or watch the movie Stand and Deliver, or read the book Ender's Game. Or look at the way unions enforce industry pay rates. Or how islamic dictatorships suppress knowledge outside of the mosques. History (especially recent history) is replete with dramatized examples of the repression of "excellence" in the anti-intellectual vein. Most commonly, it is the symptom of the desire to maintain power but almost as frequently, it is done in the name of saving face.
Very few things have ever goaded me into a red haze. This sort of thing is one of them and is one of the reasons I'm so glad to see my family home-schooling many of my cousins. Their steeper learning curve constantly reminds me of just how destructive the lowest-common-denominator aggregation of our schools really is.
It really boils down to the fact that Beavis and Butthead trumped Ferris Bueller. We are living in the aftermath of that cultural selection. Bread and circuses my friends. Bread and circuses.
Drop the tech the test system and give the schools more funding.
Easy. Put a man on Mars. For only a few billion dollars, you can have all the coverage you want, and inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists (and mathematicians).
That's a 69 with 2 fingers in yer ass.
We had a football team in high school that got new uniforms and equipment every year. My chemistry teacher had to rent the van for the science league out of his own pocket.
Disgusting
We should stop federal funding for institutions that give full rides for sports scholarships. Too many teens already are turning to steroids to gain an upper hand. The idea would be the radical side of this, but I'm sure there is a happy medium. Also, we should start earlier in our teaching of complex mathematical concepts. When children aren't learning algebra until the 9th or 10th grade (It does happen) it becomes impossible to get them to calculus before college. If algebra started in the 3rd grade, that still leaves 2 years for children to learn order of operations. This means that by grade 4 the children would have the necessary prequisites for learning logical sequences and proofs. While I don't think that this will solve everything, it would be a great place to start. Will the kids ever thank us for this? Probably not. It would mean taking a harder look at what it takes to stay competitive in a scholastic environment, and some people (not sure why, but parents often complain about how tough the kids already have it) are just not comfortable with making kids learn more early on. I know the parents have many responsiblities, but the one that should be most on their minds would be attaining the best education possible for their children. To be honest, I'm probably not the one to be telling you this. I'd like to hear more from parents and from people who have stories about how their creativity was stifled in an acedemic situation. Perhaps that would give those of us without children a greater understanding of what really seems to be required in this particular crisis.
Thank you for your time, and uh... Party on dudes!
I'd like to file a bug report on the US educational system.
Status: Resolved
Resolution: WORKSFORME
Seriously, the only way to be good at math is to love math. If you love math, then it does not matter what others may think or whether you get any media coverage.
This does not guarantee you'll actually get significantly better results, it merely guarantees that the more obvious bugs are fixed and that exceptional minds are not destroyed by tedium and an abusive environment. There are likely many other bugs that will prevent maximal gains.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
> Make it financially rewarding to learn and teach math.
That deserves at least a 6. There are a lot of unemployed Math PhDs. The problem isn't a lack of people going into math, it's a lack of good jobs for them.
You guys really allow Afro-Americans at universities these days? Wow, that's progress ...
send + more == money?
Do it for the LOLZ
If math got you sex math would be everywhere.
duh
Our losing football team gets letterman jackets because they passed and our winning math team gets a $ .50 blue ribbon to hang on our wall :(
Don't think we even got a trophy for the school for the team event.
I don't see that it has progressed any since then. Well the school does have a wonderful new gym and weightroom....
I got more satisfaction from being in a mediocre drum corps than a math team that won at the state level.
It's not as if the media were ignorant of the trends. They have seen the future and made fun of it.
The current trends are worrisome, not only in the US, but in the whole world. The easiest way to become a millionaire seems to be in sports or music, and in many countries, including a large part of the USA, being a "scholar" means studying religion.
And don't think that a long-lasting total cultural decadence cannot happen, because it has happened before.
This is no joke, if mankind forgets math, we will suffer a worse fate than global warming, communism, and radical Islamism put together.
You know, if you come on slashdot complaining that America honors its athletes too highly while ignoring achievement in areas of actual value, do you really think anyone is going to disagree with you? This is nerdopolis, we've all had this thought before. We just can't seem to get anyone else to listen to our concerns, because no one listens to the nerds until the shit stinks so bad a clothespin over your nose won't do the trick anymore.
Blaming teacher unions for unsatisfactory results is a kneejerk response. A few months back, the Wall Street Journal had an article on how many American educators are looking to Finland for teaching models, because Finland has remarkably high student achievement across the board. Yet, Finland and its fellow Nordic countries are marked by some of the strongest unions on the planet.
Furthermore, I suspect many individual American teachers, not just the union fatcats you imagine, would prefer teaching classes as small as possible. The best teachers get great pleasure out of directing young people and showing them that learning can be fun. If you have too many students, it's just too impersonal and the emotional contact is lost.
I don't think that the difference in payoff is the reason. Very, very few student athletes will ever end up making any notable amount of money on athletics. Many of them will make nothing, most of the rest will make some little league coaching fees and maybe a smallish athletic scholarship. Very few math students will ever make big money with math(with a fairly small number of finance types, startups that do really well, and similar being the exception); but there are a lot more solid middle/upper-middle level jobs that you can get with math than with sports ability.
I think it has much more to do with culture. Either people are utterly failing at calculating expected value, and actually think that they are going to be NFL stars, A-list actors, rock gods, or whatever and are acting rationally; but on the basis of bad data, or things like sports, music, and entertainment industry stuff have greater cultural attraction. I'm guessing the latter.
If it were a money thing, the least popular kids in school would be the B-list athletes: Not good enough to earn any money playing sports; but still busting their asses(and their knees) on the field. Suckers! That isn't the case at all. A-list athletes tend to be more popular; but the social hierarchy seems to have very little to do with the expected lifetime earning potential of those involved.
The people that grew up with the moon landings on TV are getting old and replaced by a generation that did not have such great role models. Many of the scientist today were inspired by the astronauts. Today science is not that high profile. We need something like the moon landings to inspire children for a lifetime.
If it was hard to write it should be hard to read.
A good example calculus problem would be:
:)
"Johnny is staggering home from a party but has to urinate. The parabolic arc of his piss-stream can be modelled by the equation 3t-16t^2. If Johnny's weenie is three feet higher than the ground, then how far will he pee? how long will it take for his piss to hit the sidewalk? What is the velocity of his piss be when it hits the ground? "
Make a textbook with similar examples and its 120-dollar price tag will be fully justified
So set up and teach your child math at home.
This is what we just did last week. We pulled our kids out of school because we were so disgusted with the "tall poppies" attitude to academic achievement. I.e, the idea that the flowers that stand taller in the flower bed need to be pruned to keep them in line... or that the kids who want to learn more need to be force to do work that the find drudgery just because they can't move ahead of the rest of the class.
My 2nd grader's teacher was complaining that he wasn't doing his math worksheets or playing the adding games in class. I saw one of his math worksheets where he was so bored that he looked up Roman numerals in one of his books and taught himself how to do the whole homework in Roman numerals... and then I saw where the teacher then made him re-do the 'right-way'. We've had similar experiences with his past teachers and the principal has a similar attitude that he should do the same work as everyone else in the same way.
He's been home-schooled for only a week, and now he's gone past the adding 1-digit numbers that they were doing in class and is now adding and subtracting three-digit numbers with carrying and borrowing. He has no trouble getting his math worksheets done now. He's even said that "This is harder, but more interesting so I like it."
AND I live in one of the better school districts in the LA area.. where the teachers are well paid...
I'm a left-winger and I used to be all against school vouchers... but now I've seen the light. We need real competition, and we need to bust the teacher's unions to get the bozos out of our school system.
It's not that parents aren't involved... It's not that teachers don't get paid enough... It's not the burden of standardized tests. It's that our nation's schools are run by a bunch of bozos who pay teachers on the basis of seniority instead of performance, bozos who disparage being elite academically, but celebrate athletic elitism, and frankly that among the ranks of our teachers are some of the dumbest people in our society.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
get involved with your kids school.
I volunteer to coach a Lego robotics team; which was created because another volunteer did it.
My wife volunteers for art programs, and other school activities. She thought the display case should be changed more often to reflect what's going on. She took ownership and gets it done.
She was the president of the PTA last year. She got programs going that brought money into the treasury; which was used to by expensive things for the class rooms.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Kids in the U.S. aren't doing as well in school anymore as a whole because a lot more of them don't speak a word of English when they start going to school.
"There is something about the culture in American society today which doesn't really seem to encourage men or women in mathematics," said Michael Sipser, the head of M.I.T.'s math department. "Sports achievement gets lots of coverage in the media. Academic achievement gets almost none."
Assuming he's talking about pure instead of applied math. Sports has all kinds of math in it. One can make one interesting by recognizing it in the other.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Gladiators that earn $$$ and inspire lower classes to engage in dead-end activities are unrelated to good schools and motivations for the upper class offspring. I never saw the "untinterested in math and sciences" issue outside trailer parks.
Just have to wonder if empires start to fall when the population takes their prosperity as a birthright and a fact they don't have to put effort into to keep.
The only thing that might make the US different is the influx of immigrants who have a gut feeling that education will help their children not have to do horrible jobs for tiny wages.
Imagine the wages they would get without unions. Or having someone to back them when needed. Look at the run of the mill parochial schools versus public schools, where they have teachers that are not unionized. They make diddly squat, have few benefits, and can be fired for stupid things like who they marry or don't marry. And the individual results aren't so amazing with their students; their high scores are simply because these schools can cherry pick students.
It costs money and does not generate any revenue (unlike college sports, which the colleges are now so dependent on for income that not even a 12-step program could help them). It makes heroes out of kids who are good at running, jumping, and throwing and catching balls. Yeah, those are skills the world really needs.
Put all the money spent on high school sports into hiring GOOD math and science teachers. The reason math and science teaching sucks is that really bright, charismatic people can find better-paying jobs elsewhere.
If we ban high school sports, college recruiters will go away and college sports scholarships will dry up, because nobody will know who's good at running and jumping. The colleges will have to play with whoever turns up, like they used to in the old days. College sports will be exciting and fun again, instead of being semi-professional. In the meantime, the sports scholarship money can go to recruiting math and science whizzes, who are the people that universities are intended for in the first place -- not runners and jumpers.
Make heroes out of the kids who win the science fair, or the ones who ace the math SATs. Load them down with scholarships. Print their pictures in the newspaper. Send 'em to meet the President. Hire hot models (male and female) to be in pictures with them to give the impression that they're sexy. The message will get out.
I piss off bigots.
Most of our country's math teachers don't understand math well enough to make it interesting. They think it is just memorizing 'math facts' and memorizing cookbook ways to solve problems. They don't see it as understanding the underlying structure of the world or as creative problem solving. They see creativity as something for writing class and understanding as something you get from reading textbooks.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Blaming teacher unions for unsatisfactory results is a kneejerk response.
It's not about blame. The union prevents change. It's simply fact.
A few months back, the Wall Street Journal had an article on how many American educators are looking to Finland for teaching models, because Finland has remarkably high student achievement across the board. Yet, Finland and its fellow Nordic countries are marked by some of the strongest unions on the planet.
Wow. So you're saying union teachers trying to perpetuate a union system are looking to another union system to guide them?
Furthermore, I suspect many individual American teachers, not just the union fatcats you imagine, would prefer teaching classes as small as possible. The best teachers get great pleasure out of directing young people and showing them that learning can be fun. If you have too many students, it's just too impersonal and the emotional contact is lost.
Nevermind the students. Nevermind achievement. Nevermind productivity. The education system, in your description, exists to make teachers happy.
Some of the rest of us would like it to do something for the students too.
Recognition for passing a standardized test that the good students know is worthless is worthless recognition. Recognition for something that actually requires understanding - ah, now that's something different. The Great Egg Race (as presented by Prof. Heinz Wolff) and the school version (The Granada Power Game), TV shows like "Now Get Out Of That", and open contests like the Micromouse Tournament - these achieved a lot for various branches of engineering and material science at the height of their respective popularity. Maths Olympics do something, but not a whole lot, and not that many schools anywhere field much of a team. Some of Keith Devlin's maths-related puzzles might help too, but you really do need something extraordinary in mathematics that allows people to earn what they regard as both well-deserved and "real" recognition, that can actually stand up to being compared to the top engineering efforts. (No, "battlebots" don't count for engineering, unless they're genuinely hand-crafted rather than COTS plug-and-power-play systems. The idea is to get people to think with their brains, not their wallets.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Both the NYT and Sipser should be ashamed for hyping such well worn material as though it were news. The only thing surprising here is that someone had the guts to publish it. Not only have we in the US known this for a long time, so have other countries and they've let us know repeatedly that they know. If I write an article that says it's possible to send voice over a wire like a talking telegraph, can I get into NYT too?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
If you really think this is a problem, put your money into it. I did. So there is now an endowment for the math and sciences at my former high school. Don't whine, actually do something
It's that our nation's schools are run by a bunch of bozos who pay teachers on the basis of seniority instead of performance, bozos who disparage being elite academically, but celebrate athletic elitism, and frankly that among the ranks of our teachers are some of the dumbest people in our society.
You know, it's a pretty daunting task to me personally to teach even one child for a year. Teaching 20 kids, even if they were synchronized in their abilities and even if they were perfectly obedient, would be even tougher.
But of course, every kid is different. Making sure all 20 kids are learning up to his potential in even one subject area for one hour a day, without leaving the dumb ones in the dust or leaving the smart ones bored... I think pretty highly of myself, but I know that's far beyond me. A little respect for people who are tasked with doing what is essentially AN IMPOSSIBLE JOB is due.
This phrase is so overused. There are other cultural factors that foster success that aren't necessarily linked to academics. It's not like the US culture suddenly changed over the last 5 years and is falling apart because of it; the culture was pretty much the same in the 90's when the US led the internet tech boom. Entreprenuership, independent thinking, charity, and hard work have long been a greater part of US culture than academics, and that's not necessarily a horrible thing.
While it would be nice if there was more promotion of academics, claiming that it's the root cause for the decline of the US is shortsided.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
FWIW, part of the delegation were not teachers at all, though involved in the field of education (and even from anti-union backgrounds). The high performance of certain other countries in education is evident to people from a variety of political perspectives.
Not at all, but if you want to keep great teachers who ensure productivity and achievement, you have to keep them comfortable, otherwise they leave for some other job. This is a basic rule of business.
2. Divide-by-zero patch
2. Reboot
2. Teach future athletes "new math" so they ex, umm, accept lower figures in their salaries...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
FWIW pro Athletes are paid so damn much because of a ruling long ago which decided that they are entertainers, and should be paid as such(too lazy to look it up, google it). Think about them as being well-paid actors in a weekly movie series.
The prestige lies not in the money or physicality so much as the Hollywood-ality of it.
"Most TV programs today glorify hospital and courtroom dramas. "
Numb3rs.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Imagine the wages they would get without unions. Or having someone to back them when needed. Look at the run of the mill parochial schools versus public schools, where they have teachers that are not unionized. They make diddly squat, have few benefits, and can be fired for stupid things like who they marry or don't marry.
Schools should be for students. They were not originally intended to be run solely for the benefit of teachers. The union doesn't care about the students because the students don't pay union dues.
Why should the rest of society fund an entire institution entirely for the benefit of teachers?
And the individual results aren't so amazing with their students; their high scores are simply because these schools can cherry pick students.
When you get the best results, you don't have to make such excuses.
Modded insightful? You could argue that part of the problem is "gangster rap culture", but it is a serious logical error to blame everyone in a group for the actions of certain individuals within that group.
you have a racist note in your comment coward.
Of course all of the girls go for the math whiz, right guys? Guys?
/Goes back to posting on slashdot
Not praising the worthy prevents contention,
Not esteeming the valuable prevents theft,
Not displaying the beautiful prevents desire.
In this manner the sage governs people:
Emptying their minds,
Filling their bellies,
Weakening their ambitions,
And strengthening their bones.
If people lack knowledge and desire
Then they can not act;
If no action is taken
Harmony remains.
I say we take off, and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
On the other hand, people involved in high school sports who win the adoration of their peers may yet make good money because they establish very useful people skills. If you are intelligent but can't win people over at all, you aren't going to have as many job opportunities as someone who might be a bit less brainy but who is immensely charismatic. Anecdotal evidence, sure, but I've discovered in going through my high school classmates on Facebook that the supposedly brainless jocks have often become affluent, while some of the nerdiest are working crap jobs and still living at home.
The article in question.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
It's considered downright BAD to be good at math in this culture.
I have a major in math, and if I wanted to have friends, and preferably girlfriends, I made damn sure either to not tell them I was in mathematics, that I hated math, that I sucked at it, or some combination of those.
For that matter, it's generally perceived that girls go for a muscular man, not someone who worked to get their masters. It's so plainly visible in television, movies and commercials. I couldn't imagine living in China, Japan, or any of the other countries where academic achievement is considered sexy by the culture itself.
Plus, the Republicans have shown us that it's not important to be well-read, or, shall we say, "elite". It is important to be just like everybody else, know things by gut feel, and not flip-flop because you have learned something new about the circumstances.
From my experience (having graduated not too long ago from a large state research uni), an undergraduate student's main purpose at a US university is not getting an education, but instead generating revenue for the school, the graduate level researchers, and even the community.
For example, the tuition was raised significantly every year - huge fees were tagged onto each undergrad's bill each year to pay for new construction of buildings that would not be even be used by the undergrads when completed (for example, new admin offices, a law school building, etc). The meal plans and dorm rates were so expensive, that I could not imagine the school *not* making a decent profit on them.
Walking near the hub of campus, one would be inundated with offers for credit cards from financial firms paying for the chance to be on campus. The main quad area would have weekly 'festivals' where multiple companies would set up big ads for whatever it was they were selling. Like the banks, these companies payed big bucks to the administrators for this opportunity.
On Saturdays, I'd sometimes have to go into the Engineering labs to finish up projects, and my walk went directly by the football stadium and all the tailgaters; during the football season, it quickly became apparent just how much money the student athletes brought in for the school. Traffic backed up for miles with alums coming to the campus with credit cards ready to pay big bucks for tickets, overpriced food, parking, t-shirts, and lots of booze. The students were, of course, offered cheap tickets to the game, though I sometimes think the only reason was to get thousands of cute 19 year old college girls into the area for the previously mentioned alums to gawk at. Not just the university, but the whole college town depended on game days for huge percentages of their revenue.
And don't even get me started on some of the other ways undergrads were screwed - the well known text-book scam, required academic 'projects' where students are essentially used as free labor for industry, outrageous interest rates hoisted on naive students. I remember the computer science department started offering graduate level courses online for professionals trying to get their masters/phds through distance learning. If, by the near-start of the semester, one of these online courses did not have enough distance learners signed up, some of these 'graduate level' courses would suddenly be included in the required elective courses for undergrads. Of course, even though I graduated with more than enough credits for an undergrad, I was denied the grad level credits after taking a few of these exact same courses that non-undergrads took and received credit towards their master's degree.
The worst part about it is that the majority of students will finish up after 4-5 years with a worthless liberal arts degree, and $50,000+ dollars of debt that they'll be paying off for the next 20 years. The majority of my friends who are in their late twenties are still working off their school debts...
(Preface: Math is fun.)
It is financially rewarding to _really_ learn math. some punk middling by in "physics for people who don't like physics 101" will probably not do well.
I'm studying engineering. Engineers get paid well.
A friend of mine took a ton of math, got a job writing code for AT&T, he's not getting paid like an NFL quarterback, but he's plenty comfortable.
Someone can teach math their entire life. A math teacher likely understands compound interest, and will invest accordingly.
What's the career span of an NFL quarterback (and how likely is it that they'll blow it all MC-Hammer style)?
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
Not at all, but if you want to keep great teachers who ensure productivity and achievement, you have to keep them comfortable, otherwise they leave for some other job. This is a basic rule of business.
This assumes the result of "productivity and achievement". That result is not in evidence in much of the educational system. That's why change is in order. If the system were already great then you might have a point. But it is not.
No change can happen though. It is disallowed by the union.
Lets see, the exams mainly test ones memmory and not much else. Students are forced to learn so much shit at one time that they almost forget it immediately as they never use it in any meaningful context except to pass the exam. Students are pitted against each other like grey hound dogs at the race track for shit they care nothing about.
This is exactly why "education" has such a bad stigma here because the school system forces those who actually are interested in "real educatioin" to be seen as brown nosers/tools/whatever the latest word is for robots who obey their master without question.
People tend to make decisions based on emotion and then justify these decisions by facts.
honestly, i know a few math phd's and most of them merely want to be university teachers.
not because they want to further other peoples educations, but rather becuase they know that once they are there, they basically have a job for life with very little chance of being fired.
I also know some others who are very good with math, and are in the financial and economic fields and make high six figure salaries.....
none of them have phd's.
i've found a lot of phds are gotten merely because they person who got them didnt want to get a real job and had a means to keep being a student.
not all, but many.
Sports achievement == Lots of money for lots of people (sure, Barry Bonds makes a lot, but the people betting on him and the franchise that hired him is making just as much!)
Academic achievement == Lots of money for [pretty much] one person (or no money for one person if he gets his patent stolen).
The funny thing is your ego will get inflated in both cases...Zing!
But where it is in evidence, with individual teachers, it would be wise to ensure that they continue what they are doing.
No change can happen though. It is disallowed by the union.
You repeat this like a mantra. Any attempt to ascribe a single malicious motive to organization made up of thousands of people, who if questioned individually would tell me that the students come first, is likely to be fallacious.
A little respect for people who are tasked with doing what is essentially AN IMPOSSIBLE JOB is due.
It's such an impossible job that every country in the world is just a big a failure as the US in teaching math??
If it is an impossible job then why do we bother spending tax payer money even trying? Seriously, why in the world would we as a society spend so much money to try and make something impossible happen?
I guess it being an impossible job has nothing to do with the fact that teachers in CA don't even work full 8 hour days and have teaching in-service days to make back any extra overtime hours that they might have accidentally worked?
I guess it being impossible has nothing to do with the schools paying people based on seniority rather than performance so that there is little incentive to try to improve upon the status quo.
We MUST do better by our kids. We must do better by kids of all ability levels. Why do we have special education on one end of the intelligence scale and not on the other end?? Exceptionally gifted kids are roughly 1/1000. Which means that most schools would have several, yet virtually no schools do anything to help these kids.
An example: my school district has a math/science magnet high school, but so many kids qualify that they have a lottery to give kids spots. This is because the standard is that kids have a C-average and be in the top 70% of standardized testing. This, in my view, makes the magnet essentially a scam to get gifted education funds from the state rather than an honest effort to help gifted kids. I could make similar points about most school districts in CA about their magnets and their GATE programs.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Unions don't want one teacher teaching thousands of students. They want the maximum number of union teachers teaching the minimum number of students.
Could that possibly have to do with a high teacher to student ratio leading to higher quality education for the students? While one teacher could lecture thousands of students, they couldn't teach them, teaching a child requires that you are aware of the child's progress and understanding. A good teacher might be able to have that kind of awareness of two dozen students and might be able to occasionally tailor little bits of a lesson to meet the needs of any students not falling in the center section of the bell curve. But a good teacher with ten students could have a much higher level of awareness of each students progress and abilities and could offer a higher level of lesson optimization for each student. Speaking personally as someone who was quite poorly behaved in elementary school, the fewer the students the less opportunity and desire for mischief. When a teacher has 30 kids in a classroom, the kids at each end of the bell curve (ability wise) frequently find the lesson to be meaningless and quickly find other ways to amuse themselves. So in a way the subject line of this thread is right, it's about money, buthe money question isn't about paying teachers millions of dollars, it's about tax base per teacher. If the default class size is 30 kids, then you have 3 times the budget per teacher compared to a 10 student classroom. Realistically, teaching should pay a median collage grad kind of wage, which it does. If you want to improve quality, then reduce student quantity. Paying the existing teachers in a school system 50% more isn't going to do much in terms of the education quality they are able to produce, but if you hire 50% more teachers so that each class is now 2/3rds the size, educational quality will rise quickly. Especially if you allow the teachers enough flexibility in their curriculum to allow them to customize lesson to the needs of the students, rather than holding hard and fast to some statewide rulebook.
We are all just people.
Some fields are tournaments; most go home with nothing, while the extraordinary few make astoundingly large amounts of money. Some are slogs; if you put in the hours and have the basic ability, you will do reasonably well but never make the big time.
Math is one of the latter; if you're good at it, you will have a comfortable middle-class lifestyle, but there are almost no chances to bag a multimillion-dollar payout. So is my field, medicine; there are no poor doctors, but there are vanishingly few who have made Real Money from it. A huge percentage of those who are the first in the family to do medicine are the intelligent children of lower-middle-class or middle-middle-class families; it remains one of the most sure paths into the upper middle class, despite poor hours and an extraordinarily long training period.
I won't steer my children into medicine, though I won't completely discourage it; I'll encourage them to seek a field where they don't have to work nights, weekends, or holidays. My parents couldn't offer me the kind of security - of freedom to take risks - that I will be able to offer them, and so I had to choose a field with a lower maximum reward but essentially no chance of total failure. Michael Dell, for instance, is exactly the kind of person I would hope my children will have the opportunity to be (if they want) - his parents started his first business, when he was a teenager, with a $15k loan (equivalent to about $30K today) that they were able to give him because losing the money wasn't that big of a risk - it was the sort of thing they could take a chance on.
it may be daunting for you, however it isnt for others.
i routinely teach classes on both general computer use, and how to use a very specialized software that i sell. I usually have between 10 and 25 people in my classes, all at different points in their study and these are classes that run for weeks at a time.
if you can do it for a week, you can do it for a school year.
i ENJOY teaching people, and would gladly be a teacher of elementary or junior high students if not for two things.
1. I've met most of the teachers in my local school district. The words "bottom of the barrel" come to mind when talking with them.
2. The school district itself is mind numbingly stupid. they have so many days off, 1 day a week were every student gets out two hours early (and they want to expand this), and they can barely make middle of the road state wide even though i also live in the same city as a MAJOR university which should allow them access to way more resources through programs with the university (which it does with other smaller districts located around mine) but they don't because that would mean that they weren't the best.
elitism is the number one problem with our school system.
they believe they are better and smarter than the rest of us, and are the only ones capable of KNOWING how to teach people.
which is usually wrong and easily proven through logic.
The story is (and how accurate this is I'm not entirely certain) that when Gauss was a child in school, he was acting up in class, and his teacher assigned him the task of adding up all of the numbers between 1 and 100. 2 minutes later, he had the answer, and he showed the teacher that he had figured that 100 + 1 = 101, 99 + 2 = 101... and thus cut it down to 50 pairs of numbers that added up to 101. He then multiplied 50 by 101 to get the answer of 5050.
I mention this because if little Freddy Gauss had done something similarly in our current school system, he'd have gotten one of three responses from the teacher:
1 - "Class, look at what Freddy figured out! Isn't he smart?" This bit of gushing praise would get him pegged as a "teacher's pet," and after his "not-smart" classmates managed to re-arrange his face during recess, he'd decide better than to open his mouth.
2 - "That smart-ass attitude just earned you a trip to the principal's office!" This attitude of "you just made ME look not-smart, so you're going to pay!" will also convince him to shut up next time.
3 - "OK. In that case, add up the numbers between 100 and 200." (Tricky one, that - it's an odd number of elements!) Freddy would be kept busy, while the teacher figured out how to contact Mr. and Mrs. Gauss and suggest that they get their holy terror signed up for advanced math.
Would anyone care to estimate the percentage chance of each response? I'd say that no matter the school, there'd only be a 5% chance of the third option being taken... (and it's predicated on the idea that the teacher would be knowledgeable enough in math to throw a curveball like that last one).
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
Sorry, I just don't get your connecting the difficulty of sport and math.
Playing in the national league of a sport is nothing like getting your basic degree.. The basic degree says you have a good chance of trying out for your local amateur team. Getting a PHD, and tenure and research post in a good university.. Now that's playing in the national league. And it's also exceedingly hard to achieve. And carries nowhere near the kind of take home pay that a premiere league sportsman has.
There is a pay grade within academics for achievements and time. It's called advancement in the department.
However, that pay grade, as previously mentioned is nowhere near the sports personalities' pay.
The time periods for patents were implemented when it took years to get an invention to market, and when you did, because ideas just didn't travel that fast, it took years again for it to saturate a market (in engineering, you'd be lucky to get an advancement in a significant portion of the market within 10 years of getting a patent).
Copyright, when it was first created, gave a period of 14 years complete monopoly of the work to an author. That was deemed a fair period in which to recoup the costs, and make it possible to be an author as a job, and make money.
That was in 1709, when ideas travelled FAR more slowly. So if, in 14 years, an author could make a living writing in 1709 with a limited audience (literacy was low), why on earth does it take the life of the author PLUS 70 years? Because it's profitable to big business, not the individual academic, who, because they don't have the funds to fight the 'big boys', rarely get to play the patent game (copyright, perhaps, but that's another whole minefield).
Yes, many people put Bill Gates as a nerd genius. Yes, he created a huge company, in much the same way as the Ghengis Khan built a large army. Scorched earth tactics that turned a large part of the software world into a wasteland. That was the problem with his version of 'competition'.. It wasn't a fight to get a share of the market, he fought to kill any corporation he couldn't own. Which was great in the financiers eyes, as it was a glowing paragon of their kind of money making machine. That same money making machine which has just ground to a screeching halt.
No, I'm not a rabid anti-Microsoft zealot. Microsoft have come up with great inventions over the years, and MS labs have come up with true innovation.. Just the business side of it has had no honour. It's not what a competitive academic environment would give at all. It's what a cut-throat, predatory, dishonourable number cruncher would come up with as a strategy.
Competition is where you come up with the odd trick to win the egg and spoon race (like glueing your egg to the spoon). Bill Gate's 'competition' is shooting everyone else on the track.
FWIW pro Athletes are paid so damn much because of a ruling long ago which decided that they are entertainers, and should be paid as such(too lazy to look it up, google it). Think about them as being well-paid actors in a weekly movie series. The prestige lies not in the money or physicality so much as the Hollywood-ality of it.
I think it's simple as how many people are interested in watching, the movie, tv-series, sporting event or the math battle(?). And how much people are willing to pay, simple as that. If nobody is willing to watch or pay for it then the athletes and performers would not receive that huge paycheck.
If it was hard to write it should be hard to read.
It's not about blame. The union prevents change. It's simply fact.
And conservatives, by definition, prevent change. So you should be attacking them as hard or harder, and when you don't, that shows you aren't intellectually consistent, and thus not worth listening to.
Nevermind the students. Nevermind achievement. Nevermind productivity. The education system, in your description, exists to make teachers happy.
If the teachers aren't happy, neither are the students. Or are you saying that the best teachers are the ones that hate teaching and dread getting up in the morning to go to their jobs? Happy teachers may be a requirement of a good system, but they aren't the goal. That you are too stupid to separate them, or that you realize the difference and purposefully play dumb to attack something you don't like are both reasons to not listen to you. Again, you are trying to win an argument but in winning the argument, you lose the ability to convince anyone of anything. Stop spewing hate and venom with your condescending retorts and someone might listen to you. As it stands, anyone that disagrees with you is probably right, because you are coming across quite evil in your statements. And anyone opposite of that must be good.
Learn to love Alaska
You know teaching kids to their full potential is a hard thing... but our schools don't even teach them to enough of their potential to do no harm. What I am demanding of our school system is that they stop damaging bright kids with the potential to do great things.
Einstein/Mozart/Newton/Jobs level intelligence is 1/1,000,000,000. This means that in LA schools there is a good chance of a little Einstein there somewhere... what do you think her odds are of being developed to the point where she can make some use of her potential? Now if she were a golf prodigy what do you think her chances would be?
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Ever hear of cognitive dissonance? They say the students come first, and they don't.
Washington DC Charter Schools. That's all I have to say to you sir.
Do you figure that the high school football star gets a lot more and better sex than the math whiz? It isn't all about money!
It's not malicious. It's what unions are. Unions prevent change that might, in any way, be a negative to their members or the hierarchy or the size of the union. They also promote change to benefit the members of the union.
They do not exist to help children learn. That is simply not the reason the union exists.
You are confusing Intelligence with Intellectual
An Intellectual is someone who classifies themselves as being elite and better than the rest of the population. They are snobs and bigots, who look down their noses at anyone not in their cultural clique.
They define themselves as "smart" and anyone not sharing their opinions are therefore defined (by them) as "dumb".
Intellectual is often overlapping with Elite. Meaning that if you are stupid but among the Elite, you may consider yourself to be an Intellectual.
News Anchors fall into this category. Dumb pretty boys (and 1 girl) but culturally Elite; therefore they feel they are Intellectual.
To be an "Intellectual" (really an Elite) you need to go to the right schools, go to the right restaurants, think the right things, have the right friends. In short, you must follow the herd and not think too much about where the herd is going.
Intellectual is a social category.
Intelligence on the other hand is a characteristic. The ability to think and reason. It is not a social class.
Anyone of any social class may be intelligent. But Intelligence won't make you one of the Elite Intellectuals.
Think of the two old jokes: ... intolerant, bigoted, and narrow-minded) attitude allows the Republicans to run as the Everyman. They can run as "your friend". Don't confuse this with running on ignorance. This is running as an Anti-Elitist. Just because the Elite Intellectuals view anyone outside their clique as "dumb" doesn't make it so.
1) Republicans are the party for people who have no heart; Democrats are the party for people who have no brains.
2) Republicans thinks Democrats are stupid; Democrats think Republicans are evil.
Democrats think of themselves as Intellectuals when the rest of America thinks of them as stupid.
Which is why they tried the Don Rickles campaign style in 2004, "Vote for use because you are stupid, bigoted, rednecks." How did that work for them?
That entitled elitist (and well
This is a problem for the modern Left. To be a good Leftist you must not Discriminate. Therefore, you must be totally Indiscriminate. You can't use critical thinking to reason your way to an opinion; you must feel your way to a non-Discriminatory answer. But yet Democrats define themselves as Intellectuals.
It is sad that modern Intellectuals are the betrayal of everything the Humanist movement has been about.
Also, American's generally value practical skills and actual accomplishment. To be revered you must have done something in the real world. Intellectuals usually don't have those practical skills. They usually have spent their time learning how to manipulate words to mean nothing or anything. They have learned Bullshit skills. Intellectuals call these Post-Modern skills.
So, Americans look at so-called self-entitled Intellectuals and only see people that are good at blowing smoke up their own asses. Truly Intelligent people are valued (at least as far as their expertise goes) but snobs aren't.
America was formed by telling the Aristocracy (the Intellectual Elite of the time) to go fuck off.
Americans prize highly people who are Intelligent, but they dislike condescending Intellectual jack asses.
Year after year I, and one other kid, scored in the 99th percentile on our standardized tests. Every year when we took the "Stanford Achievement Test" we kicked ass. When we got to high school, who did the teachers praise? The dimwitted fucktards who could run fast.
So many years later, those jocks are lucky to have a job pouring concrete and I'm a software developer. The other 99th percentile kid is the head of software development at a nearby company.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Well, if McCain and his crowd get their way, we may get lynch mobs in all their traditional glory... still won't improve the math scores though.
Science is basically logical, verifiable, long-term, dialectic, communal, collaborative, distributive, open, abnegated, progressive, evolutionary, unprejudiced, knowledge-oriented... And supported by adequate and steady patronage. ("Aye, thar's the roob!")
US society is essentially competetive, accumulative, impositive, compartimentalized (ghetto-ized), insular, greed-driven, egoistic, short-term, close-minded, monetarilly-oriented...
Accumulation means pillage, tribute and/or commerce - and associated logistics. Commerce depends on demand, and venture capital for logistics. And steady commerce requires that supply be inferior to demand. Such demand implying equally constant insatisfaction and need.
Up to now, the US had a better deal to offer the serfs of the world, on the lam from general worldwide tribulations, medieviality and caste-like systems.
So, it could count on being able to import necessary talent in technology and science.
Things are changing, and the US has been uncovered as backsliding - or somewhat lacking, lately, in human benefits, civil modernity, political dialogue, diversity and accountability.
So scientific and technological talent isn't staying around the US as much as it used to. Besides, a "lot" of countries now have technology, space programs, and so on. Usually closer to home than the US is.
So, who'll tie the bell to the cat ?
My salary might not be on the Professional Football player level but I am paid well above the average and never had a pause in working.
Because many of my friends in college protected their gpa and did not want to take difficult classes, I am now in fairly high demand.
I have a minor in math from a state school. Some graduate work and a B- average. But, primarily because of my knowledge of math, I have had one formal interview in my 15 yr professional career and get unsolicited offers a few times a year. Coworkers have been let go in downturns but I have survived.
If a student is choosing between professional athlete or a programmer, the choice is obvious. But, when someone chooses Mass Communications over a technical field because it doesn't sound cool, fuck 'em and call them an idiot when they complain about their Vietnamese boss at your 10 year high school reunion.
I have secretly hidden some mispelled words in this post. Can you find them?
Sound bodies, sound minds.
Abandoning one for the other is counter productive, not to mention a recipe for failure.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The people that grew up with the moon landings on TV are getting old and replaced by a generation that did not have such great role models.
Case in point? I'm 35; Apollo 17 (the last Moon shot) splashed down the day I was born. I'm old enough to run for President, and nobody has been on the moon in my lifetime. There are good, well-known science, math, and engineering role models out there (Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, Burt Rutan, Bill Nye, Brian Greene, Michio Kaku etc) -- but they're nowhere near as conspicuous as famous athletes.
What would help is some good publicity for all of the cool science, math, and engineering being done. MythBusters, despite what the purists would say, has done a lot to encourage a love of science -- or at least something resembling the scientific process. Junkyard Wars, and even the various robot-battle shows help get kids (and us older kids) interested in science and technology.
How about fewer popularity-contest "reality" shows, and more technical/scientific contests? You can pump up the "cool factor" and still have quite a bit of good science content.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Stop making incompetence a virtue. For reference try "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand. To flamers: Please note that I don't claim that Rand's philosophy is perfect. Her cultural critiques are, however, germane to the topic.
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Or at least that's the way that the people in government see it.
It's a lot easier to manipulate a population that can't do the math that would let them see through a lot of the propaganda, or handle their own finances.
(Note that some "experts" are now recommending that algebra no longer be taught in K-12, claiming that "nobody uses it" anymore...)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The problems I have encountered with teaching children mathematics is that children are no longer learning skills that promote memorization and logical reasoning. Much of these problems comes from the electronic media intrusion into their lives. Children are constantly assaulted with advertisements and other errata all day long. Mentally, they have to dispose much of it to make sense of their world. Lacking the experience, they have no idea what is important to remember and what to forget. The default is to dispose of anything that does not provide instant gratification. It is a shame to have so much and to be so bored.
The "instant gratification" and easily accessible entertainment destroys the logical reasoning learning. Children are no longer involved in hobbies or interests that require more than collecting pictures of anime characters off the web and searching for over-the-top Youtube videos.
When you have the rich (like Paris) or well known (Brittany) acting like stoned asses (nice they may be) and getting away with it publicly, why would they be interested in anything that doesn't resemble that life. Mathematics, or even literacy, is not on their radar.
If you don't believe me, look at some of the asinine responses previous to mine.
And, don't even get me started on some the stupid educational ideas that are being promoted as we speak.
Man, I'd trade 20-30 IQ for millions of do... no wait I wouldn't.
the whole thing is on the MS patch tue. program .The us educational system needs to be forked and released under the GPL 3 .
"I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
Ah yes. I remember in the third grade when I got bored of doing simple addition and subtraction, and started looking into multiplication. This, of course, upset the teacher. Not because I was doing bad, mind you, but because I wasn't paying attention to her. She tried to convince my parents that it would be best for my education to drug me (Ritalin or the like) because I wasn't paying attention in class.
I'd say you did your kid a great service. Kudos.
Bill Gates is considered by many (of the non-programming crowd) to be the biggest nerd/genius in this respect.
So true. Of course, to most of us real nerds the guy is one of the biggest assholes on the planet in every other respect.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Everyone seems to see money as the solution. But is it the solution in the countries that mathematics education is valued? Don't think so.
Maybe the consumerism that is driving this country down the toilet is partially to blame. The blossoming of US math-science education in the 60's had to do with kids being inspired by the Apollo program not by the almighty dollar.
Hmmm. Well I guess my co-worker down the hall who's "entertaining" the whole office by throwing pencils into the ceiling acoustic tile should be making millions.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Maybe not doing derivatives. In most of Europe basic calculus is as common as PE. But, knowledge of high dimensional vector spaces or convex optimization can make earn you a fairly comfortable salary.
As of last month, if you knew stochastic differential equation every investment house wanted to talk to you. I am sure there will be a glut of those soon.
I have secretly hidden some mispelled words in this post. Can you find them?
I respect your feelings but I don't see how handing education to corporations who's only goal is to teach to a test so as to get taxpayer funding will improve things. Because that is what charter schools do.
The Nazis all believed they were doing their jobs for the good of Germans....so....
For crying out loud - MAKE IT INTERESTING. I remember doing what I referred to as "Math for the sake of Math". Show how it's useful - the easiest way is through teaching Science.
At least for me, you've hit the nail on the head there. I figured this out back in high school when I had the exact same problem with math - it was math just for the sake of math. Then one day I took a physics class and I noticed something... this is the exact same math I was doing in trig and algebra 2, except it's easy now, because there are real world things for me to relate it to instead of just a bunch of numbers that someone came up with.
It's such an impossible job that every country in the world is just a big a failure as the US in teaching math??
I wasn't making excuses for our teachers, I was saying let's not act as if they're doing an easy job poorly. These are people who are doing a very tough job for little pay.
Not saying treat them as saints or accept poor performance, but don't call them bozos or dumb. Save that scorn for people like Keanu Reeves, or the CEO of AIG, who get paid thousands of times a teacher's salary, for a job that is a thousand times easier, which they do a thousand times worse.
I don't know about today (they try to keep it pretty much a secret), but back in the 1980's in Denver, 58% of their budget went into the admin building alone-this back in the days of busing. If you had a PhD in education, you could practically get a job from them just for walking in. They make damn good money too! So, you can be in charge of 2nd grade reading for the district, and your neighbor figuring out the 3rd grade math program. Of course there is a lot of paperwork for the teachers for the PhD's to convert into learned papers to publish. And, of course, you have to change things every couple of years in order to have something new to publish. Whether or not it worked didn't seem to matter then or now, and I have nieces and nephews who will never be able to do math due to these damnable experiments. I have seen the same thing in other states than Colorado as well: indifference to the well being of the students.
Probably the only thing GW Bush did for Texas when he was governor was to make the state universities drop education as an exclusive major: now to get an education degree, you get a regular degree in English, math, history, etc., with an education minor (more hours than a regular minor for the education degree rather than a BA). Then you take the teacher certification exam, and prospective teachers from a school with a weak program in math (say) have real trouble getting certified now I taught in a university there a few years back and the difference was palpable from the time of my BS in the 1960's: education majors are no longer the absolute academic dregs of the colleges and universities there now. In 20 years it will probably start to show as the deadwood retires.
I have relatives in several states, and the anti-intellectual attitude of all the school student bodies I have heard of makes me think the attitude may indeed be a universal culture, as the article suggests. I know that back in the 1960's I would have been a hell raiser if I had not been in "advanced" classes and not just the regular college prep classes, but the egalitarians have apparently eliminated that sort of differentiation in the belief that you shouldn't hurt the feelings of those who cannot cut it -- as if the real world did not have standards.
Don't blame teachers. Don't blame low teacher pay eaither. The reason kids don't study math is becuse they see little reason to. If they did then the kids and their parents would be willing to fund "anything".
Why are there so few Basket weaving teachers? Simple because we all see little value in teaching basket making. If basketmaking paid $250K per year we'd see parents putting their kids in expensive private basket making schools.
There has to be a demand for people with math skills other then as math teachers
But where's the moolah in sports come from? Ticket and souvenir sales, and sponsorship. And why the sponsorship? Cuz the sponsors know lots of people will be watching the games, and want to get their brand noticed more. Why do so many people watch? I don't think it's purely to find out what the athlete is so overcompensated for, they already know. The games and their stars are glorified in this culture, it's heroic. Or so we have been trained to believe.
So sports has had decades to get it's marketing engine going, to bring in more bucks for the owners, stars, and facilities, by gaining viewership. Entire networks dedicated to sports above all else don't help. Or do, depending.... It's a vicious cycle now. Some would correct me to "virtuous cycle", but I stand by my version.
It's all hype. Sorta literally.
Academics needs a new marketing agent. Everyone likes the thrill of victory, and agony of defeat. And even semi-brainy game shows like "W.W.t.b.a-Millionaire" thrive on that. There already exist many academic competitions, but they have little money and almost no press.
Any shift from the status quo, any change or addition, will require an influx of dough. So obviously this won't be easy. But Academic competitions should see more TV time, with notable scholarships, some theatricals and suspense thrown in by some producer, etc, as long as the chalenges remain valid and fair, and don't go all "American Gladiator". And the local news needs to drop half of its sports coverage, and start including the results of the regular local and regional academic challenges.
If we had league MVPs (or MVAs) and national champions, winning phat prizes like full-rides to major schools, and/or bags of money, that would begin to draw the interest of sponsors, and perhaps a virtuous circle could really begin.
Maybe awesome job offers like product development engineer at Q-branch, contingent on a financed EE degree.
I know... Wishful thinking. But that's what I got.
That's also why I don't like teachers unions. After all, if teachers are competent, they aren't going to get fired. There are few enough of them as it is. So why do they need a union?
I am a salaried worker at a union plant, and I get very sad sometimes seeing what the seniority system does to people. Often the people with the most talent have very small influence, and they won't get more until 20 years from now whenever the guys in front of them retire. Rewarding people for time in the job rather than what they accomplish in the job is always a bad idea (though I can see why plants, at least, might need unions to prevent some forms of abuses that have occurred in the past).
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Could that possibly have to do with a high teacher to student ratio leading to higher quality education for the students?
It's possible. We may never know for sure because no other structures will ever be tried.
Even the things that are tried and shown to be successful are only used if there's a benefit to the teachers and the union.
Godwin's Law = YOU FAIL.
Physics is still slightly fun because it involves mechanics and going to space. Even then, you need a pretty savvy physics teacher, and they are hard to come by (they all go to law school).
Math is dead mainly because computers are so good at it, and students are usually better with computers than their teachers are, hence it just feels like a huge waste of time with no rewards.
Scrap math and teach programming and math as a subtext. But now the problem is in the tools because all the corporations rip off the school system by making them buy unnecessarily expensive toys.
Schools need 100 dollar laptops that are 1. safely online, 2. fully programmable, and 3. composed of 100% free software. Scrap textbooks. All texts can be wikiped-ized, and the savings there will make up for the computers 10 fold. Students will program all the tools they need, knowledge will be googled and researched, not memorized, and students can concentrate on building and analyzing skills rather than imitation copy and paste automatons.
Offer a billion dollar prize to a poor high achieving high school student.
No strings attached.
Offer 1000 million dollar prizes for runners up.
Publicize the whole thing, make a true spectacle, the geek Olympics, and have hot stars and starlets glom onto these high achievers.
For the low cost of just 2 billion dollars a year the United States would quickly regain it's prominence.
What? You didn't think there was some kind of magical free solution for this problem did you?
You seem to equate union membership with increased happiness. This is only true in a fundamentally dysfunctional workplace where management and labor do not form real partnerships with rich communication. Unions are a 2nd rate response to this. The best solution is to fix the dysfunction that made the unions necessary in the first place.
I'm pretty sure much of the devastation in our economy today is directly attributable to propeller heads, math majors, who took their computers to Wall Street and thought they could rule the world's economy using math, for example by writing algorithms to assess risk of Credit Default Swaps, and to use computerized trading to keep investment banks and hedge funds with 30 to 1 leverage from imploding. They failed. Maybe teaching math isn't always a good idea :)
You might save American education if you could identify and funnel America's best and brightest in to boarding schools that value academic excellence and not competitive sports, just intramural sports to promote good health and and team skills. At the same time do your best to funnel the best teachers to the same institutions and pay them very well. Not sure where you get the money now that America is broke. Full scholarships are important to make sure they are a meritocracy and not a plutocracy like current elitist prep schools. Its kind of an elitist concept since it would stratify education and make the existing public school even worse than they already are. Liberals will hate it because its elitist, the right wingers will hate it because its a meritocracy instead of a plutocracy, so maybe its a good thing it pisses off both fringes equally.
"No Child Left Behind" being the complete fixation of the U.S. education system is insane. It is completely focusing the system on the least able students and totally abandoning gifted students. It is a system designed to destroy American global competitiveness. To compete globally America needs the elite students, it doesn't really need to do a better job of educating people who will end up in fast food joints and on assembly lines, if there are any assembly lines left in America.
@de_machina
The best teachers love and teach no matter what the system. This is a tiny minority of all teachers and will ever remain so. Sorting for quality among and improving the performance of the teachers who do not do it as a vocation is the road to improvement. Happiness != union membership.
I'm currently majoring in a heavily math based subject in college, and I look back at my high & middle school career and wonder how I got here.
In something like 12 years of schooling I only had one decent math teacher who understood the material and could delve into it in more than one way. "Lectures" from other teachers were often nothing more than the teacher copying one page of notes they wrote years ago onto the board then spending the last half of class browsing the internet or grading while the students worked through the daily assignment of whatever algebra topic the book deemed important.
Mathematics in school was just rote memorization of vaguely related algebra topics, most of which I've still never had a use for. Teachers attempted to make the class "fun" by assigning nonsensical word problems or including art projects and other silly nonsense that only decreased my grade. I recall having to make some sort of 3-D shape out of construction paper in high school -- an absurdly hard task for me as I don't have any artistic skills. I worked for a few hours on it, turned it in, and got a solid C on it.
I was made to think I was a poor maths student because I couldn't stand grinding though 20 problems a night and would consistently lose points on the ridiculous art projects thrown in every now and then. (Seems like quite a few people deal with this tedium by taking doctor approved speed, but that's another story.) I get to college, have plenty of amazing teachers, and find out I love math. In years and years of schooling the only useful knowledge I gained from those earlier high school math courses were the basic laws of algebraic manipulation and such (which I had to heavily review before calculus). The other large majority was worthless. I'm not sure if I was just largely unlucky with the math program or if other schools are this bad or worse.
Coincidentally, the one decent high school math teacher I had actually had a degree in math. The rest? Education.
Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth. Lillian Hellman (1905 - 1984), The Little Foxes, 1939
A starting math teacher in Massachusetts makes $33K. Even if you extrapolate that salary to cover the whole year, it is $44K.
If you are graduating with a master's degree in mathematics or engineering, would you rather teach overloaded classes for $44K or make $60K working for an engineering firm?
The current system pushes good teaching candidates into other fields. Only the ones who can't get higher paying jobs, want more time off, or really really want to teach get teaching jobs. That's the problem right there.
+1 Informative
Nowhere did I say that. My point was rather that happy individual teachers happen to favour the same teaching arrangements that unions generally call for.
I'm sorry- at what point to the administrators whose job it is to actually address bad teaching get put on the hook. In my school district, you get one year to improve (through a mutually agreed upon teaching plan) and then you're out. Most administrators don't want to go to the trouble to do this.
And before anyone says that it is the unions who created this improvement plan system- let me just say that I have friends who are managers for large engineering firms who also work within this structure. No problems there.
The cherry picking is simply not true and the Archdiocese of NY has had an open offer for many years to take over the worst of the worst of the NY public school system and let them take a crack at it with the same budgets and the same student body. Funny enough, the AFT has always been against that.
Make it financially rewarding to learn and teach math.
can't do that, smarty mcsmarterson! Its cool to be dumb! ya'll nerds can go to your silly clubs and talk it over, but don't try and force it on the rest of us!
But at least it hasn't made you bitter. ;)
Actually, I was homeschooled until 9th grade (it's a hell of a lot easier to get into college with an accredited transcript than from home - still doable, just harder). I feel it really gave me an advantage. I learned not only the 3 R's but how to think for myself at a relatively young age. So... good on ya, and good luck!
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.
FWIW pro Athletes are paid so damn much because of a ruling long ago which decided that they are entertainers, and should be paid as such(too lazy to look it up, google it).
Ummm, no. They are paid that much because someone (the team owners) is willing to pay it. The team owners turn around and charge high prices for tickets, for TV rights, for clothing & other merchandise, and lots of other things.
It's a free market!
Which is why I find it so amusing when team owners complain their labor costs are too high. If you don't want to pay an athlete $15 million per year, THEN DON'T PAY THAT MUCH! I'm sure they can find some other athlete for less.
Most of our country's math teachers don't understand math well enough to make it interesting. They think it is just memorizing 'math facts' and memorizing cookbook ways to solve problems.
Hah. Take it from someone who loves numbers and can't for the life of him get a classroom of teenagers to see things his way: It's not the teachers who want to turn math texts into a cookbook of algorithms, it's the students.
Fact is, math isn't natural to the human brain, unlike language or tool usage. Humans, left untutored, will discover a natural ability to count to three, and that's it. The rest of mathematics had to be invented.
The brain is an intuitive and inductive reasoning machine; mathematics is rigorously logical and deductive. It's also highly abstract, and as long as it has to be taught in schools, it will remain that way. The reason most kids think math isn't easy is because, well, it isn't.
O RLY?
We need real competition, and we need to bust the teacher's unions to get the bozos out of our school system.
It's not the unions' fault; it's the low pay scale. Most people who are good at math and numbers make a more practical career out of it because the pay is better as an engineer.
The best math teachers could teach millions of students using video
[Troy McClure appears on television in front of chalkboard reading "Pepsi presents: Addition and Subtraction".]
Troy: If you have three Pepsis and drink one, how much more refreshed are you? You, the redhead in the Chicago school system?
Girl: Pepsi?
Troy: Partial credit!
Dude, talking about schools not teaching enough, go back and take an econ class.
pro Athletes get paid a lot because they are a product that can be sold for lots of money, not because of some esoteric ruling somewhere. They top guys make millions because they are actually really good, the same general wage pyramid is found in most markets. Usually the guys who get paid the most are the ones who are best because there is a little supply of them and lots of demand.
You have the same thing with math, it's just in the US people have a value system that encourages leaving school to make money instead of hanging on as ivory intellectuals. You can't really fix that, since in the eyes of most Americans its not broken.
So, in other words, North American culture is fraked up.
Shit yes, they were. I still remember Salem; it was like anon fell into meatspace.
I remember when I was in high school that it was cool to be bad at math. "You must be one of those math nerds," "I was never good at math" and "I was told there would be no math" are popular phrases I encountered growing up and still encounter today.
The thing is, the most basic math skills gets you soooo far, and most people still just don't get it. *sigh* Really, it's abdication of critical reasoning that's the big problem. The fact that math is front and center there is just a symptom.
Case in point: Four years ago, I bought a house and got a mortgage. I got a pretty decent rate on a 30yr mortgage. My rate was consistent with the 40+year low in long term interest rates. And yet my mortgage broker tried to get me to sign on to an even lower-rate ARM that would "adjust" in about 5 years. It doesn't take a deep thinker to realize that (a) my 30yr mortgage is the deal of a (working) lifetime, and (b) if we all buy low and try to sell high (e.g. bite on a cheap ARM and try to sell before it pops), that we'll all get screwed.
Part of it is a math argument, but all of it is a critical thinking argument.
But it's sooooo coool to not think about the math and just do it.
--Joe
Program Intellivision!
Yes, really. The steps in the article you linked to are similar in countries that are currently beating the pants off the US in primary education.
It's that our nation's schools are run by a bunch of bozos who pay teachers on the basis of seniority instead of performance, bozos who disparage being elite academically, but celebrate athletic elitism, and frankly that among the ranks of our teachers are some of the dumbest people in our society.
Yes indeed. I'll give you an example that will tend to support your point.
... so in effect she was teaching remedial English.
I was engaged to an college English teacher many years ago. That didn't work out because she was also a selfish bitch, but that's neither here nor there. At the time, she was teaching first-year college English. Most of (and I mean, 80+ percent) of incoming freshmen couldn't write in full sentences. Seriously
She would bring home papers to grade, and I would read some of them. It was truly incredible. These were kids that (somehow) managed to graduate high-school, yet were very nearly illiterate. I remember that one of her first assignments was to write down every detail of their trip home from school that day, just to get a feel for their capabilities. A typical result would be something on the order of: "Left school. Side door. Went to car. Got in. Went home." How in the nine hells did they ever earn a high school diploma? Scary. And this was twenty-odd years ago, and I can't believe matters have improved much. Probably quite the opposite.
Worse yet, the school's star basketball player was one of her students at one point. Big black guy, very proud of his athletic skills (keep in mind that this school diverted a lot of funds to the team, and it brought in a lot of money each year.) So this idiot made it class once or twice the whole year, turned in no assignments and took no tests. Yet, he was very angry that he received a well-deserved "F". He told her flatly, "I'm just here to play basketball, why you fuckin' wit me." Actually, he said a lot more than that, stuff which would have put the bastard in jail if she'd had a recorder on. Anyway, the problem from his perspective was if that F went through, he'd be kicked out. For any ordinary student that would be tough bananas, but the school's President wanted this guy kept around.
She submits her grades to the school computer, and next thing you know her boss comes storming in, wanting to know how dare she give the star basketball player an F!!! She pointed out that he had only showed up a couple of times for class, and done no work. You know what he said? He said, "Huh. Any way we can get a 'B' out of this?" She told him no, because that was the right thing for the student. He agrees and leaves, and goes right into the database and changes the guy's grade to a "B", updates all the paperwork, and left my fiancee's name on everything so it appeared that she had approved it.
I told her that either this administrative asshole changes the damn grade back, or she should quit. A lawyer friend told us that if there were any repercussions from her supervisor's actions, she could be held liable. He wouldn't change it (naturally) so she wrote a formal letter of resignation, sent it to him and various other faculty members (so he couldn't just sweep it under the rug) and quit.
This kind of crap goes on all the time, I discovered, and it's not hard to see why anyone who actually gives a damn about the students or quality teaching might just say "fuck it" and go into something else.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
So your son is going to finish his home schooling, get a job and refuse to do the boring bits. He'll last a few months before moving (or being moved) on to another job. This will happen a few times, he'll become disenfranchised with society because it doesn't recognise his true genius.
The stench of Randroid droppings is thick in the air, tonight.
It's all the fault of:
The Unions
The Liberals
The Democrats
The Socialists
(Choose as many as apply. Bonus points for suitable quotations from Atlas Shrugged and/or The Fountainhead. Triple points for quotes by Milton Friedman, quoting Atlas Shrugged and/or The Fountainhead.)
"I'm trapped on Gilligan's Island, but I'm not paying any INCOME TAX!"
Mary Ayn Rand
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
This is true, and I would like to add my $0.02 regarding the school system.
Part of the problem with our educational system is that we don't reward outstanding performance as we once did. I am told by a parent of a young child in a local school that they have an award ceremony where they now have the cut-off for rewards around an average of 70 and up. During the ceremony, at least 3/4ths of the class receives awards.
Anymore, there is simply no need to perform exceptionally well when most of the class is going to wind up with the same recognition. School officials are reluctant to recognize the students who perform better than--for example--98% of the rest of the class because doing so would be considered unfair to the others. Such "de-stratification" doesn't exist at the college level (yet) and as a result, many new high school graduates are dumbfounded to discover that they are no longer pushed through the system with the relative ease they've grown to expect.
The same thing has happened in mathematics. When a student merely needs to perform just well enough to make the grade, there's no motive to excel. We've stripped rewards and recognition for those who perform truly outstanding work in comparison to their peers simply on the basis of fearing for the self-esteem of the former. In short, we reap what we sow.
So, there you have it. Our society has fallen so far behind because we cherish mediocrity over bringing harm to the self-esteem of others. Yet, for professional sports, competition among athletes is encouraged; competition among students is increasingly discouraged. Is it any wonder why few children see a need to rise above their peers and become someone exceptional?
He who has no
Yeah, we know how much $$$ has helped computer professionals, we get a lot of those diploma mills and a lot of CS people who cant code two commends together to save their life.
What we need is to make math easily accessible and available for students who are truly interested. Not have some Phys Ed teacher in an algebra class just spouting from the teachers guide. Get some good books, some good MATH teachers, set up some extracurricular projects for the math whizzes (mathletics?) Figure out a way to get guest speakers and or math related field trips. More or less feed their interest and hunger.
All big money is gong to do is attract a lot of people who want money.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
The payoff for a good teacher to buck the union system is steeply negative. The chances of you being able to continue to teach in peace are rather small.
...that math teachers despise calculators, and not just the ones that can do symbolic algebra. My current math prof (college algebra) had to resort to lying in his syllabus to get people to not drop the class the instant they found out they don't even get a 4-function on the 3 tests that make up their grade.
You want to get people interested in math again? Stop fucking everyone by forcing them to do FOURTY 3-equation quadratic systems AND forcing them to do it using a given method instead of whatever mathematically functional one gets the correct answer AND without a calculator AND without the formula written down somewhere.
Rote memorization does not produce anything but an arrogant fool that thinks because he can solve some things quickly without a calculator because he's memorized them, and who will make many mistakes in life because he can't admit that he doesn't actually KNOW what he's doing.
Start rewarding the students that can figure out how to solve something they're unfamiliar with by figuring it out on their own, reward the kids that find new and more efficient ways of solving things, reward the people who when confronted with an evil little problem pull the answer out of their ass and verify it's right. Don't reward people for learning the theme to fucking gilligans island and solve 20 quadratics with it before getting stumped on the one problem that isn't just some outright copy of something they've already done.
And get rid of the goddamn gordon rule requirement for math classes for people going into majors like law and english.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Is this a nerd whine fest or what? Not that I disagree... ;-)
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
... Let America see them go from college leaders to public influences. Math and other subjects are the consolidation behind every framework in the world. Let everyone see how the world is brought to perfection through the efforts of this brilliant students.
The problem is not the teachers, it's that it's impossible to teach twenty children at the same time at twenty different levels.
It's simple supply and demand. Top-quality athletes have a much smaller supply than teachers.
Who is John Galt?
Money is the root of all evil?
I believe that the problem is how American schools standardize education. My class graduated last year without me. I had a 33 on the ACT, 800 on the SAT Math Level II Subject Test, 5s on the AP Calc BC, AP Physics, and AP Stats tests but I didn't graduate. People constantly talk about how hard it is for Special Education students to function in a normal school environment, but I speak from experience when I say that it is just as hard on the gifted. My teachers and fellow students would have easily described me as talented and hard-working, but I just couldn't force myself to hold myself back and concentrate.
I really hope that we fix this soon but, honestly, I'm not optimistic.
I don't buy it. When someone blames teacher unions, perhaps they are blaming our particular set of teacher unions and not the general concept. Ours can suck while the finns are great.
Yeah, one teacher spread over a million students. Granted with TA's around who will be paid less than teachers are now.
The problem is that Math isn't entertainment. It requires hard thought. Which isn't really encouraged in today's schools. Spirit is what is taught to children.
The problem isn't whether it's beyond one teacher or another. The problem is that once you get out of the public school system, you can find innovative solutions to these problems that the public schools have long resisted adopting. That's stupid, but it's historical and current reality.
No change can happen though. It is disallowed by the union.
Well, that's part of the story, but not nearly the whole story.
It's fairly clear that much of the problems with good science/math education in the US comes from outside, in the form of the religious objections to certain parts of the subject matter. This affects not just biology teachers, but all science teachers, as science in general is suspect to "people of faith".
This is actually quite reasonable, as science and math both depend on rejecting "faith", and saying "prove it". (Yeah, I know; that's an egregious oversimplification. But in the context of the current discussion, you really can't go into much more detail, because you'll be shouted down if you try. ;-)
So we have two sources of problems: the unions and the religious fundamentalists, and the commercial folks. Wait; I'll start over ...
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
LOL... if I only had Mod points.
Money is the root of all evil?
That's true in the UK as well, a footballer earns something with six or seven digits of salary, a London underground tube driver earns 45K, busdrivers and hairdressers earns around 25K, while postgraduate students earn less than 20K.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Actually, defending teachers unions is the knee jerk reaction. I cannot attest for what the unions in Finland are like, but here in the US, they are a business, and are primarily interested in making money. Furthermore, I have no doubt that many individual American teachers would prefer teaching classes as small as possible. After all teacher are people, and people tend to want as much money for as little work as possible. This works in both the teachers and the Unions favor. Smaller classes = more classes = more teachers = easier job for the teachers AND more money for the Unions.
One of the big problems we have is the false belief that there is ONE problem with our educations. This leads to the fallacious argument technique of believing that if you can show that some other part of our education system is broken, that your part (or the part you support) is working fine. The sad fact is that EVERY level of our public education system is broken. From the parents to the teachers to the unions to the state to the feds to our culture as a whole. The whole system is broken, and there is no incentive to fix it. There is just too much money being made by having a broken education system.
The article is correct. Our whole culture discourages good education. A favorite anecdote of mine is the school district in my city. While complaining about not having enough funds for education, they decided that it made sense to rebuild their sports stadium. Installing stadium lighting, astro-turf, the whole nine yards. This kind of behaviors seems common across the country.
A good way to tell where a school's priorities lie is to drive by the school, and check two things. 1) How much land is dedicated to education vs. how much is dedicated to sports, and 2) Do they have a sign in front of the school telling you about their education, or do they have one telling you about their sports teams.
Both Jobs and Gates are geniuses in the realm of business
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Basically, the professions aren't even remotely comparable. And, honestly, I'm pretty happy that money isn't a primary motivator for mathematicians. The last thing I want to be seeing in the news is the latest drunken escapade of some overpaid math star.
It's not about blame. The union prevents change. It's simply fact.
I counted to 100 before I posted this so I could calm down and politely say SHUT THE FUCK UP. Seriously, I can't be more polite than that because I doubt you believe your own words. You know you're wrong.
1)The union is absolutely positively in favor of changes that benefit TEACHERS and STUDENTS. It cannot be otherwise.
2)The only reason teachers get the (still too little) salary they do is because of the union and the public outcry strikes generate. (i.e. the WA state lottery was supposed to be all for education. education never got a dime)
3)The poor state of education today has everything to do with BUDGET CUTS and the slashing of programs that promote critical and creative thinking. You can thank Ronald Reagan for convincing people that we need to focus on the "three R's" and use the money for tax breaks to big business and the wealthy.
4)Some of the rest of us would like it to do something for the students too. Pay the Teachers enough to make more Science and Math majors WANT to be teachers (in other words support the union). Put money back in the budget for programs that teach children to THINK, not just make change at WalMart (want that? support the union, they want it too). The generation that had those programs is the generation that landed us on the moon.
Or maybe Walmart greeting non-voting MTV watching tards is what you really want most people to be.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
AND I live in one of the better school districts in the LA area
yeah. that might actually be the issue here...
That might have been true a century or so back, when the term "conservative" was understood to mean someone who wanted to conserve the social order. But in modern America, the people who call themselves "conservative" are mostly radical reformers who want to replace the centuries-old culture of individual freedom with an authoritarian religious system.
In the current American school systems, conservatives are mostly heard from when they are pushing to block science teaching. They have had a fair amount of success. Thus, if you look at high-school and lower biology texts from the 1940s and 1950s, you'll usually see a section on evolution. Today, few biology texts below the college level even mention the topic, from fear of the "conservative" religious people in the community. Thus, the conservatives in this case have forced a change that resulted in lower quality education.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The brain is an intuitive and inductive reasoning machine; mathematics is rigorously logical and deductive. It's also highly abstract, and as long as it has to be taught in schools, it will remain that way. The reason most kids think math isn't easy is because, well, it isn't.
This attitude is very common among US math teachers, but not math teachers in Singapore, China, Japan, etc. I don't think it takes rigorous logic to deduce why the US performs worse than these countries in teaching kids math.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Bonus and triple points just for a citation?! There you go again, your liberals and your feel-good reward systems...
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
And conservatives, by definition, prevent change.
Political understanding does not come from a dictionary. You may find it, but you'll have to put the dictionary down and listen to what people actually say and watch what their positions are. Many "conservatives" want change in the schools (among other things).
So you should be attacking them as hard or harder, and when you don't, that shows you aren't intellectually consistent, and thus not worth listening to.
How about if we just get the government out of the system and let people make their own choices as free people? It seems better than attacking people.
And saying that "the union prevents change" isn't an attack. It's just a fact. The union prevents change except when change benefits the union and union members. That's what unions exist to do. And students are not members of the teachers' union.
we shouldn't encourage students to go into a field of study that they find boring just because it might make them a lot of money in the future. that's not the kind of academic culture we ought to be fostering. and i don't really see this problem as necessarily due to schools not enticing students enough to excel at math. to me it's part of a more fundamental problem with our society. increasingly, we're developing an anti-intellectual culture in the U.S., and a decline in mathematical achievement is just one small symptom of this cultural crisis.
when you live in a culture that glamorizes ignorance, shuns intellectuals, and holds reason & rationality in contempt, you have a society that promotes anti-intellectualism. and that has serious societal consequences. for instance, look at who's leading the nation. look at the recent controversies related to teaching Intelligent Design in public schools. and look at the large segment of the population still in denial about Global Warming. the stifling of mathematical achievement is just the tip of the iceberg.
part of this is due to the rise of religious fundamentalism in our society. that has resulted in the abandonment of science & reason for irrational and reactionary beliefs. that's why you have people who believe in private industry PR campaigns over scientific data collected by disinterested intergovernmental research panels. we've become a society that reviles any kind of rational thought or intelligence, so of course academic achievement is in decline.
The influence of quants is over-rated. The big scores and big money are still in the hands of the seat-of-the-pants traders, playing a very human game. Of course they use computers, and they get summaries from quants, but it's hardly the be-all-end-all.
The smart strategy for going into Wall St., as I understand it, is to hide or play coy with your math skills. Being a "quant" is a deadend position (although it deadends well into six-figures), whereas a trader has an unbounded ceiling and although in principle there's an unbounded fall... we've noticed that the fall is usually distributed amongst other people.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Cell phone giants can't convert cents to dollars and/or don't understand the difference.
http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=992243&cid=25333891
I grew up in the Apollo era. Geeks and nerds were even less popular then than they are now. Uber-nerd Bill Gates has actually done a lot to boost the status of geeks.
So lets have a non-government system where free people make their own choices. Then you won't have to spend so much energy worrying that someone might have a religious perspective. They can be responsible for their children and you can be responsible for yours. Everyone chooses for themselves and their family only.
Yet, Finland and its fellow Nordic countries are marked by some of the strongest unions on the planet.
Perhaps. But the laws regarding unions are completely different in Finland so you are comparing apples to oranges.
Teaching is a thankless job with little to no incentive beyond the calling to teach. You have some weird cynical idea that teachers join the profession to milk as much as they can out of the system and have unionized to further that goal. Sit around all you want complaining about how students are getting exploited to line teachers' pockets. If some certain base level of representation and compensation isn't guaranteed by unions you see shit like in Georgia where education is so crappy that I can't even call it substandard, and I mean for students. People without children in the schools were upset that they had to pay for someone else's child so now they don't, and school funding is piss poor. In fact look at the National Right to Work Foundation map of the US and see if the weak unions are leading to bold new visions in education or if they're just shafting teachers and by extension students.
You seem to prefer a situation where people have to be able to afford to take a job teaching because they have some other independent means of sustaining their lives.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
I found this from some googling...
K-12 Teachers (with B.A.'s) make an average starting salary of $33k/yr. Accountants start at $48k/yr on average. But the teachers salary is for working 9 mo a year and they can make more if they teach summers too... this makes the teacher average starting salary equivalent to $44k/yr. This compares well to accountants. Engineers make more ($55k/yr), but most other bachelors degrees make less (in the $30K/yr ranges).
And in the LA area (where I live) the pay is significantly above the national average yet the schools are some of the worst in the country.
So lets kill the "teachers are underpaid" meme. This was true 20 years ago, but it's no longer true.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
My student athletes have people skills all up and down the spectrum. Some of them do learn valuable lessons from sports such as how to take a loss and learn from it, how to work on a team, how to lead others to pursue a goal. Others are just playing a sport so they can hit people. Or else they learn above all an us-them mentality in which they always deserve to win, regardless of which team played better. I don't think your theory is correct that playing sports corresponds to having useful people skills.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
I am currently in my 3rd year of college, getting by with student loans. I was an education major until this year.
If I only stayed for a Masters, which is required in my state to teach secondary ed (jr. high and high school) I will be in debt to the tune of $55,000 and I would make about $32K a year.
I can make just as much working at the insurance agency I worked at BEFORE I went to college.
Its just not worth it! That's why I changed my major from education to rhetoric. It's not that I don't care or that I don't want to teach...but I have a daughter that I will need to put through college in ten years and I have to think about how I'm going to be able to do that (which is *not* on 32K a year!).
I firmly believe that the most mediocre students become teachers because they can't do anything else. The smartest people go into industries or start their own businesses because they want to make $$$.
What if someone actually could make it compelling to students though? Not quite entertaining, but enjoyable. What if they learned better because of the style and the energy and the personality of the teacher? What if he was one of the best teachers and had broadcast talent to connect to an audience on camera?
Lots of students might learn math as a result.
We'll never know.
Get rid of the F****** J*W'S Propagated SH*T culture in the USA...
That is task #1 on the WBS...
Assuming that (1) your equation gives the height above Johnny's weenie of the piss stream's leading edge and (2) the units are feet for distance and seconds for time:
It will take $(\sqrt{201}+3)/32 \approx 0.54$ seconds for the piss to hit the ground. The vertical velocity will be $\sqrt{201} \approx 14.2$ ft/s downward.
Assuming that the piss's initial horizontal velocity is $v_x$ ft/s relative to the ground (you don't give a specific value) and ignoring air resistance, the total speed will be $\sqrt{201+v_x^2}$ ft/s, and the stream will travel $v_x(\sqrt{201}+3)/32$ ft horizontally from where it originally emanated (Relative to the ground, of course. Because of Johnny's drunken staggering, the tip of his weenie defines a non-inertial reference frame, which would be inconvenient and overly complicated. Not to mention, disgusting.).
As a European who emigrated to the US, its very obvious how here in the US there is a damaging culture of PCness where it is unacceptable to speak ill or criticise anything or anyone else, no matter how bad they or it is. Consequently morbidly fat people get away with calling themselves 'large' and the bar for academic and other success is made so low that it doesn't represent any challenge just so that everyone can feel like they're a winner.
In fact just because I'm suggesting the US isn't perfect I expect some American with mod points will exactly prove my point by modding this down as a troll, even though I'm trying to be observational and insightful.
Comparison to other countries is meaningless unless they start including all school age children in their tests of academic achievement.
Also, any school district that thinks they can address the needs of gifted and talented students with a separate facility is stupid or running a scam like you're talking about. GT is special education in just the same way as the rest of special ed and requires a very individualized approach, not a special school.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
And do not allow sporting events where the participants are paid.to be televised at all.
I remember doing what I referred to as "Math for the sake of Math". Show how it's useful - the easiest way is through teaching Science.
I won't argue that this isn't a good strategy for teaching most students, but I don't think I would like this. "Math for the sake of Math" tends to reach deeper concepts, which ultimately gives me a better grasp of the subject. Physics, in contrast, makes it too tempting to memorize a half-dozen formulas per test. While there's certainly deeper material there, teaching math through science seems as if it would focus on the formulaic aspects of the topic, and so be lacking. Just my $0.02.
American school culture - reflective of the culture at large - is composed of a majority of lunkheads who fear what they don't understand - which is the majority of what their senses convey to them. This is why democracy is a stupid idea.
I completely agree that most of the teachers I had in high school were idiots. Most of the (smart) people I know say the same. I think its because they aren't paid for shit...they just stop caring. Plus low pay isn't going to attract the best people.
I like your idea of home schooling. Unfortunately, most home school programs are ultra-religious or they aren't accepted as academically equivalent by colleges (this is true in WA state at least-many home schoolers I knew put their kids into public school in high school so they would have transcripts to send to colleges). Still, I think I would do a better job of teaching my ten year old then the school system is doing right now...
They do not exist to help children learn. That is simply not the reason the union exists.
This is true, but it's beside the point. The idea that unions exist to serve the interests of teachers isn't particularly problematic, because teacher satisfaction hardly precludes student success, in fact, it's rather dependent on it.
Not to mention that it's completely orthogonal to unions -- if teacher's interests were inherently at odds with genuine education, the problem really wouldn't be unions, it'd be teachers, and the remaining option would be non-professional educators...
Tweet, tweet.
It's that our nation's schools are run by a bunch of bozos who pay teachers on the basis of seniority instead of performance, bozos who disparage being elite academically, but celebrate athletic elitism, and frankly that among the ranks of our teachers are some of the dumbest people in our society.
Or, as I like to express it: If you're talented in math, why would ever even consider working in the US school system? You'd be working for people who hold you in contempt and don't pay you very well. And you can easily earn 2 or 3 times as much in industry. Hell, you can even do better financially (and have a more fun lifestyle) by going into academia.
It's obvious why US kids aren't learning math. Hardly anyone with any math ability will seriously consider teaching in the school system as it is. So math is mostly taught by teachers with very little knowledge of the subject matter.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
There are now home-school charter schools that will have an accredited teacher monitor your kids progress as you teach them. They can give good advice to help you and they give you a paper-trail to show that you really taught your kids.
Here's an example: http://skymountaincs.org/
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Nevermind the students. Nevermind achievement. Nevermind productivity. The education system, in your description, exists to make teachers happy.
Some of the rest of us would like it to do something for the students too.
How effective do you really think miserable teachers are going to be at teaching?
Exactly. When NFL quarterbacks get millions and top-of-the-line math teachers get a few tens of thousands, guess which way a physically fit but also smart student would go.
He would probably go for a different pro sport. NFL careers are very short with a high rate of disabling injuries. On the other hand, baseball, hockey & basketball careers can easily last decades.
You are biased. You've decided in advance of any data that unions are at fault and immediately reject any ignore all data that does not match your belief. You deserve Troll -1 moderation nothing else.
"Make it financially rewarding to learn and teach math."
I disagree, when I was in school math was so divorced from everyday life. I only began to appreciate math once I had to implement things in the real world like vectors and 3D geometry using programming, etc. Not only that but there are many ways to teach math and math principles instead of what is prescribed out of some boring ass textbook.
The biggest thing they don't teach is how to think about math and how those equations were derived. If there's one thing about math I hated is that the original men and women who figured out much of what is taught us over the last 1000 years, their whole thought process by how they discovered and reasoned their way their is totally omitted. Not only that but a geometric interpretation of a lot of math is left out of math textbooks, so you get a bunch of equations and algebra, etc, etc totally divorced from context.
It's easy to demonize unions, but if it weren't for greedy and abusive management practices, there never would have been a need for unions in the first place. Unions are a necessary evil.
It's getting fixed as we speak. A long series of quick fixes is taking the economy apart. Only long term fixes will be left once all the possible short term fixes have been tried...
Dude, speaking of going back to school, how did "Athletes" get capitalized and not "pro" in your second sentence? On a related note, how did the fourth sentence wind up as just one? I'd like to recommend that you escort the author of the grandparent post to the registrar and sign up for a freshman composition class.
"A few months back, the Wall Street Journal had an article on how many American educators are looking to Finland for teaching models, because Finland has remarkably high student achievement across the board. Yet, Finland and its fellow Nordic countries are marked by some of the strongest unions on the planet."
'Wow. So you're saying union teachers trying to perpetuate a union system are looking to another union system to guide them?'
some people, would look to the DNA of finns for the answer, rather than the unions or anything else. America became 'the great melting pot' as they say, taking in all manner of people from other countries, often times relying on those new immigrants to do nasty work for short pay. are you saying that people capable of learning good would willingly move en mass to a place what will abuse them where they'll get short pay? for what was it 'freedom'?
Frankly, a narrow focus on teaching mathematics is partly to blame for low attainment in mathematics. Studies show that better schoolwide physical education programs increase student achievement in the academic areas. I'm not talking about expanding extracurricular sports, I mean curricular phys ed programs that appeal to students and get them moving and exercising. There are also benefits to academic achievement from, say, learning an instrument or from studying martial arts.
This school year, I've been trying to incorporate some history of mathematics in my Algebra 2 and Calculus 1 classes, because it struck me that what we're doing is really math history. It's not like we're doing new math, just revisiting old results.
Back when I taught middle school in the late 90's, I used to hear a lot about creating interdisciplinary activities, projects, collaborating with teachers of other subjects. Maybe it's high school, maybe it's the education reform pendulum, or maybe it's the statewide tests, but I hardly if ever hear about that anymore.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
When there's an exam and a reward for doing well on the exam, people will get more money for teaching to the test than they would otherwise. Even if teachers don't want to do this to their students, there are forces greater than teachers directing education. For example, the Honors Algebra 2 curriculum includes a section on algebraic proofs. Commutative property, additive identity, inverse, stuff like that. The curriculum includes this but the district-produced midterm and final exam have no mention of any of that. One question I think on one test where you have to identify the property shown. As a result, the supervisors direct us not to emphasize it or even to skip it completely in favor of teaching more material that will appear on the SAT. Meanwhile the geometry teachers report great benefits to their students from having done some algebraic proofs with me before they spend more time on them in geometry. My kids don't do as well on the midterm as they would if I taught to those tests, and I do get taken to task for it, but I'm more concerned with their math education.
I'm kind of venting, but the upshot is that tying funding to some kind of measurement tool means that everyone is only going to do the things that are measured.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
I'm a left-winger and I used to be all against school vouchers... but now I've seen the light. We need real competition, and we need to bust the teacher's unions to get the bozos out of our school system.
Yes, parents as a group obviously know much more about educating children than teachers do. Armchair educator? Pfft. It's not like there are a bunch of morons out there raising children. And even if there were, any one smart set of parents can fashion a complete education for their child out of just one voucher's worth of money per school year. So everything will be OK.
Also, the right way to encourage a failing school to do better is to take away its funding and see if it does any better. It's those damn teachers not working hard enough! The quality of education one receives has nothing to do with class size, which has nothing to do with funding. The people in charge are lazy. I know, because it's obvious that educating children is the easiest job on the planet.
where are my mod points?
ENGLISH is used to DO stuff at an early age and continues to be applied throughout. Math NEVER is.
I never had a good math teacher. Since math is so useful in science why didn't we ever combine the two?? Calc without physics and standardization BS greatly lowers the ability to try out new techniques-- its whatever BS they can do for the exam scores and nothing else. I was in before this testing idiocy and even then it was teaching for the test.
Oh, standardization BS has caused them to attack creative classes like ART so creativity is being undermined; not to mention that modern kids are already pathetic creatively to previous generations. This helps other subjects such as the application of math to things.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I got beaten up all the time in high school by moron jocks who are now neo-con fuckfaces. Fucking bigoted neo-con shitheads.
My experience was somewhat different, in that alot of the kids in music were also in the honors/AP/Math & Science classes.
Makes some sense though, as music involves symbolic representation and logic, both higher-ordered thought processes...
The idea that unions exist to serve the interests of teachers isn't particularly problematic, because teacher satisfaction hardly precludes student success, in fact, it's rather dependent on it.
The satisfaction of GOOD teachers is dependent on student success. Unfortunately, good teachers are not nearly as common as we'd like and tend to focus on teaching not union politicking. When my wife taught school, she noticed a strong negative correlation between good teachers and union advocates. The best teachers were the ones the union reps had to lean on the hardest to get them to join up and pay their dues.
That's not to say that the unions make for bad teachers, just that the union's interests are focused around the desires of the most outspoken and politically-active teachers, rather than the best ones.
The best teachers my kids have had were those in a local private school. The teachers there made significantly less money than public school teachers, but said that was okay because they also didn't have to deal with big classes, discipline problems and all of the "career ladder" garbage that the union has arranged for teachers' "benefit". They were great, professional teachers, and they found that the best way they could achieve job satisfaction was by opting out of the public school system, even though it cost them money.
Judging by the opinions of those excellent teachers, the union should recommend that teacher salaries be cut in order to pay for more teachers to reduce class sizes, and that teacher salaries be made merit-based rather than the current basis, which is a mix of seniority and busywork accomplishment. Not likely.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
But at least it hasn't made you bitter. ;)
When I first moved to LA, I lived in Pasadena and I volunteered to be a math tutor at a local high school. The kids didn't know very basic stuff that they should have learned in elementary school... but that's not the scary part. These kids were trying very hard to figure out the material, they weren't just coasting (the tutoring program was voluntary). I was helping a girl with fractions and I explained them to her in like 15 minutes and a light went off, and she got it. She wasn't having trouble because she was stupid or wasn't trying... it was just that no one had ever explained it to her before. No one had ever sat down with her for just 15 min and explained it. AND the worse part is that kids at other tables dropped what they were doing to come over and listen too. It was so sad, and it really made me feel bad for how the school was failing them.
After that experience I was determined to try really hard to get my kids into a good school district. Buying a house in such a good district was a real hardship, and required us to get one of those 'sub-prime' loans. So now I have one of those time-bomb mortgages where the rates are going to shoot up in a few years... all to get into a school district which turns out to not be much better than the one in Pasadena.
So, yeah, I'm a little bitter.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
An easy way to motivate people is to demonstrate who's a complete idiot; in Japan this is exactly what happens. The test scores of every student are posted publicly with their name in the order of who did best to who did the worst. Even though Americans value being attractive or popular more than education and intelligence, I imagine people would quickly not want to be the "dumbest person in the school" and would quickly change their ways if this sort of thing was public, and eventually the whole class/school would get better grades because everyone is afraid of being last.
Oh how I wish I had modpoints. Ahem: The parent?
Wow. So you're saying union teachers trying to perpetuate a union system are looking to another union system to guide them?
No. He's saying teachers in the US trying to gain higher student achievement are looking to another teaching system which has high student achievement across the board to guide them.
The best teachers aren't the ones that give the best lectures, then hand all the personalization to the TA's. I'm kind of confused as to where you got that idea.
What can be a flawless lecture to one student is utterly incomprehensible to another. At which point, when you introduce a TA the student is essentially getting a brand new lecture from a poorly-qualified teacher who even under the best circumstances is rebuilding a kid's understanding from scratch.
Believe it or not, there *are* advantages to providing small classes rather than giant classes and clinics.
The astronauts were top-notch test pilots, many with combat flight time in fighter planes. They were fit, good-looking types who were plastered all over TV, got free Corvettes and expensive watches.
They also happened to be excellent engineers and capable of doing complex math in an age before pocket calculators.
The problem today is that there is, to many people, a rather large dichotomy, whether it exists or not. The ancient Greeks stressed physical fitness as well as intellectual fitness because having one will make the other easier.
But think about this: the amount of dorito-chomping, 400lb, thinkgeek-wearing individuals are into math and science are pretty much going to make the crew team, student/athlete types run off to the history or english faculty for fear of their health, and the tribe doesn't really do much to dispel the myth.
The problem is that the Fundamentalists have such power in the US, and there are so many of them. You don't usually get this sort of problem with Jews, Catholics and Lutherans (among others). You get it from the Pat Robertson-style nutjobs, who used to routinely refer to Jews, Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, and many others as having the "spirit of the Anti-Christ" or something similar. For example, they keep quoting the notion that increased education leads to decreased faith (which is actually not true, it simply leads to decreased fundamentalism). They don't want kids learning science, math and so on. They want kids to shut up, absorb, and obey. Unfortunately, they are the ones who have lots of money and tend to get the media attention since they are loud and obnoxious.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Exactly. When NFL quarterbacks get millions and top-of-the-line math teachers get a few tens of thousands, guess which way a physically fit but also smart student would go.
If he is truly "smart" he would know that your odds of being drafted by the NFL are slim to none, he would take the deal if offered, but it is unlikely any "smart" kid will truly believe he has a shot.
The Gospel according to lolcat
Wow. So you're saying union teachers trying to perpetuate a union system are looking to another union system to guide them?
What makes the Finnish educational system great is that it uses a lot of things that other countries don't do. Maybe it's because the unions are so strong so they can impose their ideas on the government bodies that define the way things should be done in schools, but maybe it's because their society has looked to itself and saw that only through education it could achieve great results (both economically and socially).
If Finland wasn't so damn cold, I certainly would move there. It kinda makes you proud to pay extremely high taxes when those are put to good use, unlike in this most countries.
I don't understand why everybody thinks it's important to promote math/science/engineering education.
We're all technical people here on slashdot and it's clear that there is a giant surplus of people for the given amount jobs (i'm an engineer and i won't even comment on academics which is truly nightmarish situation for employment) so I don't see that there is any need to promote this path in society (except perhaps to combat the gross ignorance in the US regarding things like evolutions)
In fact, it works much better since the US (and the west in general) is acting as a giant vaccuum cleaner of intellect from all over the world (especially in academics) which is a clear benefit to our society.
Is it really some bogus ego issue that we need society to revere intellectual types as it does sports heroes? get a life.
Of course, the authoritarian religious system is only for the proles. The "haves and have mores" will still have their bacchanalia and their Bohemian Clubs and so on while pretending to be pure as they let a few crumbs "trickle down" to the proles.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
I agree with you, though this arguably only applies to "standardized" testing. If the exam questions are from a genuinely random selection (with an even distribution) of what can be expected of children of a given age, where the only prediction you can make about what will appear on the exam is that it will be some fixed percentage of the syllabus, then teachers can't be pressured into dropping stuff that is supposed to be taught. There's nothing senior/administrative types can do to determine what should be dropped. This, however, tends to lead towards a restriction on the syllabus itself, thus still eliminating what is important in favour of what is easy to test. This can be beaten if (and only if) the exam board is given incentives to test a wide range of topics and damn what any school district restricts itself to. If it doesn't teach what's needed, too bad.
Now, it's perfectly true that kids can only handle exams of a certain length of time, and you're limited by that. For a single exam. So set multi-part exams. It's also true that school districts will want to ensure their kids get good grades, because that's how they get paid. Which goes back to the whole relative increase in knowledge, rather than absolute scores. Then it doesn't matter how many questions the kid can't answer, it only matters how many questions they CAN answer in comparison to what they knew the previous time they were tested. (Continuous assessment, as tried in the UK, might work better than strict examination, but only if the student/teacher ratio is good enough for quality assessments and quality responses to a student's change in abilities. But if you lack the manpower, the assessments are no good and just serve to distract both teacher and students from the object of the exercise, which is to learn.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There's also home-schooling. Again, the majority of home schooling families and home school groups that I'm aware of all seem to be of a religious nature. Probably because they don't want their kids exposed to dissenting ideas regarding their religion. My experience only, grain of salt and all that good stuff.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
So now you have your l33t math skills. What do you do with them? Engineering has been offshored. There's now a glut of unemployed Wall Street rocket scientists. Defense spending has to decline, what with the bailout eating up the Government budget. And don't even talk about NASA.
Few programmers do that much math any more. Even game programmers don't do as much as they used to; most of the hard stuff is embedded in packages now.
(I'm not complaining personally; I've done very well. But I can't recommend this to young people who have to go into debt to learn.)
As a current high school senior, I have a ...bit ... of a first hand perspective at this. My school and system are considered one of the best in the state (rich town, moderately rich system). However, our athletes get a far too large portion of the budget. I have discussed what would happen if that budget went away, but its impossible with so many 'All-American' parents in our town. So its not possible. Even with about 50% of the states revenue gains over the past 6 years about to go away, I doubt sports will be cut enough (or even fairly). No, we'll eliminate a couple janitors or a psychologist or something. After all, if our kids get sports scholarships, who gives a damn if they have a clean school?
And even our academics are not what I would consider up to par. Our system teaches five major subject areas - English, Math, Science, History, and Foreign Language. But they're totally separate. I'm not even sure the department heads talk to eachother very often. (The school gives them different lunches, so math/science can talk as can history/english/FL, but never between the two groups.) But even the subjects which should be closely linked (my calc course and physics course) are not. My physics teacher has never even spoken to my calc teacher. (Extenuating circumstance: My physics teacher is an EE who graduated from MIT a very long time ago (70s), thinks it makes him smart (hint: he can't complete a sentence without subjects) and has since failed out of two jobs. He somehow got himself certified as a teacher (egads, I'd like to get my hands on whoever certified him - oh, wait, its a standardized test!) and has spent two years confusing the hell out of everyone).
Back on topic - the lack of interdepartmental communication really hurts the students. We end up learning the same thing multiple times. Even communication within the department sucks! I swear I've been taking the same math course every year a different testbook - er, textbook - up until this year. I've spent four years learning the foundations of calc from algebra (I, II, Pre-caclc). Excepting the year of geometry, which is so simplistic its only use it being taught to freshman. Then comes the teaching to the test. It really is true that students don't, in general study until the night before, then cram and regurgitate. I'll admit that its mostly what I do. BUt this is because teachers far too often do things like 'Ok, heres whats on the test tomorrow!' and not enough of the pop quizzes.
And the results of this? Well, I was lucky enough to find a group of people who are pretty smart, and who think being smart is cool. But most of us have gotten bored. Two of my friends are now total slackers. One takes 3 AP classes yearly and is just barely in the bottom half of the class because he gets so bored out of his mind he doesn't do his work. A second one is much the same, except his grades are fairly better, and hes rated 30ish. Another friend of mine is taking AP calc BC at the end of the year. Not because the school is able to prepare him for it, but because he has been taking courses from a Chinese immigrant who taught members of the us national math team. And does he pay attention to our math course? No. He complains we're monumentally behind. Nor is he a 'perfect score' kid. And me? I'm taking 4 Aps this year, took 3 last year. I did ench, okay on those tests (who cares, they're standardized). But I'm enjoying calc this year, because I'm learning something. (oh, and I'm 13th in class)
As a side note on who this system encourages: Our valedictorian is an obsessive-compulsive neurotic-over-grades girl who is only able to interact very poorly socially, and is often insulted behind her back by 'friends'. Shes valedictorian because she gets insanely stressed about tests and memorizes facts and processes very well. But ask her to extrapolate? Can't do it. Shes little more than a sponge - sucking up information and spitting it out when asked.
So what needs to be done to f
Fixed that for you.
This may be true in some sections of the country, but I know that in some major urban areas where "faith" really doesn't seem to influence teaching, most public education still is weak and the teachers' union still fight change. I'm talking about areas where evolution was/is taught (correctly IMHO), without question and without controversy, as fact and where creationism (and variants) isn't even mentioned (and this has been the situation in these areas for at least 40 years).
For example of "union obstructionism", it seems most public school teachers consistently resist standardized testing. They claim it makes them "teach to the tests". I agree that this is true to some extent because, for example, the California HS exit exams are way too easy to pass so it sets the bar too low for the teachers. And, I would entertain arguments that the tests need to be improved to better test the skills they are purported to test. Also, the tests may need fixing -- I've found some ambiguous questions on sample tests - in one case the question was so poorly stated that I could make a very reasonable and equally valid argument for several of the offered answers and the response of a teacher I know was "oh, that doesn't matter -- anyone who gets that wrong by picking one of the 'correct but unacceptable' answers would have done well enough on the rest of the test anyway to pass it anyway" (wtf?). If the tests are too easy, not testing the skills they purport to, or inappropriately ambiguous, teachers should be calling for the tests to be fixed not eliminated. If you teach the material properly and the tests test the material properly, there's no reason to "teach to the tests" - just teach the material and the test will take care of itself. I think the real fear of teachers is that they may be evaluated based on how much their students' test scores improve - you know, sort of like part of my evaluation is based on how my code performs.
However, I agree that teachers unions are far from the sole problem. Often, public school administrators are complete do-nothing bureaucrats and too many parents fail to raise their kids to work hard, respect authority, and to understand the value of an education -- all of which makes public school teacher's job very difficult in many areas.
Now, get off my lawn.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
You sure about that?
Let's say you become a math teacher and make $100,000 a year. Okay, not bad.
Now let's say you sign a four year, $1,000,000/year contract for a football team and fulfill it. You've just made about 30-35 years of your salary (counting raises, tenure, bonuses, etc.) in roughly 1/10th of the time it would have taken you. Now you have the financial freedom to take a teaching position wherever you like and not have to worry about the salary.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Rather than wasting your energy and my time with finger pointing at teachers and teacher unions, I recommend doing research and examining better ways to present math. Here are the approaches that I use in my class: -Topics in Applied and real-world Math (balancing checkbooks in Excel, realistic and safe investment strategies) -Advanced Math topics explained in everyday terms and presented in a practical way (game theory). -Recreational Math (playing with the Fibonacci sequence) and math games. -Math History and biographies (Pythagoras, Newton, Ramanujan, Hardy, Erdos). Each of these strategies presents math in a way that shows how one could love it. As I tell students on the first day of the course, there are no promises that they will fall in love with math, but they may be able to glimpse a life where they do not have to hate it. Math is unlike many other subjects in that one failure may cause a lifelong disbelief in one's mathematical skills. But it doesn't always have to be that way. It took me a long time to learn what a joy this discipline can be. A majority of the math teachers I know feel the same way. Education does not scale up well. It has nothing to do with union conspiracies. Simply look at how ineffective mass-produced education was in the 1800's. It is simply the way it has always been. Innovators such as John Dewey have tried to change the traditions that have been around since ancient times, but improvements have always been small and slow to be accepted. What can one do? Try something positive. Your points are moot, and your energy can be used much better than in complaints. Help make improvements - how could it hurt?
I am going to throw a kinda trollish thesis here to you, fellow slashdotters, without any justification. Just a thought:
The more authoritarian (formally or by tradition, like respect the elders) the country, the better are it's students in math.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I love you.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
That's male bias in the problem set. Toss in some female anatomy also to even it out:
Sallies breasts jiggle at a rate of 1.3 times per second when the temperature is 82 degrees and at a rate of 1.6 times per second when the temperature is 55 degrees. Assuming the jiggle rate is linear to temperature, what is her jiggle rate at 72 degrees?
Table-ized A.I.
My mom left the teaching profession because she was tired of fighting with the unions. Teachers with seniority got to choose what they taught first, even if they were grossly unsuited. Teachers with seniority got paid more, even if they were blisteringly incompetent. If there were budget cuts, and someone had to be fired, guess who it was? I'll give you a hint: it wasn't the teachers with seniority.
Start teaching at a school early on, and relax! Once you've been there for three years you'll just never be fired, no matter how awful of a teacher you are.
The teaching unions are a blight upon the country.
Now, I'm not blaming them for all the problems. You're right - the painful lack of funding is an issue also. But I find it hard to believe the situation would be *worse* without them, given what I heard about what it was like with them.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
An emphasis on athletics does detract from an emphasis on academics, but when it comes down to it we aren't losing math majors to sports careers--we're losing them to business students.
This anti-union rant brought to you by some douche with an MBA and an opinion of educators apparently scraped from angry 14 year-olds.
People learn in dramatically different ways, and it takes people who know this and are skilled at adjusting how information is given to be learned in order to have the most people learn the best. Doing this actually requires a lot of cross-disciplinary skills and a substantial investment of time in each individual student. Knowing the material is only half of it, because a teacher with all the knowledge in the world is useless if they cannot convey it effectively.
As for your idea of having one really good teacher projected across time and space to teach thousands of students at once, believe it or not that's already been thought of... a very long time ago. As it turns out, textbooks are a popular, even ubiquitous, way of teaching new students, and they are then supported by a large local network of assistants who are able to assist students with understanding and interpreting them. The assistants have also managed to unionize, which apparently drives you nuts, but seems to serve the majority of teachers AND the majority of schools AND the majority of students just fine. You almost had a great idea that nobody else has ever had before, though. No, seriously, that was really close, I mean it.
Here's an idea: revoke No Child Left Behind and reassign the millions of dollars being paid to standardized test writers to hiring more teachers in all subjects. The cost stays exactly the same, but even a relatively poor teacher is going to teach the kids more than even the best standardized test because, get this, TESTS ARE NOT INTENDED TO TEACH. But that would harm those wonderful capitalists at Useless Tests, Inc. to the benefit of those commie unionist teachers, so I'm sure you'll oppose it whether or not all the evidence in the world supports it as the only way that works.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
And herein lies the rub. The factory mentality of school systems is the root of the problem. Why is it that until junior high/middle school or even high school, that everybody pretty much has to sit with the same kids all day long and get the same teaching? When I was in second grade, I was one of these bright students, and I fought constantly with my teacher because she insisted that I had to do everything that everybody else did and if I finished I couldn't do anything else. I just had to sit there. But when my parents wanted to advance me, the issue was purely black and white. I would have to be advanced a grade (which actually would have been fine), but the school fought them because a) I refused to be compliant (duh, I was a little boy, and little boys have a tendency to not be compliant), and b) because I wouldn't be as "emotionally developed" to be able to handle the older class. So I was punished.
The issue is that you've been given a job that is impossible from the start, and your job is, sorry to say, quite futile, in achieving its goals.
As a physicist and math/science teacher, I agree completely. Intellectuals are persecuted outside of academia and shunned by the majority of society.
Basically, American culture consists of MSNBC news, hotmail, facebook, lame shows like SNL, CSI, and Sunday football. They're happy as long as they have gas in their SUV, msg-laden food on their table, and have their Sunday football. I call it an "Information Bubble". If these people don't hear of something from MSNBC, they think it doesn't exist.
In reality, all of those people have been sold a false bill of goods by the corporations that own them. The information is filtered to create a culture of consumerism and discourage discussion and dissent.
As for denial, it goes even further than global warming to include fossil-fuel depletion/scarcity, the Hubbard peak, housing bubbles, credit bubbles, CDS bubbles, etc. I have a feeling that once the Information Bubble bursts, people will realize their house is owned by a Chinese lender, their car by a Saudi lender, they owe 50% of their wages in taxes every year, there is no industry or jobs in the US other than exporting copyrights and legalese, and their kids can't do math well.
I personally feel like packing up with all the intellectuals and starting a new country based on merit and achievement rather than who was born to a wealthier family.If a guy like Bush can become president of the US, then the US is lost to the powers the founding fathers were trying to stop.
Media isn't going to highlight academic success unless its profitable, some companies do try it (think Discovery Channel) but they immediately become less profitable and lose rating (ESPN owns Discovery Channel).
Of course you can't rely on the sheeple to influence themselves or we wouldn't be discussing this.
Government could do something but as long as the corporate sector is allowed to bribe government officers the media will still call the shots.
So in the end the only real solution is good old natural selection, we will start highlighting academics when we depend on them for our survival.
But... the future refused to change.
First of all, not all states have unions. In fact, most states in the South have banned unions and where are the lowest achieving states? The South. I've taught here for 7 years, and what amazes me is not the schools or the tests or the teachers. It's the idiots who actually think teachers are miracle workers and can fix every problem that walks through our doors. We're expected to teach to a test to keep our school off of 15 different lists created from No Child Left Behind, deal with 20 different types of behavior and emotional problems, deal with kids who haven't eaten, and will probably get their only real food at the school, and deal with a parental culture that simply doesn't have the time or wherewithal to get involved in their child's life. If you want to fix the schools, start by fixing the families and communities. The school system wasn't designed to be all of those things to all of the kids. If you look to other countries who are supposedly successful, you'll find they don't have nearly as many outside factors that the schools can't possibly control, counting against the schools.
Your teacher is protecting her job by 'teaching to the test'. You have the Republicans--and this president to thank for that.
My father was a college level teacher for over 50 years. Tenure and unions are very important aspects of college career. Here's why:
During the civil rights movement, my [white] father held on to his job while being able to protest blacks *not* being allowed into university. If it wasn't for the tenure, he would certainly have been let go.
You see, universities teach science, philosophy, and other disciplines which frequently go against the cultural fad of the day. It is important for freedom of thought to be part of education; without it, teachers would live under constant fear of being fired for simply expressing non-PC views. Think of the number of nuts who want creationism taught as "science" in school.
Universities are turning more and more to private enterprise for funding. This is dangerous, because it lets pointy haired MBAs treat education like a for profit enterprise, which it shouldn't be. Education funding should only be given by the state, federal and individual. Special interests need to stay out. If you think I'm wrong, just look at our congress.
There is another factor - $$ in college are allocated disproportionately to sports programs. Just take a look at the budgets of university sports programs in comparison to other departments. That's where your tuition goes - not to the pittance salary your professor gets.
As far as your other union related comments - I kind-of laugh and flinch at the same time. It's very vogue right now to look down on unions, to think that your "sheer skills" will somehow catapult you above all your peers, and that anyone who is in a union is a slacker.
To some extent, this may be true. However, unions, social security, and other social programs came about because of one very important factor: greed. It's the same greed you see today in Wall Street. Prior to the advent of unions, people suffered tremendously at the hands of companies. Do your homework - read up on why they came about. Time changes little - today in the US system companies would love you to be slave labor (read: WalMart). What do you think WalMart would pay its employees if the federal or state minimum wage wasn't in effect?
In the end, extremes encourage strife. Government, business and people need to live in constant tension, and in balance. There should always be a tug of war happening between all three, with government erring on the side of its people whenever possible.
Pay the Teachers enough to make more Science and Math majors WANT to be teachers (in other words support the union).
The Union wouldn't allow that. Part of supporting all members is that history and english teachers (which there are too many applicants for) make the same as math and science teachers (who there are usually not enough of). The seniority based pay scale the teachers unions insist on hurts as well, a teacher makes decent money in most states if they stick with it long enough, but how many people who just graduated college (and probably have major debt) are going to want to take a job that doesn't pay anything in the short term? A flatter wage will get you more teachers, even if there's more churn. (not necessarily a better situation).
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
No.. it's because they have a legal cartel.
If there were rules for anyone to set up a football team and compete (so that there were 300 football teams in america) then the pay would not be so grand.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Quick Anecdote:
I am a teacher in Canada (where teachers are paid fairly well). In particular, I am a math/physics teacher, and a pretty good one at that, if anonymous student ratings can be believed.
I left a relatively high paying job (in a nuclear reactor as it turns out!) to go teach, and I was able to do so because the cut in salary was not too severe. In the states, I would have certainly NOT left my original job, since the gain in job satisfaction would not have been worth the crippling change in lifestyle.
Frankly, I am amazed that any competent individual would choose to teach in the states. Anyone in math/science should be able to find a much better job.
OK. Lets STOP accepting poor performance from teachers.
The NEA can't have that though. Teachers getting fired for not teaching? Heaven forbid. Promote them instead, they got their masters in regurgitating nonsense.
Lets also get the concept of denominators through teachers heads. They are paid for short work years and are paid more then fairly. Cue the standard response. 'I work 26 hours a day doing lesson prep for the same class I've taught for ten years.' I see the problem. They are too stupid to keep their lesson plans from last year.
BTW both my parents are teachers. No competent teacher works all that many hours once they get a subject down.
My parents were well enough paid to send me to private school. Like the majority of teachers do (public and private).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Actually you could perform a first-order approximation for the weenie-tip by using a sinusoidal oscillator and get a probability density of where it will hit and the expectation values for velocity, how far, how long, etc.
I found it interesting that this article is embedded deep in NYTime's website. The article isn't found on the front page, and even on the technology page it only makes the "More Technology news" section.
No change can happen though. It is disallowed by the union.
You repeat this like a mantra. Any attempt to ascribe a single malicious motive to organization made up of thousands of people, who if questioned individually would tell me that the students come first, is likely to be fallacious.
I love unions in the abstract. Unions can be a great force for good. Some Unions like the Steelworkers are just fickin' awesome in the good things they do for their memebers and our country.
But some unions in the specific are bad. Teacher's Unions are not awesome. Not even a little bit, unless you count being "awesomely bad" as being awesome. They are a cancer on this country that enforces an idiocracy on our schools.
It is hard to understate how much harm teacher's unions are doing to the US.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Look we've got 7 cannisters of CN-20, I say we roll them in there and nerve gas the whole fucking nest!
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
Are people asking why highly advanced mathematical lectures are not put on prime-time tv or on Monday night math events? Almost anyone understands that when a football player crosses the plane marking the end zone, something has been achieved, and they should cheer. If they were to watch a professor scribbling at the blackboard, and he turned around without boxing in his QED, would most people even know if he was finished? How can they relate to what they are seeing? Opening a book and taking baby steps might be interesting, but those "math events" would probably be boring and unintelligible.
I disagree. The system will be heavily regulated to death and pushed around by crazy PTA, parents, politicians with their uneducated beliefs if you break up the school system. It will end up similar to school districts and charter schools.
Other countries BEAT the USA without a silly 'competition' system. Perhaps one should look at what works before falsely equating education with business. Perhaps the states could also look at each other...
A half decent PARENT can outdo a teacher in a classroom easily. Give a D level teacher just 1 or 2 kids per class and they will do quite a lot better.
Everyone likes to blame teachers and knows of a bad one (there are lots of teachers we are exposed to in our lives.) The culture, technology and the PARENTS are also part of the problem. The business-think fixes that have and are being applied are only making things worse.
Education and child development experts should be designing the schools not ignorant politicians and the parents-- who all have 'gifted' children.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Will the Archdiocese also make children sit through daily prayer?
yeah, but I'm 25 IQ points shy of where I started, and I haven't opened a textbook in 4 years.
I'm not going to be the same math teacher I would have been, and I probably won't enjoy it as much.
i forget
The Fundies might be a problem with teaching biology. But they have little to do with the poor school systems in the US. If you look at which states have the worst schools it has very little correlation to states with lots of Fundies, and more to do with states that have poorly performing state governments (CA, MS, LA, etc)
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Congratz on homeschooling. Welcome to an up-hill battle against the state.
For some reason, the NEA doesn't like us (homeschoolers).
It's a free market!
Which is why I find it so amusing when team owners complain their labor costs are too high. If you don't want to pay an athlete $15 million per year, THEN DON'T PAY THAT MUCH! I'm sure they can find some other athlete for less.
The complaints are directed at the politicians who have burdened them with a free market.
i forget
Unions support the interests of their members which for many teachers is helping their students. I won't say that there are not bad teachers but most have their hearts in the right place.
Sure it will. How many Klu Klax Klansmen does it take to hang a nigger? I bet most people here can't answer it.
Sergey and Larry? Cuban? Jobs? The infamous Bill and Chair-Throwing Steve? Ellison?
Ok, I'll admit the last one is stretching things on the famous bit.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
It is financially rewarding to learn math.
The easiest way for a typical person to get a
solidly above-average salary is an engineering
degree or something similar like computer science, physics, or plain old math.
It is not financially rewarding to teach math,
and there is no way to fix this.
Money won't fix the problem. It would, except
that you can't do what you need to do with it.
Getting bright people to enter teaching would
require that you convince them that they'll be
able to get a solid income for decades into the
future. In the cheap places that means $60000.
It's probably $150000 in Silicon Valley. Even
if you could offer that today, you couldn't
convince them that it would always be offered.
The money has to come from somewhere. There are
a lot more teachers than NFL quarterbacks. This
isn't a matter of few dollars per taxpayer. It's
simply massive. My rough estimate is $4000 to
$10000 per family per year, rather than the
$2000 to $3000 right now.
You can't pay some teachers more than others,
except based on seniority. The union won't
let it happen. This means you can't just pay
extra for math teachers, you can't pay extra
for the teachers that most help students get
better test scores, and you can't pay extra to
a new teacher who happens to be wonderful.
Politically, you can't purposely give better
teachers to the better students. You can't do
that with equipment either. You thus have to
waste money where it won't do any good.
Also note that you can't discipline a student
(or their parents) in any effective way, and
you can't even get rid of students who are
disruptive and destructive. Besides directly
ruining the educational environment, this is
yet another reason for highly capable people
to avoid the teaching profession.
I've seen it a thousand times. On tv, in the movies, media reflects it very well: the high school football player and the cheerleader get all the attention, they are "popular" and at the top of the social scale. At the bottom: nerds.
OK. Lets STOP accepting poor performance from teachers.
I just have to point out I WASN'T DOING THAT.
When teaching kids math, it's more of a monkey-see monkey-do phenomenon. The logic and deduction come later after calculus, usually at the undergraduate level. Asians don't teach logic and deduction, they teach copying, cheating, and rote-skills; hence their kids appear better at math. In US government schools, the monkey-see approach is thwarted by large classroom sizes, disciplinary problems, and general cultural malaise and perception that math is not important.Who wants to do homework when they could be taking steroids and getting big enough to be drafted into the NFL?
Um, Jobs? As in Steve Jobs?
The man is brilliant in business execution, sure. But to put him on the same level of Einstein/Mozart/Newton?... But I guess we were long due for a business idol. And except for the dictator-aspect, he's a pretty cool guy.
(and her? him is generic/male... women; if you take offense at him, look at this way: you always brace for the worst. :) )
You might not, but the system does.
Without recourse as public school teachers typically have 'tenure' after only a couple of years. (Outside universities anyhow, where tenure is largely a thing of the past.)
After that they would have to rape a student or be seen voting R to be fired.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I see a lot of "replace the crappy teachers" comments. With who? Schools have a near impossible time just filling the positions at all. If you want good teachers your going to have to make it comparable with the jobs you can get elsewhere with a math and science degree. Which means paying them 20-60% more then they are paid now. And don't think that you can get away with only doing that for the math/sci people. The unions, teacher and admins would mutiny. In short: better pay, better educations.
It's at the tertiary level but the culture pervades American society. Went to/worked for enough colleges and U's that I can pick and choose my charity. My local Big 10 is building a football stadium that would have been the pride of any American metropolis 30 years ago. When their Advancement Office calls, I ask:
"How big is Columbia's football stadium? Johns Hopkins? The Sorbonne? Oxford? Cambridge? They seem to be holding their own in the reputation department. Why was a world-class football field a top priority here?"
They predictably give me the line that it is precisely such extravagant expenses on entertainment that build school spirit and prime the pump for donations. At which point I can explain that it does not have that effect on me. Research and scholarship are the rightful products of a university and they would impress me.
Of course, I'm wrong. They claim their donations have spiked significantly since groundbreaking on the stadium. Which circles back to the idea that it's pervasive and deep in the culture. We're Romans, not Greeks. Americans, not Europeans. What _can_ you do but wait for the Mongols to invade from the East?
1)The union is absolutely positively in favor of changes that benefit TEACHERS. It cannot be otherwise.
Fixed that for you.
--------------------
The hell you did. With compensation being what is, teachers only become teachers because they want to teach. They care. The idea that the majority (which would be needed to control the union) of teachers are self serving and indifferent to the needs of students is flat out ridiculous. You do know better.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Yes those shows are very good and everything but cultural norms will still prevent them from getting the same sort of coverage and hype of something like the olympics. What is needed is a cultural shift, these shows are a step in the right direction.
but my middle school and high school encouraged me plenty with the Utah State Math Contest, which I see is still being held annually. I still have my trophies from that. :-)
How did this get modded up as "interesting"? It doesn't make any goddamn sense. Are people really falling for this "I'm too lazy but you can Google it" bullshit?
Are you telling me that CEOs also had to get designated as "entertainers" before they could make millions of dollars? That is not the way our economy works.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
It's fine to pay English and History majors the same as Math and Science majors. Pay them all enough to make the job attractive, there's nothing wrong with having 20 applicants for one English teaching job.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Exactly... which is why I can't wait to see
http://igor-movie.com/
Ok, try classes of 35 students... 6 per week... that's 210 students. How long does it take to grade 210 papers? Every week? Don't forget you need to plan 18 lessons(3 periods/weekX6classes). During the days off, teachers are at work. Teachers make a lot of personal sacrifice and are constantly faced with decisions where they have to choose between helping one gifted student or 25 struggling ones. I'm sure they try to help everyone but in reality, classroom time is limited and so are teachers.
I dunno, that example has something of an Emily Dickinson flavor to it. She may be teaching the next Robert Grenier or Aram Saroyan.
Quality control requires measurement. Sorry.
We need cold hard numbers, not some rubbish
about how the students are all self-esteemy.
No numbers? The learning didn't happen.
I dunno, that example has something of an Emily Dickinson flavor to it. She may be teaching the next Robert Grenier or Aram Saroyan.
I wouldn't count on it.
I'm not saying these kids were stupid, but they certainly didn't qualify as educated.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I think your response is just as kneejerk. In a profession where honor and integrity must be valued over all else (including money) - I can see why teaching unions have the potential to protect an important part of our economy from becoming capitalistic (and no, not in the sense that the promise of money drives excellent teaching...) That being said, as was said in a previous reply - the current union system in America is rather stuck up. I think a combination of good administration at the top along with a little funding can clean up the teaching system in about 5 years assuming the leadership doesn't drop off at the head with a new election cycle.
Unless we bring back lynch mobs.
Those were the days.
Who would a lynch mob be more likely to attack: an athlete or someone who is good at math? Which one might be more likely to escape this mob?
I should think this would fall upon the parents to take responsibility for their child's education. The government education is just a starting point. If a child is beyond that, send them to private school or get a tutor. Hell, my parents couldn't afford any of that so I enrolled myself in college when I was 16(my High School had to foot the bill :)). There are also trade schools, open/alternative schools, etc.
Oh and please don't equate Steve Jobs with Einstein. A college-dropout-businessman is not on the same level as the Father of Modern Physics and Nobel Laureate.
The timing was perfect. A commercial came on TV just as I was reading this article:
Gladiators in a steel cage, each one representing a different academic discipline, growl and strut. The ringmaster asks, "Who will take them on?" and a young girl steps into the cage and says "I will."
The commercial then lists a website (which of course I failed to write down) and encourages kids to study now so that they can face challenges later. The commercial is exciting and engaging, with a quality similar to a (rather dark) children's movie. Clearly, you're not the only one who thinks the system is broken.
Irony: Having to win a lottery in order to get taught how to do math.
You, sir, are full of bullshit and don't what the hell you're talking about. Sometimes that happens. Do you know member of a teacher's union? Have you talked with him/her? Do you know what the stated priorities are of any union in your local area?
Look, I was thinking about this today. The teachers are the ones in the classroom, working shoulder-to-shoulder with students, seeing their needs, hearing their cries. The alternative is to put all the power in administrators -- actual fat cats who make more than teachers -- who never see, hear, or deal with students. All they care about is money figures in a spreadsheet. You can dig up enormous numbers of stories where it was the teacher's union fighting for student safety and welfare, and the administration fighting them every step of the way.
Here's an example. I used to teach in Massachusetts at community college with a pretty weak union; a cranky dean ran everything pretty much as a fiefdom. Students failed the physics final? Pass 'em anyway, more money for the school. Teaching basic math/science? Not interested, give me a "sexy" new class like cybersecurity to advertise. Observe what's going on in the classrooms? No time for that -- I had to beg to get an assistant dean into my room one time a year, for like 5 minutes, and scrawl some smoke-up-my-ass about how everything's great (and demonstrating that he didn't have a clue what I'd been teaching).
A fellow teacher tells me about this kid who's in the engineering program. He took Calculus I three times before he just barely passed it. Now he's in Calculus II and failing that for the second time. The kid's obviously not cut out to be an engineer. Can anyone tell him this? No, because that would be less money for the school, and the dean would crack your nuts if he found out anyone had advised the student about that. So off they went, sucking money out of this hapless student year after year.
Now I'm in New York with a strong teacher's union. Instead of a dean, here my boss/employer is the department chairperson, a teacher herself. First thing she tells is do _not_ pass students who are unprepared into other classes. Last month she fought with administration to get smaller basic remedial classes, where students are really struggling. Here I get observed regularly -- every semester a different teacher comes into my room for a whole class period and writes up a 5+ page document on exactly what I did, puts it in my permanent record, and we have a 1/2 hour discussion about I can do to improve. Here I would feel very confident that I could politely advise a student on their own best-interests, even if it meant less tuition money to the college.
That's what the union is doing, specifically on the ground this week. Guess what's the #1 priority of the administration in their negotiating sessions? "Get rid of the chairpersons as union members." Remove their responsibilities to deans who are in administration, not teachers, not dealing with students.
It's really just common sense. Who's going to have a greater emotional connection and allegiance to students? Teachers in their classroom every day, or administrators in an office crunching budget figures? Those are really your only choices.
Look at this month's issue of "American Educator" magazine, from the American Federated Teacher's union. (http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/fall2008/index.htm) It's all about how to better judge and analyze how well teachers are doing. There's an article on peer review with what will be a surprising result to you -- it is the unions *fighting to fire more bad teachers*, because it hurts our profession, whereas the principals who hire them don't have the guts or care to start the process (p. 37). At one school where the union got involved in teacher evaluations, dismissals went up from 1% to 12% in the first year. You can see quotes from principals, surprised as you are, about how much more aggressive the union was about firing bad teachers than the administration would have been.
So to conclude: You are completely full of bullshit, ignorant on this issue, and don't know what the fuck you are talking about. Sometimes that happens; you can become more knowledgable. Maybe with luck this has been... educational.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
hmm..reverse of what actually prevails in India. Sports achievement other than in cricket gets very little recognition. Every parent wants their kid to be a computer engineer or a doctor.
Ha! Well played, Sir! Well played, indeed!
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
I don't think it's about money at all. This is kids we're talking about. It's about popularity. Football players give swirlies to nerdy math-majors in highschool, so they are popular and smart kids are not. Given that information (and keeping in mind that students think with the mind of a child), if you were a freshman in highschool, which option would pick (assuming you had the option)? I know that money can get you friends in school too but that comes from your parents, and "considering your future" doesn't exactly make you popular with the ladies.
I didn't RTFA, but I'm guessing when they attributed the issue to American culture, it wasn't referring to the teachers but to the students, and to a lesser degree, their parents. Paying teachers more probably won't help (though they should get paid more). I think the responsibility falls on the parents, who don't teach their children the importance of an education early enough. I also think parents don't spend enough time with children, which means the children listen to them less and are more likely to be affected by peer mentality, which, if unchecked, reduces children to the level of wild animals.
The path to enlightenment is truly through homemade drugs!
Oh yeah!
I remember getting minus points in the fourth grade because my teacher insisted that I couldn't possibly read 3 books more or less simultaneously.
And when I taught myself cursive writing, well, that too was a sign that I was a dedicated trouble-maker.
Public education sucks but that can be overcome in the home. If anything, public education today, with its teaching-to-the-test, NCLB insanity, card-turning social engineering crap is, regrettably, crap.
But you as parents can make a difference within the home. No need for the general public to pay taxes to support home-schooling or private schooling interests of people who, more often than not it would seem, seek those solutions out precisely because they do NOT ask the hard math and, especially, science questions.
(bows)
Really, though, I think your observation was spot-on. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the libertarianism on slashdot is born out of (quite reasonable) spite and bitterness toward a mostly-wasted youth in the prisons that are modern schools. It's only natural that the topic of education would bring out that sentiment the most strongly.
Although I understand the sentiment, when I think of libertarian education, I think of that episode of The Simpsons, where the kids are stacked in cubicles to watch the Pepsi education channel.
Troy: Now, turn to the next problem. If you have three Pepsis and drink one, how much more refreshed are you? You, the redhead in the Chicago school system?
Girl [her face appears picture-in-picture]: Pepsi?
Troy: Partial credit!
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
No, I don't think so at all. Expensive (but effective) private schools take on good staff *and* ensure a favourable student/teacher ratio. If there were anything in conveniently exposing pupils to videotaped maths lectures from sports-star like teachers, private schools would be doing just that, but they don't. They simply invest in good teachers and make the pupils *work*. That's all there is to it.
It may sound very "American" to go on a rant about "unions" and waffle about how they supposedly block progress, but in its simple-mindedness and it's lack of thought it's a veritable poster-child of what's wrong with the US approach to academic achievement.
When in school, we had these two Saturdays where that was tried. It was awful. I think a teacher can only teach a certain number of students well. Above that it all breaks down.
I don't care if you set up 300 football teams; you go join one of those teams and no one will pay to watch you. If you somehow got a chance to play against the NFL, they'd snap you in half and you'll have cleat marks running from your feet up to your face. People in the NFL or any professional sports get paid well because they're the best at what they do and because millions of people pay to watch them. If you've got some sort of talent that can get a million people to watch you, you'd be a millionaire too.
This is so true.
I teach at a California State University. I'm currently teaching a third-year general education course (Computer Impact on Society).
About a year ago, I had a student stumble over the following sentence presented as an oral presentation of his group's group project:
"Computer technologies and telemedicine enabled Dr. Jeri Nielson to perform her own autopsy..."
I nearly fell off my chair.
I attributed it to nervousness until I read the actual report, which said the *exact same thing*.
THIS is why when one or more teachers of my 7 year olds pompously tells me how they've been an educator for 20 years and how, implicitly, I don't know shit, I really want to weep for the current state of public education.
Because I've ALREADY SEEN the fruits of their supposed labor, albeit 10 or so years later...
It's simple supply and demand. Top-quality athletes have a much smaller supply than teachers.
Hogwash. Top-quality teachers are probably just as hard if not harder to find than top-quality athletes.
The difference is that amazing athletic ability is something that something like 90% of the population will gladly pay to see, or will at least sit and watch so that someone else can sell advertising on their eye-ball time.
Great teachers have a harder time drumming up those kind of audiences. There simply aren't as many consumers interested in the product they are offering.
So, it's all about supply and demand, yes, but you picked the wrong side of that equation. The supplies aren't that different. It's the difference in demand for watching athletes jump up and down vs demand for listening to educational lectures from skilled teachers.
Disclaimer: I don't live in the US, so my opinion is based only on the article and the remarks above. However from what I'm reading it seems to me that "the school system" is as convenient a scapegoat as ever. The real problem seems to be the people themselves. For some reason they are more worried about "what would people think" rather than trying out something they may possibly enjoy. To be perfectly honest, I don't think there is in fact any problem at all with the school: people like that, who are so concerned about conformity and being labelled, would not make great mathematicians at the first place. Even if, for the sake of the argument, we admit that "social pressure" can be somehow relevant, it's still remarkable that having a talent in a certain field, enjoying it and excelling at it is seen as "socially" bad. When you add the fact that the sole and only criterion for choosing an activity seems to be immediate financial gain, there is nothing to be surprised of and nobody else to blame. Sorry if this post sounds harsh, by the way.
I find some of the comments here a bit strange. Mathematics and many of these 'prestige' jobs have a close relationship, modern economics and finance are dominated by it, mathematics is King in these fields. I thought this would be self-evident, but apparently not. For illustration of some of this and a good, rigorous, (open source) introductory and intermediate (micro)economics textbook, check out: http://www.introecon.com/ for "Introduction to Economic Analysis" by Prof. R. Preston McAfee.
I use the examples of economics and finance due to the American obsession (or so it seems to us foreigners abroad fed with US film, media, etc) with Wall Street and the upper echelons. But this applies widely to many, MANY fields.
Although, I must concede that the program at many universities doubtlessly does not do it justice in these fields. In fact, I believe that mathematics is widely misunderstood and mistaught. Look up Bertrand Russell and his extensive writings. THIS is a mathematician, and is what proper mathemematical perspective yields. Mathematics without proper rigour is a dead-end, even in the presence of great potential and talent. Once you come to see this as self-evident, only then can you understand how truly important this subject matter is.
There is nothing stopping you or anyone else from starting their own competing professional football league. In fact, it has been tried several times before, XFL being the most recent attempt, without too much success. However, there is no law against trying and good or at least decent football players are still available at regular working man prices if you can figure out ways to compete successfully for viewers and attendance.
And why is that? I think it's because most people can't do them, don't understand them, and can't appreciate an elegant mathematical solution. While it's also true that most people can't throw a tight spiral at all, let alone throw one in pads, while running, and 15 yards downfield to split two defenders and hit a receiver on a crossing route in-stride, they _can_ appreciate how hard it is to do, and how much effort went into it. Most people have some more-or-less frame of reference for the QB/RB/CB/Pitcher/insert-sports-position-here. Is that the chicken, with the egg being poor emphasis on academics for the last three decades, or is it the egg, with the chicken being "I don't need to learn more than the basics of math, because I can be a superstar (insert-position-name-etc.)!" I'm not smart enough to figure that one out. Maybe someone here can enlighten me?
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
I think it's simple as how many people are interested in watching, the movie, tv-series, sporting event or the math battle(?).
Exactly! Mod this man up.
The large sums of money in pro-sports all come from viewers pockets at the end of the day, in one way or another.
Even the advertising dollars, in a round-about way. There just aren't as many people who can appreciate a great math answer as can a flying slam dunk from the free-throw line. I don't think there's any way to change that.
I think most of you folks are past expiration date on this subject. It's not your fault! You're just old. But hey, here's my take on the subject:
First of, this is obviously cultural, as has been pointed out. American culture has gone to an extreme. Those who read this site most likely are not fans of that extreme. But look to the other end for one second: would you be happy if the US was like, say, Japan? Yes? Then friggin' move! But if a little voice is saying "That would be sort of nice, but they're sort of weird little fuckers over there", well, then, there you go. Culture is a hard thing to work out.
Second of, think - like, really, really think - about the following. Assume all that's been said is true: teacher unions suck, teachers suck, there are no rewards for excelling, and everything runs this way because, now, there's just a lot of money that depends on things running this way. Who in the fuck is gonna pull off the trick of getting all of this to move in the opposite direction? Fuck inertia, huh?
And thirdly, and in regards to your being too old, I believe most people work on sort of a rewards system. Sure, you can have motives to be a good student and whatnot - you can do it for prizes, money, because it gives you satisfaction to understand things. But in high school, the thing you want most in your life is power. This may sound strange, and I'm no psychologist, but I believe it's true. You want to be able to make your life blissful. You want kick the asses of everyone who disagrees with you or who you just plain don't like, stomp the face of captain of the football team, and walk off with his hot girlfriend to top it all off. I sound pissed? And you've never thought about it. The thing is though, math doesn't get you closer to any of that in high school. You've lost sight of that. You may want to believe you can value math, but you can't. You can maybe only make other things less attractive.
Sorry for the long post.
Let's say you lose 1 hour of being able to sit down and reflect on a quantum field equation and it's relation to information exchange in the human brain.
That would be worth the footballer's 70 meaningless years put all together.
In Singapore, academics is king. Extra-curricular activities play a huge part in secondary education too, but ultimately most people are doing them just to get into a good university and receive a good scholarship.
There are all sorts of examinations and awards used to measure academic aptitude and reward the brightest with the best. The best and brightest receive government scholarships for college education and are pretty much guaranteed a life of success in both the public and private sector, both because they simply have the talent that they are being recognized for and because such public recognition opens doors of opportunities.
I think most people here cannot understand the American mindset of catering to the middle at the expense of the gifted. SAT is a joke compared to the rigorous nature of A'level assessment in Singapore, and scoring 800 for SAT I Math or SAT II Math 2 is considered normal for my high school, which Washington Post claims is the school that sends the most students to the Ivy Leagues in the entire world, including expensive private schools in the States. All this coming from a tiny country with less than 5 million people. This is the result of decades of heavy government investment in education since the nation's independence 43 years ago.
The people that grew up with the moon landings on TV are getting old and replaced ...
Hey! I'm not dead yet! It's getting better. I think I'll go for a walk.
We need something like the moon landings to inspire children for a lifetime.
Totally agree. They considered me retarded (I think a different term would be used now), until I got interested in the space program in the 1st grade and they discovered that I had only been bored, not brainless. I thank God they didn't start force feeding me crap like Ritalin.
My "specialty" is diagnosing bugs in software (or any large system) and fixing them. My job will never be outsourced and they'll retire me when they close the door on the casket. So I can definitely say that I was inspired and helped by the space program of the 60s and early 70s.
The media covering achievements in sports can kiss my ass, as can the achievers.
We shouldnt WANT their petty coverage, because it also means that we dont HAVE to compete on a smoke and mirrors level, and concentrate on the real subject.
They top guys make millions because they are actually really good, the same general wage pyramid is found in most markets.
Actually, sports is much more pyramid-shaped than most. Most companies would be ecstatic if they only hired people past the 80th percentile. In most economics, you simply want one competent at his job that does it well. In sports, it's about the GOLD, not silver, not bronze. Is the world's 100th best player bad? Hell no, but hardly anybody will know his name. The very, very best are stars and make huge amounts of money while a good athlete isn't anywhere near as useful as a good employee. I'm not going to watch, and certainly not pay to watch, some second division match between whatstheirname and thatotherteam. Their salary follows straight out of their market value or lack thereof.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Why didn't you report this to a news source?
I'm glad you're talking about it here, but this is the kind of thing that people need to be telling everyone. The only way you're going to change the system is if you make it vocal to as many people as possible about just how broken the system truly is.
If I can not smoke in heaven, then I shall not go. -- Mark Twain
The gladiators had the highest salaries in the empire...
.
There is no "ruling" here.
Promoters have always known that the star performer is the best guarantee of success at the box office.
Joe Lewis in the ring. Babe Ruth at bat. Elvis on tour.
It is all money in the bank.
It already is financially rewarding to learn mathematics. The problem is that it's not immediate and not potentially as rewarding as many entertainment careers can be.
A better education is going to provide better job opportunities and the money that goes with that. The fact that people fail to see this is a bit sad.
If you were to look at it purely from financial terms, consider an education as an investment. Low (but some) risk, long term payoff.
>The education system, in your description, exists to make teachers happy.
Wow. Clearly you don't know any teachers. I'm married to one. Many of our friends are teachers. And let me tell you unequivocally they aren't happy. And contrary to what you want to believe, I don't usually hear complaints about pay or the amount of work. The vast majority of them are dissatisfied for one reason: the kids are dicks and they have dick parents.
And just so this doesn't sound like sour grapes, let me give you a flavor of what my wife goes through every day as an 8th grade science teacher.
-Parents who call up and *tell* her she's going to accept a late assignment from their child because the parent says so. And these aren't legitimate "kid was sick" scenarios. They're bullsht reasons like "we went to the movies and ran out of time".
- Kids who tell her that she has no right to discipline them and parents who will stand there in front of other students and reinforce that message.
- Parents who refuse to make their child go to detention because, and I quote, "It's inconvenient for me to drive up to school to get them."
- Kids who think "I forgot" is a legitimate reason for ANYTHING and their parents who call the principal to complain that remembering to do homework is too hard for a 14 year old.
- An absolute inability to follow directions. She's resorted to putting extra credit freebies in the instructions just to see if they'll pay attention ("one extra point if you put a smiley face somewhere on this paper"). If she gives out five points in a day it was a success.
- A general disdain for any rule that might be a negative for the kids. Like having homework deadlines (no, I'm not kidding; they're 'stifling to his creativity'). Like failing a kid for cheating on a test (the parents *love* to believe their 14yo over an adult professional with two degrees).
So let me tell you that when I saw the title of this story it was a complete 'no-sht' moment. It's been very apparent for some time that there is something going wrong with our culture. We have a bunch of slack-ass 'fight the man' parents raising kids with no discipline and no mandate of success.
I had no money growing up and I went to a half-assed school district. But there was never any question in my household that education was the single most important thing I was going to do in my life. It didn't matter how crappy or boring the teacher was. I was expected to find a way to learn that material and get the grade. And gee, what do you know-- it worked. Three engineering degrees later I'm still finding things to learn and I love it.
Two points of clarification:
* This is a district with money, not an inner-city slum
* I'm no union apologist. I work with union labor every day and it's the bane of my existence. My wife also does not favor the union, although she's stuck with it and uses it where necessary.
"Really, though, I think your observation was spot-on."
Thank you!
For all their talk about freedom and liberty and voluntary cooperation, it always seems to come down to "the money".
And if some action, somewhere reduces the profit margin of some multinational hypercorp, the cry of "SOCIALISM!" is heard throughout their tubby ranks, and the sound of their chubby thighs rubbing together as they rise, en masse, to rush, well, actually, waddle, to their keyboards, sounds like the oncoming wind. The clacking of the keys, as they go on the Internet to register their displeasure is deafening!
They're the nerds who give honest & rational nerds a bad reputation.
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> Schools should be for students :-)
Yeah? Well if you understood the abuse that parents and administrators heap on teachers daily you'd understand that without the benefits and protection of the union you'd really be scraping the bottom of the barrel to get someone to come in and deal with that crap. At least now you can get *some* good teachers. As it is, the good teachers I know are looking to leave the profession because they can't stand it. How do I know they're good teachers? Because they bitch about the union and their lazy co-workers
> When you get the best results, you don't have to make such excuses
Seriously? You're really going to try that line of reasoning? You have parents that are willing to make the extra effort to pay more to get their kids into private school and you're going to pretend that that in itself doesn't make a huge difference in the child's attitude towards learning? You really are delusional.
Well, in my experience you don't really have the time for the whole problem[reality] -> problem[math] -> solution[math] -> solution[reality], usually the curriculum is enough you just need to teach people to get from A to B in the middle and hope the rest is covered in some other class. As for creative problem solving, mathematicians spent years figuring it all out. In a class you know you'll start with some basis and end up at some results and you're more explaining the way through than you could possibly hope for people to find it by themselves.
Math is tough in that pretty much everything that's easy has already been done and there's only one "math". You can always come up with a half-original physics question or essay topic but there's really only one way to derivate a function and the unsolved problems are usually in the million dollar class. I'm not disputing that ideally it should be more like what you describe, I just think most people have trouble enough wielding the huge cookbook, far less getting to really use it. I certainly feel there's like an endless pit of math subjects where I'm still following in someone else's footsteps and is a long, long way from doing something original, at least in the pure math sense.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm a left-winger and I used to be all against school vouchers... but now I've seen the light. We need real competition, and we need to bust the teacher's unions to get the bozos out of our school system.
Thank you, thank you, thank you! So good to hear someone (a parent, no less) saying this. Vouchers have always sounded like a great idea to me -- among other things, they make it easier for parents to home-school if they choose. The Democrats like to wave scare stories about religious schools where children learn nothing useful, but I think this is mostly a smoke screen. Parents -- those who care at all -- mostly want their kids to get a good education. I vote for Democrats more than half the time too, but they're wrong, and destructively wrong, on this issue.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
Maybe life is different at other schools, but I can tell you from experience that this is often not the teacher's fault. The union in my wife's district fights *against* the inability to tier kids based on skill level.
Think about it: how much easier is it to teach kids that are all at roughly the same level vs. having to teach a classroom where the dumbest kid can barely read and the brightest kid should be two grades ahead? You've lost before you started.
No, this stuff comes from "concerned parents" and school board members that have no business touching education. After all, you can't have the underachievers feeling bad about themselves. And certainly it's worth hobbling decent kids so that Johnny can move up the skill ladder from fry cook to *head* fry cook.
As for the standardized tests, they are a HUGE problem. In order to meet all the various requirements so the kids can pass the tests, the district resorted to developing one curriculum that all teachers have to follow. Want your kid's teacher to be interesting and flexible and spark your kid's interest? Forget it. There's a manual to be followed!
As a maths teacher who has worked in primary, secondary and tertiary education, the biggest problem is a misproportioned misinterpreted focus on "equity". As a result classes now contain more "challenged" students. Now there is lots of evidence that the slower kids benefit significantly in many, ways by not being marginalised in "special schools". But when you factor in the large classes (driven mainly by low teacher salaries and low funding) the teachers find themselves spending over half their time managing the behaviour of the 10% of kids who never used to be there.
The other big factor is curriculum bloat. Look at curriculum and see how much time is spent on such things as teaching against homophobia or on "modern popular culture". As more is added to the curriculum less time is available to teach literacy and numeracy. As a result, the minimum standards are lowered to make the numbers look good. Meanwhile we as teachers do not have the time to really engage the kids in the really interesting and fun content. This sucks a great deal.
I believe there has to be a serious look at getting balance back in the curriculum - 3 hours maths a week for 15 year olds is inadequate. And there has to be a rethink on how to lift the challenged without handicapping the "normal" kids and start inspiring the gifted.
What often makes it an 'impossible' job is that these kids aren't getting discipline or a work ethic at home. My wife teaches junior high math (in a good district) and she routinely gets parents complaining that she gives homework. These people think she's capable of regurgitating something in 50 minutes and the kids will magically know it. Yet, somehow, it's her fault when they fail a test after ignoring the homework assignments.
Now compare that to the Asian countries where kids attend school after school and on the weekends and math competitions are the bomb. Seriously. Education is wholesale encouraged on a cultural level in these countries. That difference alone counts for the disparity in abilities you see.
Yes, there are crap teachers. There were crap teachers fifty years ago too. But you knew it was your job to get that damn education and you did it.
And btw, unless CA teachers have some robot that grades homework and creates lesson plans, you're mistaken to think that just because they weren't in the building for 8 hours that they didn't work it. Probably some, but not even a majority of them, scam the system. The rest bolt to get away from your bratty kids ;-)
For the record, I have the same complaints about seniority and tenure. I was raised to earn my kudos.
The devotion of our entire educational system to "special education" is what has harmed your son and every other typical or more intelligent child. Massachusetts has standardized achievement tests that all students must be proficient enough to pass. A school gets punished if all its sub groups don't improve on these tests. Sub groups are SPED, Asian, African American, Non-English speakers, typical students, etc. There is no defined group for high achievers. According all the resources must be spent on SPED or non-English speakers, so that they can improve.
Resources are wasted in many other ways as well. A SPED student has an individual education plan (iep) designed by a physician/psychologist, the parents, a childrens advocate, and a rubber stamping member of the schools. If this iep says that the student requires two personal aides, organic spinach for lunch, and the freedom to curse and swear at his teachers, then the school must accommodate that or they will be sued and lose.
SPED by law will cover a child from the age of 3 to 22. My town's school budget is paying to have 21 year olds bussed to costly day programs an hour away.
Our priorities aren't even as lofty as focusing on the average height poppies. Instead we are razing the flowerbeds so that all children resemble the stunted weeds.
Private schools in France can also reject the students they do not want, french private schools also have smaller class sizes than their public counterpart, and yet the French public schools will still consistently outperform the private schools in every category.
What's different over there is class promotion. Fifteen years ago, 40% of the student population in public schools repeated at least one grade or more -- throughout their schooling (although, I suspect that percentage to be lower by now, I'm sure it's still pretty significant). And I'm not talking about repeating Kindergarten or 5th Grade or taking summer school, I'm talking about students repeating their full 9th, 10th, 11th, or 12th Grade, which can be quite an humiliating experience for any teenager. It doesn't matter if you're popular or not, if you can't make the academic cut now, most of your friends are going to be looking down on you, because next year they all know you'll probably be one grade lower than most of them -- and so the better students end up being the same as the popular kids. That's just the way the system is set up. And the same goes for those French public school teachers, those teachers may actually not be that well paid, but once you make school important -- the teachers certainly become important -- much more important and respected than any American teacher (and that, not money, can be one of the greatest motivators for becoming a teacher).
So if the United States is serious about academics, it is indeed possible to upgrade its K-12 education, it's just that not everyone may be willing to pay the cost for such an effort. It takes serious backbone to tell a retarded kid (or his mom) that he's not moving up to the next grade (unless he's willing to go on the special ed track, or take another lesser track, which means he's not going to get the usual high school degree). And it takes some even more serious backbone to tell the mayor of your city that his son was just too lazy recently and is probably not going to graduate this year.
From what I've seen in the US, the system is set up to bow down to whomever has the most at stake in a political situation. And I don't see the Democrats, nor the Republicans, wanting to alienate 40% of parents -- even if both parties agreed completely with me on that issue. And there is also the issue of trust, I don't think the Republicans trust the Democrats not to use school as a way to promote their left-wing agenda. And I don't think that the Democrats trust the Republicans not to use school as a way to promote their right-wing agenda.
Really? Because where I go, yes, we have plenty of fat, smug nerds. We also have three sports/games almost entirely dominated by geeks.
This is counterbalanced by the 20 or 30 other athletes competing for the same prize, mostly working as McDonald's staff, security guards, etc. Sports salaries are a lottery: you have to factor in all the losing tickets people buy to make a sound investment in it. You also have to factor in the risks of becoming drug-addicted, getting your limbs mangled in a sports injury that destroys your career, and giving up the best years of your life to a generally very hard and strenuous lifestyle.
But that would mean understanding math.
It's got what young people crave!
Unions make it near impossible to fire a teacher who does anything inappropriate short of running down the halls naked and pressing his(or her) genitals against the classroom windows.
Even then, they'd probably demand 3 warnings from a single institution.
Case in point there was (and still is) a teacher's assistant in a district I used to work in and my parents still work in. She basically came to work drunk everyday for the last several years but because of her seniority and her penchant for moving from school to school if someone caught on, the union rules made it impossible for the district to fire her.
Unions may have a useful purpose, but the power they have to protect sub-par workers is a detriment to any business, especially education where it can have such a larger impact on other people.
Except that that's wrong. Unions are only in favor of changes that benefit unions. The only way the teacher's union will support a change for teachers or students is if it also benefits the union.
In this country, the teacher's union is one of several huge obstacles preventing our educational system from achieving adequacy. The biggest way it does this? The negotiation of teacher contracts that prevent school systems from firing ineffective staff. It's called tenure, but it's nothing like the process that professors have to go through to obtain academic tenure at the university level.
If a teacher can keep their job for two years, they can't be fired. That is a destructive policy, contrary to the interests of students, contrary to the interests of excellent teachers, but definitely a benefit to the union.
We spend more than ever on a per student basis and yet, we're still fighting to achieve mediocracy. The budget isn't the problem. Private schools achieve better results with less money per pupil (on average).
If you want to retain excellent teachers: 1) fire ineffective teachers, 2) expel troublemaker students quickly, 3) keep class sizes as small as possible. That last point does have a budgetary element, but it's not all that important on it's own. Only as a part of a comprehensive rethinking of education. Rethought without unions.
Go re-read Godwin's Law. That's not what it said.
Teachers used to be banned from forming unions. I think that changed in the mid 50's, which is about when the education system started to fail.
While paying all the teachers more would work great, schools aren't a profit industry, which means there's no cash reserves to do that with, nor can you simply raise prices. Education reform needs to work with what is available, not what you wish you had.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
And though I may have missed it by accident, I didn't see a single one of the people posting here with complaints about the broken system suggest stepping up and getting involved in that system in an attempt to fix it. I see lots of people lamenting that poor schools are essentially sinking our society, and yet I didn't see anyone itching to do anything about it - instead it's "ooooh, if only the pay were higher..." So you either don't think it's that broken, you do think it's that broken but you'd rather be well paid than make a difference, or you're convinced it's broken, willing to forgo the money, but too scared to pull the trigger. For me, it's a mix of the latter two. But you don't just have to be a teacher. Get on the school board. Attend the meetings. Be the most vocal critic of your school's bone-headed policies. Volunteer. Mentor. Fucking do *something.* I don't mean to imply that if you're a parent, you're necessarily uninvolved, but I do want to inject a sense of involvement into this discourse because I am not seeing it. I think part - at least *part* - of the reason that our culture stifles math achievement (and all academic achievement in general) is that the "achievers" just mill around and whine to each other about how bad it is and don't do anything about it. I just graduated college with a CS degree. I didn't become a teacher. After 20 years I need a breather from that bullshit for a bit. But, at the very least, before I finally retire for good - once i get to the point where I don't need the money - I plan to go back for a few years and teach math or science.
from the posting: "I suspect there's a flaw in the US cultural system that prevents achievement on the academic front as valuable. Could anyone suggest a patch for this bug or is this cause for a rewrite?" as I say: There is no patch for human stupidity - but there are percussive readjustments.
Yep.
Well you can, but only after having blown up the Banking system...
Why should the rest of society fund an entire institution entirely for the benefit of teachers?
And on that note, why should people buy from businesses that allow unions, since the unions obviously aren't working solely in the best interests of management and productivity? Why can't workers just shut up and do as they're told? How could organized labor possibly benefit society when it doesn't exist to help workplace efficiency?
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
The problem is cultural. Everyone in this thread seems to attribute the problem to teachers.
The problem the study finds is that mathematics and science achievement are denigrated in American culture relative to sports and musical achievements, unlike in countries like Japan. You need a culture that celebrates academic achievement. Changing teachers won't change anything. The poster's asking how to change the culture.
Celebrity mathematicians?
Public education IS a profit industry, but the profits are long-to-very-long-term, which is why it doesn't get enough money attention in nations that adopt the "maximize medium-to-short term profit" even at the expense of the long-term health and wealth of the nation itself.
Paradoxically, those same nations see no problem in spending trillions of dollars into the military, which is not exactly what one would call a 'profit industry' by any means ...
'nuff said.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
I think it's simple as how many people are interested in watching, the movie, tv-series, sporting event or the math battle(?). And how much people are willing to pay, simple as that. If nobody is willing to watch or pay for it then the athletes and performers would not receive that huge paycheck.
We have no choice but to pay for it. I'm sure if we payed royalties on equations that we use day to day (oh, did you just divide your table bill?), you'd see a lot more interest in math.....
From the beginning of the enlightenment up till about the middle of the twentieth century there was plenty of role models and they got lots publicity: just take at random Einstein and Bohr, but also Gauss, Riemann and a long list of others. In the west it ended with the Moon landings, more or less, not least because that was never meant to be more than a publicity stunt, really.
Another contributing cause is that while people like Einstein and Bohr produced some breathtaking results that reverberated through the common media so everybody heard about them, scientists are not seen as producing similarly impressive reults. In many ways we haven't really done much more than filling in the gaps and checking predictions since then. And the next big step forward seems ever more elusive - it isn't for lack of talent or effort that we still don't have a definitive unified theory in physics.
A third factor is possibly that science fiction has pumped up people's expectations with ideas of faster-than-light travel, worm-holes and aliens that look surprisingly like dressed-up humans everywhere you go. Only a century ago science-fiction's wildest imaginations were life on Mars and time-travel, and science was able to blow our minds with discoveries far more exciting than that, but science now-a-days tells us that we are unlikely to be able to travel faster than light and that alien civilizations don't seem to be thick on the ground - it is simply a disappointment to many young people.
And of course we don't admire the power of the mind any more. Where there once was Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, we now have Rambo, Batman and very occasionally somebody with an impressively huge computer, but even then it is the computer we admire, not the guy who invented it.
So, that is why we are beginning to lag behind in science; and to add insult to injury, the Chinese are storming forward and are becoming the leaders, not least in mathematics. But what can we do? When we have to actually fight against the mind-numbing idiocy of such things as Intelligent Design, what hope is there of attracting young people to a line of study that requires you to ask critical questions every step of the way? And for a disappointingly low salary too.
I find your ideas interesting and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
It would be kind of nice if the intellectuals actually did leave the US en masse - you'd think with an economy powered by thought, those intellectuals would be worshipped as gods. Instead it's the opposite, and it would certainly make people sit up and pay attention if the economy collapsed because the idiots suddenly achieved free reign with no smart advisors as safety nets. But it'd probably never happen - like you say, it's comfortable to live somewhere with gas-laden SUVs, football and fatty foods, and even intellectuals value this.
Finally someone gets it.
Math doesn't get chixx. And that's all life is about (I'm not joking). I was pretty good at math, but I wanted the chixx, so into the arts I went. You have to be pretty smart to make it there, and it gets you popularity.
My big mistake wasn't doing what a lot of people do: re-tool in college. In grad school, I finally gave in to statistics, but it was rough getting back into math after so many years hiding it in my closet.
In all honesty? I don't think there's a math problem at all in the US. None at all. Or, rather, it's not worse than other countries. Other countries force students to pass more standardized tests, that's all. They lose the math as soon as they don't have to take the tests anymore (I live in Japan; believe me).
The thing the US education really had going for it was the degree of autonomy it offered. It seemed to be designed to foster development of the individual and interest in subjects that they can really get into in college... Now when I talk to friends of mine who are teaching in the states, they describe a death march to the tests. Living in Japan, I know that this does not produce well-rounded people, and it doesn't even produce very smart ones.
People will learn whatever they need to learn when they need to learn it, unless they just really like it. Very few people like math, and this has a lot to do with the fact that chixx don't dig it. But hey, here I am, getting paid to do stats for other researchers, after basically quitting formal math education when I was 17. I needed stats for my research, so I sat down with some books and taught myself. There was no reason before that.
So, to conclude, math is never going to be popular, but the US, as a society, really isn't that bad at it. Just look at the subprime meltdown. That could only have been pulled off by people so good at math that they could use it to tell whatever crazy story they wanted!
The best math teachers could teach millions of students using video and the Internet
I see an earlier poster addressed this (after crass political digressions on all sides) but I want to come back to it. What you propose, Kohath, already exists in the form of expert-speakers, professionals who charge $50 a seat and fill a stadium for a two hour lecture on crisis management or starting a business or what-have-you. I've seen ads for lectures by Donald Trump, for example: "Make yourself a millionaire- it's easy, srsly!".
Yeah, I'm sure that worked out for all the thousands in attendance.
It's a stupid idea because the value of a class for the student is interactivity with the teacher, and even in 200 seat university classrooms it's the interactivity that suffers.
You suggest paying TAs to help answer one-to-one questions, and to that I say, great! Except that there is no longer any value provided by the actual prof. Replace them with a textbook, and students will have explanation, interaction and example, and relative freedom to learn at their own pace. It's an infinitely better system. Actually, it's the one we already have.
Don't blame the unions; you cannot teach those who do not wish to be taught. Those who DO wish to be taught, on the other hand, are reasonably well served by our current system. Labor laws have nothing to do with it. I'll end with a suggestion of my own:
Public service announcements showing Images of the homeless, of a provincial manor with a sign: "Americans use side entrance", of junkies and war, of empty dinner plates, of a decrepit white-house and a statue of liberty sinking into the sea.
I'm no marketer, but perhaps you get the idea: a wake up call. Show your younger generations how much they have to lose - and how much you have already lost for them -- out of ignorance.
DISCLAIMER : I have previously received education in Singapore up to a pre-University level, and have spent the entirety of my childhood there for over 10 years. This is an account of both my experiences and opinions; they may not be in line with what most others educated in Singapore may believe. The education system in Singapore in my time is still markedly different from that of the United States. The official policy of the Government of Singapore is that the education system was originally meant to prioritize the acquisition of relevant skills for work for its population, in order to facilitate the competitiveness in a period of industrialization. As a result, tertiary education is actually intentionally limited, resembling the Scandinavian countries in this respect. However, at the turn of the millennium, various measures were implemented to phase the education system into the so-called knowledge based economy, thus tertiary education became an acknowledged goal that the government stated for its citizens to obtain. However, the previous measures present within the education system (the japanese-style multitude of tests/streaming/talent sorting) have already marginalised the society, even resulting in the local film scene producing a number of popular features on the subject. Further information regarding this Singaporean celebration of its 'oppressed' students can be found by googling "I not Stupid". The viewpoint that you express borders on astroturfing and will most likely be regarded by most Singaporeans as an extract taken from the scholarship information pamphlets so regularly distributed to students. The hegemony of the Singaporean government is not widely explored in Western media, but the abuses of the administration are well documented, the least of which unearthed again by the death of recent opposition activist Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam (forcibly expelled from political participation, not unlike the actions of neighbouring Malaysia). In summary, your post contains a heavily biased perspective regarding the situation in Singapore. In my opinion, it is not much better than the United States, with the "guaranteed life of success" mostly an indoctrination strategy meant to control the ideology of those intelligent enough to possibly pose a threat to the existing establishment. The Singaporean system and culture has its own serious flaws, and it is a severe detriment to this discussion to not bring them to light.
> Hogwash. Top-quality teachers are probably just as hard if not harder to find than top-quality athletes.
Mostly because it's so hard to tell who is a top-quality teacher. It is extremely easy to measure the quality of an athlete, because quality is very well defined. With teachers it is much harder to measure how good they are.
Einstein/Mozart/Newton/Jobs level intelligence is 1/1,000,000,000. This means that in LA schools there is a good chance of a little Einstein there somewhere...
If the chances are one in a billion, and there are one million students in the LA schools, then you expect 1/1000th of a genius.... which is quite a bit less than unity.
And that kind of "applied maths", "applied" everything is what made me absolutely hate maths and completely drop chemistry in the last two years in school (university maths was great again!).
I still was the best in class or close in both but I f*ing do not care about how it is used, at least not while I am still busy _understanding_ it.
And even the bad students in class did not like that teaching style either.
If it helps your students, sure use "applied" whatever, but please make sure you are not just kidding yourself and actually just annoying them. And in any case please try not to completely about the maybe two brightest people who most likely will not like it at all.
My personal opinion: from time to time drop some interesting "real world" story or problem, but please make absolutly sure it is interesting and not even more boring than your normal lessons.
It's a good idea but we don't even know if it will affect them.
"As I tell students on the first day of the course, there are no promises that they will fall in love with math, but they may be able to glimpse a life where they do not have to hate it. Math is unlike many other subjects in that one failure may cause a lifelong disbelief in one's mathematical skills. But it doesn't always have to be that way. It took me a long time to learn what a joy this discipline can be."
The real problem though is the way math is expressed and approached, I take the geometric approach to mathematical concepts and principles. I've been doing research into numerals and how numbers are expressed, and expressing 5 or 7 as a geometric shape enhances understanding a lot of the time when doing basic calculations since you can see the parts of the number itself in the shape at a glance. Arabic numerals tend to mask a lot of hidden mathematical relationships. Not only that our current system of math is merely one way to express math, there are other more enightening systems that I've been looking into and plan to write about when I get the time.
Math unfortunately has expressed in a such a jargonistic fashion when it doesn't have to be, math can be taught in many ways in terms of other things, like music, art and color, geometry, etc... it doesn't have to be taught in the way it is mostly taught from textbooks and curricula today, even though their are pockets of lucky schools and teachers that realize this.
(books)
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Mathematics-Comes-Embodied-Brings/dp/0465037712/
http://www.amazon.com/Molecule-Metaphor-Neural-Language-Bradford/dp/0262562359/
http://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011/
Wrong, we have that in the UK and believe me the top player's get paid A LOT (Apparently premiership footballers earn an average of £676,000, possibly twice that including performance bonuses)
In our district, this is impossible as the districtwide tests are constructed by groups of teachers, and revised every year by groups of teachers. Some people know those tests like the back of their hands.
We'd need some kind of independent authority to come up with the tests like the College Board or some shit, and then set about studying all the past tests. I am in my first year of teaching AP Calculus 1, and I resent every second I have to spend on test taking strategy. Still, I guess it's better than if the test was known ahead of time and I was expected to spend more time on test taking. I'm torn between applauding that and opposing the privatization of certain portions of our curriculum. We're feeding the college board lots of money each year in the form of the fee students pay at our nonstop encouragement. I don't like selling my kids to the college board.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
It is. The problem is that you have to work for the NSA and keep everything you do secret.
Nordic countries do have some of the strongest unions on the planet - but that does not mean that the US teachers union and their Nordic counterparts are the same. In fact, there are strong differences in the unions and the environment in which they operate. One of the largest difference (in environment) is probably the pay scales of the general population. Compared to the US, they are compressed (i.e. less financial reward for comparable success on an open market - but also comparatively better pay for math teachers).
http://books.google.com/books?id=EjkKBotJcyIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=liping+ma&sig=ACfU3U0z62q9IVjTTgTD_RuujH3fD7QX3g#PPP1,M1 The introduction to this book is interesting to read.
Here's an actual advanced functions problem:
A polynomial ax^2 + bx + c has roots that are reciprocals. What is the product of the roots?
Have a physics competition show. Something like a crossover between Brainiac, The Incredible Machine and Jackass. Participants get some raw materials and are asked, for example, to make their contraption hurl a bowling ball as far as possible or to fix and fine-tune a light gas gun for use in trap shooting. Of course you'd need lots of disclaimers and "Don't do this at home"s, but that'd be a show that rewards math and science knowledge while at the same time providing lots of property destruction and big explosions.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
The general knee-jerk reaction is to blame teachers, but this misses the nature of the problem. The problem lies in how the concept of learning has evolved in the US. Ideas about learning arise from concepts of what is knowledge.
Recent emphasis on doctrinaire religious belief is stifling mathematics training, as well as in other sciences such as biology, by imposing the idea that knowledge comes from "God" rather than from critical thinking. It comes from a false belief that "God" is the solution to all questions and consequently, knowledge is seen as a matter of belief and a looking to authority. Unfortunately, developing skills in mathematics requires critical thinking and critical thinking requires questioning, not just authority but one's own preconceptions. If you can't question your own preconceptions and understand the consequences of your preconceptions, you will be unable to do much math.
In other societies the notion of "God" is not so strongly authoritarian as it is in the US. Rather it is more detached and distant concept, consequently requiring more critical thinking on the part of believers.
natural selection will cure the existance of
countries without the inclination to understand
negative numbers like debt sooner or later..
or perhaps sooner.
While I understand the sentiment please put it into perspective. How many NFL quarterbacks are there? Let alone professional athletes. Now tell me how many teachers there are. Perhaps we should pay the better ones more? Oh wait, we can't. The two big teachers unions won't let us. Worse they stand in the way of any accountability.
You want to fix education, then get the teachers union out of it. Then toss in accountability, vouchers so parents can get around horrible schools, and put a requirement of how much goes to teacher pay versus administration.
Education would be fine if we would accept the fact that not all children are equal and not only allow but CELEBRATE those who are better. A local school near me dropped all valedictorian titles because "it hurt the other kids feelings" and they even allow those who don't graduate to walk up and get a diploma. If that doesn't teach you that success isn't something to aim ...
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The problem is, these two goals are often conflicting and contradictory. Quality- or results-based funding means that you have to have some way to quantitatively measure quality/results, which translates into some form of standardized testing. Teaching only the aspects of the subject covered in the exam, to the extent needed for the exam, in the style of the exam, will have students on average perform better on the exam than if they spent equivalent time on the subject in general (which would involve material, concepts, ideas, etc not relevant to the exam, and thus "waste" time). Thus, the pressure to teach to the exam is immense - your school is competing with the other schools in the district/county/state/nation for funding, and so you wind up doing everything possible to raise those scores. Given that so many public schools are cash-strapped as it is, threats to their funding get taken *very* seriously, and I can't blame them.
I got to see some of this first-hand. When I started highschool, the state didn't have meaningful standardize tests used as school metrics. In my junior and senior year, we were the guinea pigs, providing the baseline data, and the exams would "count" starting the year after I graduated. Comparing my freshman/sophmore and junior/senior years, curriculums *definitely* changed. Material was shifted and reorganized, and substantial amounts of class time was given toward pure test preparation (the style of the test questions, the kind of information they'd require, the usual "good test-taking techniques", mock exams (separate from usual grade-impacting tests), which details were more likely to show up, etc). Most of that test-prep class time was acquired by cutting subjects and material that the state exams didn't require.
I was truly amazed at just how much changed. The nature of the classes I was taking changed, but that could've just been a normal 1st/2nd vs 3rd/4th year divide. But talking with freshmen and sophomores about their classes, and discussing the curriculum with the math department, there were major changes made to all of the classes teaching subjects covered by the new exams, and even some programs had to be redesigned so material would sync with state testing.
I'm glad I (mostly) got through the system before those standardized tests re-wrote the curriculum. Their acronym, SOL, was all too apt.
(Officially, SOL = Standards Of Learning, yielding "SOL exams")
> I agree with you, though this arguably only applies to "standardized" testing. If the exam questions are from a genuinely random selection
That absolutely excludes multiple-choice though. There are just far too many questions you can not ask properly as multiple choice, esp.
more "real world" questions where you have to expect at least 20% of the students to fail to give the "right" end result but where it
is important that they had the right ideas of how to solve it.
Mathematical proofs are completely impossible as multiple choice, too.
But without mutiple choice you have to rely on teachers grading correctly without favouring themselves and/or have some external checks.
I think you got the jiggle rates reversed. Allowing for shivering, the cold jiggle rate should be lower as the skin is contracted by the muscles and heavier clothing, thus firming and acting as dampeners. So given that the mass and stiffness stay the same, figure out the damping effect by using a padded bra.
Probably not too smart though if you ask me. What are the odds of making it to the NFL, maybe one in a hundred highschool players, and that is probably being generous. I'd think that the proportion of people that go on to study math and end up getting a good job because of it is much higher.
>>They do not exist to help children learn. That is simply not the reason the union exists.
>This is true, but it's beside the point. The idea that unions exist to serve the interests of teachers isn't particularly problematic, because teacher satisfaction hardly precludes student success, in fact, it's rather dependent on it.
This remain to be seen: 'too strong' teacher's union is hardly a US only problem: in France we have the same issue and these unions defends teacher wether those teachers are good for the kids *or not*.
First of all, this is /., so lets note that johnny's piss would dribble at a low parabolic arc until t=1 and then have a negative exponentially increasing arc. Also, why the hell would johnny want to figure out how long its going to take for his piss to hit the ground?
A textbook with this kind of math problem would be even less useful than the current one, and certainly would still not justify its price tag, regardless of how 'interesting' the book might be.
You may find it, but you'll have to put the dictionary down and listen to what people actually say and watch what their positions are.
The words "conservative" and "liberal" have no meaning anymore. I've never heard anyone use them that actually intended people to understand what they mean. Instead, they are words like "fuck" that are used to convey or incite emotion, rather than meaning. That will never be found in a dictionary, but that doesn't excuse anyone for using them incorrectly. A conservative is a person that wants to conserve the social order. They are against change. That's all it means. To declare that the dictionary is wrong because you find it onconvenient means you should use a different word.
And saying that "the union prevents change" isn't an attack. It's just a fact.
But it's a useless fact, just like "conservatives prevent change." Who cares if they do, and you've never supported that they do. It isn't a fact, it is your opinion. I've seen ones that do promote change. Perhaps the change was something small like the change in their salary, but that is change none the less. Thus you are 100% incorrect, and you are doing it in a manner that is condemning unions, teachers, and the educational system at the same time. There are plenty of things wrong to attack that which needs attacking, but to throw out useless statements that convey emotion but not meaning (and the meaning that is taken by the words literally is wrong) is not going to further a conversation.
The union prevents change except when change benefits the union and union members.
Oh, so they do promote change. So you are wrong, and admit it. Good for you, I think that's a first on Slashdot. You might not like the change they promote, but they do promote change, and thus you have stated that your initial statement I objected to is wrong. Glad to hear someone here can admit when they are wrong. Now if only you'd agree that the dictionary definition of "conservative" is someone that wants to conserve the social order. It'd be a shame to have all those dictionarys wrong too.
Learn to love Alaska
"When a math teacher can get millions of people to watch commercials and thousands of people to pay $40 to watch them teach math for 2 hours, then they'll get paid as much as pro athletes."
Translation: Math isn't entertaining enough, so it sucks.
Why, hello Mr. Culture! Thank you for stopping by and explaining to us why you're killing math and science!
I'm pretty sure much of the devastation in our economy today is directly attributable to propeller heads, math majors, who took their computers to Wall Street and thought they could rule the world's economy using math, for example by writing algorithms to assess risk of Credit Default Swaps, and to use computerized trading to keep investment banks and hedge funds with 30 to 1 leverage from imploding. They failed. Maybe teaching math isn't always a good idea :)
Of course, you're assuming that what's going on now is unintentional. I'm not saying that it was planned, just pointing out that the possibility of it exists.
"The New York Times reports on a recent study that shows the US fails to encourage academic talent as a culture."
This can only be news to the slashdotters that don't have children?
-Styopa
Steer clear of that book. I raped my boss's daughter last year to get her to fall in love and marry me, but it totally backfired! Not only did she not fall in love with me, she was really pissed!
Regards,
Inmate no. 038533285
Stanton State Prison
My 2nd grader's teacher was complaining that he wasn't doing his math worksheets or playing the adding games in class. I saw one of his math worksheets where he was so bored that he looked up Roman numerals in one of his books and taught himself how to do the whole homework in Roman numerals... and then I saw where the teacher then made him re-do the 'right-way'. We've had similar experiences with his past teachers and the principal has a similar attitude that he should do the same work as everyone else in the same way.
No Child Left Behind strikes again.
Making every school's jobs dependent on test scores means that they will teach to the test all the time, every time. There is no reward, encouragement, or funding for going above and beyond the expectations of NCLB.
Schools should be held accountable to parents only, not to Congress.
The answer is to get the general public bleeding furious at the union, make the teachers strike, and bring in the strike breakers.
Sure it will be chaos and financially ruinous to all parties, but the tail can't wag the dog. And if fighting a strike won't be successful, then voucher the school system. The union can't use a strike as a threat. One way or another, decertify the union if it won't consider the customer's interest as well as their members.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
This has been lamented since at least Mark Twain's time and grows rather repetitious. Thousands of school districts across 50 states have tried all sorts of things, and been watched by millions of parents, each other, and hundreds of univerity faculties of education full of "publish or perish" professors.
However, in teaching skepticism towards authority and the evils of arbitrary authority, the US public school system has no equal. It provides daily demonstrations and is of perfect [insufficient] competence to truly squelch many students.
Given the choice between learning skills and learning attitudes/philosophy, I think the latter are more important. Skills can be learned when needed. We got what we got 'cuz we want it.
So that 33K salary is only 22K to the teacher paid over 9 months.
And if you're smart enough to be
a teacher
or
an accountant
and the accountant earns double what you'd get, which job would a *smart* person go for?
Hell, the battle cry for the obscene renumeration of CEOs is "we must pay the most to get the best!".
Stick that to the teacher problem and "more pay" makes sense now.
But that won't work for you, will it. CEOs overpaid is the right capitalist thing. Overpaying teachers for the same reasons is a communist attempt to steal your money.
Time changes little - today in the US system companies would love you to be slave labor (read: WalMart). What do you think WalMart would pay its employees if the federal or state minimum wage wasn't in effect?
With this, I must object. WalMart actually pays more than every unionized grocery store in our area. I remember one guy, who after a 90 day wage increase, was making more working for WalMart then he was making after four years working for Meijers(regional competitor), who of course is unionized. In addition to this, my siter was a union liaison for Meijer's 20 years ago, and according to her half her time each week was fighting for people's jobs who really didn't deserve to keep them. People smoking in the bathroom, people doing half as much work as others. These people, necessarily, get the same protection as the employee of the month. Why? Because they both give $X each week to the Union. Seems like a scam to me.
I agree that when unions were first founded, they served a valid purpose, as you said. But like most long-standing institutions, one thing has corrupted them: greed.
Don't worry if you're a kleptomaniac, you can always take something for it.
That is an UTTERLY flawed view as to why tenure is important. Its there purely to protect the ability to introduce new, unpopular theories into the academic arena. As long as the proponent has demonstrated they are competent in the research techniques required to properly and "impartially" present a new theory, society can be satified the theory met a level of intellectual rigor and standards. It doesn't exist to fight racism or unpopular non-academic political agenda.
Tenure absolutely should NOT exist on the primary school education level. High school teachers do not present new research, and are not there to crusade unpopular ideas to students. They are totally subject to the dictates of the school board. There's no reason for primary school teachers to have tenure, and it obviously instills mediocrity (if not incompetence) and raises the cost to PROPERLY administer a school. Instead of good teachers getting competitive raises, its spent keeping lousy teachers employed even when there is no economic reason to do so.
Unions did not come about because of GREED on the part of the members. They came about due to the "greed" of the employers, whether they are capitalists or taxpayers. Nobody gets rich working for the union (at least, not since the '60's). It does not mean unions are devoid of other negative traits which make them an anathema.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Physics, in contrast, makes it too tempting to memorize a half-dozen formulas per test. While there's certainly deeper material there, teaching math through science seems as if it would focus on the formulaic aspects of the topic, and so be lacking. Just my $0.02.
That was a complaint of an ex of mine, she taught calculus at a university, and said her least favorite students were the engineering majors because they resisted learning the math in any sort of abstract or theoretical way, and insisted everything be given to them in practical terms they could use. Obviously engineers aren't scientists, but the same problem would arise I think.
I graduated in 1999 from Brentwood, NY I do see this as being a problem and my fiancee and I have discussed this for along time. If your a Nerdy kid who gets great grades you go to school to hear names like "Geek, Nerd, Freak, Weirdo!" If I had been a football player I would have gotten names like "All American, Going Pro! Elite!" But what people don't realize later on is that 1% of High school players get to go into the minors and maybe go Pro. Nerdy kids after graduating become Doctors, Lawyers, IT professionals, etc. After graduating I make more then the "all americans" I went to school with. Tragically many kids don't know their futures will be brighter after school.
One possible solution that it may help to adopt is an educational system similar Germany's. In the USA, we treat every child as if they are going to college. They are taught a little bit in many areas to make well-rounded citzens, with little ability to specialize until halfway into an undergraduate degree. Once you reach high school you have two options, graduate or drop out. In Germany, they begin by teaching all of the various fields like in the USA(with a little more emphasis on langauge.) After a certain point the children take an aptitude test and decide where they see their life going. The students then divert into three groups, those who enter high school(gynasium), those who go into a technical or vocational school, and then those that become apprentices and begin learning a career trade. I think this is an exceptional idea. Not everyone is created equally and from my personal experience a lot of students have no desire to be in school after a certain point and their only options are graduation or failure. As many people have pointed out, this means having great extremes in aptitude, leading to students that would excel being held back. Another problem I see is that schools seem to be teaching to pass a test at the end of the year more and more. Most schools seem to have a standardized test now, and this stifles the ability to take tangents and really open up a subject. So many people have said that math teachers need to make it fun. Well first teaching to a test will have to change, because making math fun on a tight schedule can be difficult(I imagine).
You're right, it's not YOUR fault, it's those damn OTHERS. The Unions.
A pox on their houses for making it wrong despite your sterling efforts.
Fuck off.
I'm pretty sure much of the devastation in our economy today is directly attributable to propeller heads, math majors, who took their computers to Wall Street and thought they could rule the world's economy using math, for example by writing algorithms to assess risk of Credit Default Swaps, and to use computerized trading to keep investment banks and hedge funds with 30 to 1 leverage from imploding. They failed. Maybe teaching math isn't always a good idea :)
Can you cite a single fact to back this up or are you just coming up with wild theories with nothing to back them up?
Computer modeling is going to give you more information, not less. It is still up to some greedy human to say, "Damn the risk, I want more money." I think it would be more likely they knew the risks and ignored it, since they get to keep their bonuses and comissions regardless of the success or failure of the company.
Life is too short to proofread.
And the individual results aren't so amazing with their students; their high scores are simply because these schools can cherry pick students.
When you get the best results, you don't have to make such excuses.
Can someone please mod this parent as flamebait?
Teachers have classes of 40+ students (sitting on
counters because I'm out of space for chairs) because we don't discriminate on who we take. I have had students who have violent behavioral disorders, deal drugs, carry weapons, and prostitute themselves to earn enough money for food outside of school. That's just the 6th grade.
Your private school will kick them out for wearing
the wrong color socks.
Give us money for textbooks (don't have them), supplies (few available), space, and smaller class sizes so I can teach those students on a more personal level that will make a difference to them.
That is why unions exist you insensitive clod.
FWIW if someone is a brilliant engineer that always produces amazing results he/she can shop for a job that will reward them much higher pay. If a teacher is highly skilled at their job there is no extra reward - you get the same pay as everyone else.
The abovementioned exceptional teacher could be attracted with a 10%+ pay increase, but there is no public school district that I know of that is able to do this on a regular basis. You can get business results in teaching but you need to pay business rates for it. Good luck selling that increase to taxpayers.
Perhaps one should go put their children in Michigan schools and see how well the teacher's union support quality education. After three kids, i find it is a total failure....especially Ann Arbor schools....
That's because American schools actually pay attention to their sports teams. I was taught in a European high school, and while there were at least a dozen different competitive teams, nobody gave a rat's ass about how well or bad the team did. Nobody went to see then play. There were no letterman jackets for team members: The only reason one would know that you were in a team is because you stayed in school after classes. There were no special considerations for jocks that underperformed. They'd just fail their classes, and get kicked from the team.
On the other hand, the top 5% of students received props. Who got the girls? The students with good grades, decent looks, and some social skills.
Schools allocate lots of money to athletics because they bring in money -- not just ticket prices, but donations as well. Some schools even get TV contracts. There's no way that any other activity can be such a fundraiser for a school.
dom
Wow...where do you live that math teachers (any teachers) make $100K a year?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I have taught math concepts to several elementary and pre-school age children and they are fully capable of logic and deduction.
Just look at the types of thinking needed to figure out many video games... most kids can do that at a young age. If you can figure out Mario, you can figure out math.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
My father never went to college. He attended high school in a southern Missouri town of 3000+, then attended a private 2-year academy roughly analogous to junior college today, except that it was very small--had to be; a day school, and Missouri had no paved roads.
Here are some of the subjects he studied in back-country 19th century schools: Latin, Greek, physics (natural philosophy), French, geometry, algebra, 1st year calculus, bookkeeping, American history, World history, chemistry, geology.
Twenty-eight years later I attended a much larger city high school. I took Latin and French but Greek was not offered; I took physics and chemistry but geology was not offered. I took geometry and algebra but calculus was not offered. I took American history and ancient history but no comprehensive history course was offered. Anyone wishing comprehensive history could take (each a one-year 5-hrs/wk course) ancient history, medieval history, modern European history, and American history--and note that the available courses ignored all of Asia, all of South America, all of Africa except ancient Egypt, and touched Canada and Mexico solely with respect to our wars with each.
I've had to repair what I missed with a combination of travel and private study...and must admit that I did not tackle Chinese history in depth until this year. My training in history was so spotty that it was not until I went to the Naval Academy and saw captured battle flags that I learned that we fought Korea some eighty years earlier than the mess we are still trying to clean up.
From my father's textbook I know that the world history course he studied was not detailed (how could it be?) but at least it treated the world as round; it did not ignore three fourths of our planet.
Now, let me report what I've seen, heard, looked up, clipped out of newspapers and elsewhere, and read in books such as Why Johnny Can't Read, The Blackboard Jungle, etc.
Colorado Springs, our home until 1965, in 1960 offered first-year Latin--but that was all. Caesar, Cicero, Virgil--Who dat?
Latin is not taught in the high schools of Santa Cruz County. From oral reports and clippings I note that it is not taught in most high schools across the country.
"Why this emphasis on Latin? It's a dead language!" Brother, as with jazz, in the words of a great artist, "If you have to ask, you ain't never goin' to find out." A person who knows only his own language does not even know his own language; epistemology necessitates knowing more than one human language. Besides that sharp edge, Latin is a giant help in all the sciences--and so is Greek, so I studied it on my own.
A friend of mine, now a dean in a state university, was a tenured professor of history--but got riffed when history was eliminated from the required subjects for a bachelor's degree. His courses (American history) are still offered but the one or two who sign up, he tutors; the overhead of a classroom cannot be justified.
A recent Wall Street Journal story described the bloodthirsty job hunting that goes on at the annual meeting of the Modern Languages Association; modern languages--even English--are being deemphasized right across the country; there are more professors in MLA than there are jobs.
I mentioned elsewhere the straight-A student on a scholarship who did not know the relations between weeks, months, and years. This is not uncommon; high school and college students in this country usually can't do simple arithmetic without using a pocket calculator. (I mean with pencil on paper; to ask one to do mental arithmetic causes jaws to drop--say 17 x 34, done mentally. How? Answer: Chuck away the 34 but remember it. (10 + 7)2 is 289, obviously. Double it: 2(300 11), or 578.
But my father would have given the answer at once, as his country grammar school a century ago required perfect memorizing of multiplication tables through 20 x 20 = 400...so his ciphering
No mod points today, but this is the best thing I've seen on /. all week.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
sorry, I was tired and flubbed my zeros... the occurrence of the profoundly gifted in 1 in 1 million.
Until recently the total human population was only a few million so these people were much less numerous. But now that we have 6 billion people on Earth we should expect to have quite a few Newton level minds running around.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
*US Culture* Stifles Math Achievement
But a patch or rewrite? The case for a fix has not been made.
Culture describes a societies "state" and state changes.
The article looks at the society from the perspective of a component. Let's call it the "intellectual" component. And that component is looking at the state that produced it saying "I like that state". But of course it does.
One of the ways society mass-produced intellectuals in recent times was by using schools. Why society needed a burst of intellectuals is anyone's guess. I suspect recent massive scale clashes between different societies (wars).
My thinking is that wars are an inefficient way for societies to gain access to energy. They're "energy access method 1.0"
Maybe society produced a bunch of intellectuals to create more efficient mechanisms for gaining access to energy.
Maybe those mechanisms are in place now.
And maybe a large pool of intellectuals is not a good long term thing for society.
I think that intellectuals take a larger amount of social energy. (anyone who has taught kids will get that. Smart kids require much more effort and attention). To grow society, the energy from intellectuals needs to be freed up for "general purpose" component use.
Anyway, society is sending out signals to scale back intellectuals. It needs a different balance, right now.
When intellectuals look at the "culture", they can detect the signals running through the society.
And right now, our society is de-emphasizing intellectuals.
So what's to be afraid of? Being an intellectual surrounded by non-intellectuals? Knowing that your kids will probably be less intellectual? And even if they are intellectual, they'll be an even smaller minority.
Basically, being the sighted person, in the land of the blind?
(truth be told, I'm creeped out as well.)
But state changes. And what's good for a society (as an organism) is not necessarily the same as what's good for all the components.
There are fewer "intellectual component" slots in society, now. There will be competition.
If you're a smart intellectual, you'll look at the new state and figure out how to operate effectively within it. If you're not, you're SOL. Welcome to the pool of the dumb :)
Let's start by setting an example and weaning ourselves off the addiction to stupid, pointless entertainment. Let's start paying attention to things that mean something. Let's refuse to care about passing fads. Let's honor teachers, and not just with mere money. Let's utterly cease reflecting back on our stoner days with pleasant nostalgia, but talk about them as wasted time. Let's stop overemphasizing how our children feel, and begin to address how they think. Let's establish the notion that it's a young adult's job to develop to their own full potential (no one else's), and the notion that it's the job of all the adults in their lives to support that effort fully and hold them accountable.
If enough people do this, the culture will either change for the better or become irrelevant.
What often makes it an 'impossible' job is that these kids aren't getting discipline or a work ethic at home. My wife teaches junior high math (in a good district) and she routinely gets parents complaining that she gives homework. These people think she's capable of regurgitating something in 50 minutes and the kids will magically know it. Yet, somehow, it's her fault when they fail a test after ignoring the homework assignments.
My kids got a ton of busy-work homework... starting at kindergarden. And this homework is geared to the slowest kids in the class, not to what a student needed to know.
They entered kinder already knowing how to add and read and were really excited to learn more... but all the had to do in kinder was color and do letter sounds. For a whole week they would get stupid worksheets on one letter at a time. When we complained to the school, we were accused of hot-housing the kids and told that we should give them the "gift of time."
Homework helps kids learn when it is difficult and they spend their time figuring it out. It is harmful to learning when it is just a giant mountain of stuff that they already know how to do. Unfortunately, most teachers in the US do not understand this at all.
How are you supposed to teach kids a work ethic when working hard gets them nowhere? The whole class is expected to progress at the same level, and teachers can be quite hostile to kids who want to go any faster.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
We may never know for sure because no other structures will ever be tried.
Bullshit.
Take a look at third-world countries (you know, the ones without Teachers' Unions.)
In every case, public schools (where kids are crammed into class like sardines) produce horrible results. It's just simple logic - students need individual time, (even if it's just grading assignments.) A single teacher with 100+ students can't give each one enough to properly educate them.
It *IS* being tried, and it proves you're wrong. Just because you don't want to acknowledge it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Because Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and George Soros all made bajillions playing football? Hard work is its own reward. The educational system in this country is broken because the bleeding hearts at the NEA are more interested in feel-good "everyone gets a participation trophy" socialism than focusing on the merits of educational achievement. But, this being slashdot, it's somehow George Bush's fault.
I think the disconnect is in the way "success" is measured and achieved. In athletics there is one measure of success - winning the event/competition you are in. The same does not hold true in academics, so supply demand - the determinant of pay, work very differently. In the sports league, the teams have to compete for the talent, but then can pick and choose the fillers from a large recruiting pool (financially worthless)
In academics, people compete for the position (regargless of how difficult it is to get a PhD, there are usually more than one person being considered for the top spot at the nations top universities). also, my point was the sudden jump in paygrade - the minor and club leagues do not really pay much as compared to someone who has achieved a doctorate. Once an athelete achieves a certain skill level, he now becomes highly recruited and the pay increases exponentially.
The fact that the patent and copyright systems are broken, it doesn't change the intent. I brought it up as a potential means of fixing the system. Stating how its broken is a first step, but one that has been stated repeatedly. The only "solution" I have ever heard here is "get rid of it". Perhaps middle ground? End corporate copyrights and patents? Reinstitute realistic limits on copyright terms?
There are people in academics making a considerable amount of money (if that is to be our measure of success) - including some who make more than some professional athletes. Like in sports, your ability to make revenue is the underpinning of how you will be paid/recruited. People able to obtain multi-million dollar grants for the univeristy will suddenly become more popular and if not locked into a long term contract, they can make considerable demands as a "free agent".
The fact that the public doesn't care is not in and of itself surprising. Sports are targeted at the masses - academics are not - with the exception of publications like popular science.
Perhaps, more academic competitions with more real prizes in school would change this. People like winning and people like winners. Give those who excel the opportunity to be seen as "better" or you will not get people to want to join that rank. Its the nature of competition and a back bone of our society. Even at a local level, it has a huge impact.
not sure where I was going with this post... probably would have been better in different threads. oh yes, bill G - statements like yours hit the ears of the public as jealousy. People never hear/see that side in the papers - the anti-trust case got little mainstream attention and was often spun as "you can't be too successful or that evil government will get ya".
how I wish there was a way to carve an existing post into various threads....
When all else fails, try.
Schools never teach basics like the difference between 7 and 7 cars or 7 feet or 7 songs. They don't teach what the number line really means and what the different kinds of numbers are. They don't teach the history of math and tell the great little stories about how the discovery of 'pi' really blew peoples minds at the time and how amazing it is that some numbers can't ever be expressed as fractions. They don't teach the things that point out the wonder in math but expect kids to find it on their own. They teach math as something that only has value in application... they teach kids that they only need to know enough to balance their checkbook unless they go into a specialized field.
A literature teacher won't accept arguments from kids that reading Mark Twain is something that they'll never use after school. And I think math and the beauty of numbers should be taught with the same reverence as Shakespeare.
But the problem is that most people learn math with the same understanding that a dead piece of silicon has. They teach it through drills and repetition designed to turn kids into little calculators.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
How effective do you really think miserable teachers are going to be at teaching?
In high school, I had quite a few teachers who were happy to come in, do the minimum, and take as many sick/vacation days as possible.
Maybe, it is the curriculum. I didn't start to enjoy school until my second year in electrical engineering. From there every year became more and more interesting. Math and science are highly interactive disciplines. I never learned much of anything listening to a lecture, but I did doing homework and projects. The more my classes began focusing on computer simulation tools like Matlab, the more fun I had.
Perhaps if school was more interactive and showed applications that use the concepts, learning would be more fun. For example, when I first learned imaginary numbers, I had no idea why we needed to know them.
Had I been shown how to make a fractal, or how they can be used to describe and predict, from Physics to Digital Signal Processing, then I would have become interested in school, and I'm sure others would have too. The point is we need to make the concepts seem at least a little applicable and make learning interactive, not passive.
There is really very little incentive to make learning more fun though when the government forces you to go to the school in your district. We are left with depending on parents for motivation until something changes.
And someone needs to tell the AP English teachers that sometimes a fish is just a fish, and a boat is a boat. What a waste of time that class was.
EOF
The problem is that in a capitalist society, the press writes about what people want to read about. They say that 0.3% of current mainstream news coverage (by time) is science. That's abysmal. Abolishing the free press and mandating good science coverage paves the way for all manner of stupidity, but can anyone think of a way to "encourage" the free press to do lots of good science reporting?
Also, banning religion and football couldn't really hurt.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
It is financially rewarding to learn math -- most billionaires in the US these days didn't inherit their wealth, they made it themselves by founding or running high-tech or finance companies, and generally have technical or scientific degrees.
There are many more high-tech billionaires (and probably a hundred times more millionaires) who made their money as a direct result of having academic skills than their are people who made their money from sports.
Moreover, it works for the average Joe, not just the outlier super rich. If you study math (and other things) hard and do well in high school, you're practically guaranteed admission to college, and a middle-to-upper-class job for life. If you work hard and do well at sports in high school... well, a few of the best high school players will go to college because of sports, a few of the best college players might play professionally, most for just a few years. Only a tiny and unreliable fraction of kids practicing sports in high school will turn it into a career, whereas kids who put the same effort into math are set for life (even if not extravagantly so).
So I think the answer is back to culture. It's not enough to pay people more. There's something beyond money at play here. Now, maybe kids and parents *think* that there's money in sports, not math, but they think this in contradiction to reality. Why is that?
The proper response to this scenario would have been a call to the NCAA. They can handle it much better than a single faculty member.
The school is cheating. Sure, breaking rules for athletes may be widespread, but that doesn't make it right.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
Make it financially rewarding to learn and teach math.
But only for the good teachers. There's no sense in paying mega-bucks to mediocre or bad teachers. The only way to accomplish this is to eliminate teachers' unions. You generally get what you pay for except when there's a union involved.
Too true. In elementary shool (or rather, my local equivalient) i remeber the teacher scolding me for using equations to solve some problem, rather than the method that was in the book.
:(
I don't remeber the problem, but I remeber figuring out the correct equation and getting the correct result myself, and then having the teacher get mad
I think the assumptions underlying your idea are questionable. Education isn't about broadcasting knowledge to audiences of student-consumers.
I think you will find the best teachers are not necessarily the most entertaining, but the most able to engage students by teaching differently than the traditional sit-in-your-seat-while-I-tell-you-things model.
The more students in a class the more difficult that is to do, just logistically.
It's a good thing my stupid face book anecdote completely contradicts your stupid face book anecdote.
Not exactly. Our city decided to attract a professional sports team. I had no part in the decision, and if I had I would have voted the other way. The ******** thing has been a financial drain on the entire city for decades, but most people who decide still seem to think it was a good idea. (I suspect kickbacks, but without evidence.)
Now it's true that this relates more directly to the owner of the team than to the individual athletes, but he has to pay them from some source of funds, and the fans are only a part of his income. Other parts come from the contract with the city, which makes it supply him with a satisfactory-to-him stadium. (At one point he was planning to break the contract and go elsewhere...he used this to extort even more subsidy from the city, on what basis I don't understand. I'd have sued him for damages caused by breaking the contract.)
Money's the answer alright, but it's nothing as straightforward as what the fans are willing to pay.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Althought I agree with you on the whole, I think you may have missed the lesson that your little Johnny was learning from that situation. One of the important aspects to society is our ability to conform, follow rules, and work within pre-estabilished guides we may not agree with.
I applaud your little Johnny for his ability to self learn Roman numerals, and leapfrog the other children; however, if everyone in the class, or society were allowed to self direct their activities in this manner the world would be stretched into many unproductive directions.
My response (I am also a parent of two extrememly bright children in the LA area) would be to explain to this child why he recieved this treatment, allow him to experience the feelings of frustration he may experience, and WILL experience in the real world, and channel his energies by getting him to conform to their rules and regulations. Train him to conform to their requirements while using this personal time following a successful completion of their minion tasks to develop his own interests.
This may teach him to get the bullshit out of the way first, conform to rules, while allowing room for personal development, and finally arm him for the much more intense emotional turmoil that the world will present him.
Yes, well, all this happened twenty-five years ago. She was afraid that if she went public it would ruin her career. And she was probably right.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
"Can you cite a single fact to back this up or are you just coming up with wild theories with nothing to back them up?"
Only anecdotal, I've seen such a glut of info on the economy in recent weeks.
I recall an article on Paulson arguing the SEC for relaxation of the 12-1 limits on leverage on the big investment banks one of the rationale's was their modeling of risk had become so good everything would be fine.
Someone on CNBC yesterday, I can't remember who, blamed the "propeller heads" for some of the problems in the derivatives markets.
@de_machina
Who wants to spend all the time, money, and effort, to get a STEM degree, just to be training your H-1B replacement two years later.
Both presidential candidates want to increase the number of H-1B, and the L-1 and OPT visa already allow unlimited guest workers.
Unless you want third world wages, stay away from STEM. If you are smart enough to get a STEM degree - go into medicine.
Funny you say this: I'm in the Ph.D. in English program at the University of Arizona, and as a result I teach 50 freshmen divided into two classes in English 101/102 each semester. They're great for learning about society's views and prejudices, since they come pre-equipped with so many of them and so few tools for self-analysis. This time, I created a unit on technology, form, and myth, assigning an Asimov story and various other things, including Peter Wood's How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science, which the author of the New York Times article should have referenced, as well as Neal Stephenson's Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out. Students' responses to and associations with science in particular have been fascinating for how negative they are.
Many draw a distinction between "us" ("normal people") and "them" ("scientists and mathematicians," as well as others who focus on intellectual achievement), defining the two as utterly opposed to one another. Few if any perceived science or learning as a process, rather than a thing. Just like much of the fiction and many of the essays we read, many saw science as being not applicable to their lives. Actually, it's hard for me to discern what they do find applicable to their lives.
Anyhow, you're right -- they "just don't see the connection," and I'm not sure if my efforts, like pointing out the us vs. them tendencies, actually helped. I drew explicit comparisons between work and tenacity needed for significant achievement in virtually any field, including scholastic ones like English, but I'm not sure whether some of these subtler points were actually understood. For most of them, I'm guessing the answer was no, but maybe a few were genuinely affected.
Politicians and teachers tell everybody that math and science are the way to go. Not every student wants to work in math and science, nor should they.
When a student who's interested in writing (technical or otherwise), small business, history, art/photography/video production, graphic design, military, and all the other useful things out there is told they would be better doing math and science, they go along and fail at it.
What we need to do is let the other students pursue their other interests and leave a greater allocation of resources to the students interested in math and science. This way we'll get better math and science students and better students of all other kinds.
The university I am attending does just that, they offer a 'Math for Non-Math Majors' course that is all applied, everyday math. Students who really want to pursue advanced math can still do it, and they aren't drug back by uninterested students in their classes.
I really wish my high school had something like that. I slept most of the time in my math courses and got A's because the instructor was too busy trying to get the uninterested students to focus. I know a few of the uninterested students now and they are successful contributing members of society who almost never use the math they learned. The educational system wasted their time and mine by forcing them to study math and science.
Turning public opinion against the teachers union would be near impossible, I've watched them spin falsehoods, and successfully sell them to the public, that would make Karl Rove blush.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
I dunno. Hearing about alcoholic teachers keeping their jobs or unusually incompetent teachers keeping their jobs make my blood boil. The only think the union can whine about is how underpaid teachers are, and I beleive its easy to put the blame on the union when you point out how they are directly responsible for skyrocketing operational costs.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
The only problem with american children excelling academically is that they will be smarter. I am all for the cultivation of the intellect but i believe that the powers that be are NOT. who would believe the 911 myth if they all genuinely understood the laws of physics? nobody. and the bottom line is that if our government needs to tell a really big lie to further an agenda, they need the people they are deceiving to either be thoroughly uneducated or in a distracted into complacency. it's not paranoid or pessimistic, it's the way things are. the only solution is to be educated enough to encourage and assist your own child in their education process.
Smart people are smart, they will know how to reward themselves in a free market system they don't need society to reward them. Lets not make it harder for them by holding them back, or making others seem smarter. Besides, it will be difficult for society to recognize them since evaluating smart people must be done by "smarter" people.
Famous athletes are just a handful, and not everyone will be able to be a famous athlete (or a smart person), so I wouldn't worry about the allure of fame drying up the smart pool. It's also very unlikely that the smart crowd will be driven by the rewards associated with being an famous athelete.
You speak London? I speak London very best.
It's like reading my own story....
loose: not fitting closely or tightly != lose: to suffer the deprivation of
The Colts?
For example, the year I graduated, I was valedictorian. Yet the culture was to not really promote such and almost not to allow speech.
Because that might infringe emotionally on those who achieve less academically. Yet, why the same does not go for sports?
We need to stop pandering underachievers, criminals, etc. And support those who work hard, achieve, and commend those who both are at the top OR overcome additional obstacles to achieve more than society expects of them.
Management and labor in partnership and rich communication? Not all of us originate from a culture grounded in 'wise paternalism'.
When people try to repeal the laws of supply and demand, people die.
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.
I take difference with your argument.
Supply and demand do, of course exist both in the scientific, educational and sporting industries. But not fully in the ways that you suggest.
There is no 'shortage' of HIGHLY skilled actors, singers, or athletes. It is a shortage of 'slots'. You can only honor '10' artists a week (40 in any given quarter), say 5 to 20 atheletes in any given field in a year. 2 to 10 actors in a year, etc.
These numbers are specifically designed by their respective industries, synthetically. How else can a over-abundance of supply with few slots not produce price-pressures downward. The olympics, for example, pays little.. It is only the secondary income that makes this pay off. The olympics is more about skill than industry, and truer economics applies.
It's the same as the oil industry and diamond industry.. By artificially reducing the supply, they can control the finances. If left as a truely competative market, the focus of the population would not be nearly as profitable, the ranking would be not as nearly valuable, and thus salaries for the very tops of the pyramid would not be a matter of discussion.
It is the salaries that are the topic here, and to a certain degree, the 'life style' which includes but not restricted-to the salary, motivates young people to focus their lives. But if you look at world sporting events, the payout isn't nearly as great, yet the general participation is much higher than in the US, so I don't know that even the life-style argument really is all that true either.
IANASF (I am not a sports fan), so YMMV
-Michael
In all walks of American life to day unfortunately, the emphasis has been placed on winning, and the consideration that! Money is the solution of any, and all problems. This is possibly due to Darwinism's theoretic, "survival of the fittest". And so America has evolved into a nation of cheats, and losers.
Thus proving Darwin to be in error; the civilized, are not fit enough to survive. Just look at the condition of the ci-vil-ized world!
Paris August 8, 1900, David Hilbert lectured about mathematical problems. 100 years later: Paris, May 24, 2000: announce the millennium problems as the central theme of a Paris meeting.
The Scrip's Monkey trial, proved Believers had failed, They did not know enough about Creation, to prevent Darwinian theorems from being placed in schools, even Ivey League Schools. It appears Theorists, are coming to the point beyond which Mathematical Theories, have the ability to explain the functions of evolution/creation. ie, Believers, nor Theorists have proved they are capable of answering The Question! What Is The Cosmos?
Ever heard of Jeapordy?
Though I actually hate that show. Random mindless facts. I knew someone that was on the show, and he says he'd forgotten 90% of what he'd memorized during his build-up.
Personally, I'd rather see a debate show.. As this is a battle of logic, and often can involve science. Sadly, most debates are poorly moderated, and become trivial shouting / talking-points for various advocacies.
Still, most of the TV/radio that I watch/listen-to is actually debate oriented. So maybe I am living out my dream. :)
-Michael
Just have the parents get better involved. It's not a panacea, but it should go a long ways.
And if you actually read the article, you'll discover that it has a number of cautions about translating what works in one country and culture to another. Unions appear to be part, but by no means all, of the current education problem in the U.S.
We discuss the article here.
AAAAHAHAHAHAAAAHAHAHHHAHAHA...(gasp)...AAHAHAHAHAHAHA....
Now, before you get upset, I want to say I agree with you, but holy shit, "purists" bitching about MythBusters and the like...are you fucking kidding me...don't even give those douches the honor of being called "purist" anything other than pure asshats.
Let me explain...You don't get kids into math and science by teaching them math and science. It is a fairly counterintuitive method to get a kids interest in anything...make them like it for the sake of liking it? Please. MythBusters, Junkard Wars, etc are EXACTLY the kinds of things that get kids into science. Math and Science are nothing to be interested in for the sake of doing them. Math and Science are nothing more than a means to an end. That end being making things in your imagination into reality. Do you think all the years of research into flight was for the sake of the math and science? Absolutely not! It was nothing more than the desire and imagination to "slip the surly bonds of earth"! Show kids giant robots, science fiction, fantastic "impossibilities", make them imagine the impossible. Science never has and never will be about doing the possible, it is about making the "impossible" possible. MythBusters, Junkyard Wars, and the like are nothing more than a catalyst to make them realize that they CAN start doing the things they imagine (That and the redhead...mmmm... role model for young girls in smart/sexy, wishful thinking for boys of all ages wanting to impress the smart/sexy girls.)
I have my son learning basic math so he can play Warhammer 40k. He sees us doing the modeling and painting and wanted some too. So we told him we would start buying some for him when he learns his basic math fast enough to do it in his head. Less than a week later he has probably has about half of the possible combinations of addition under 10 memorized without counting and about half of that came from an hour or two while he was watching me put together some of the models that will be his.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Going to Wall Street and getting rich off fucking up the world economy is always going to beat teaching math.
Unless we bring back lynch mobs.
Those were the days.
I know you are making a good point, but there are those of us on Wall St. who do quite a bit of math to construct pricing models. However, as an undergrad and in high school, no one ever really made the connection between differential equations and making money. I stumbled on the relationship myself and then went to grad school for more math -- not an MBA.
Math (in particular, statistics) is definitely connected to making money on Wall St. If someone told me in engineering school how entertaining or educational this direct use of math was, I would have dove in much, much sooner.
Because NFL players attract audiences and advertisers willing to pay those paying the athletes?
Also, there are 1696 NFL players and 95,762 public schools (not including colleges and private schools) that all must hire at least 1 (if not 3) math teachers.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
You do not have an education degree.
They teach math teachers how to teach math; my aunt just so happens to teach math education to teachers (elementary level) and was a teacher and principal. I credit her with me surviving at all. In MN, its a bit different (not as much now, its going downhill, they are trying to fix one of the best states by breaking it.)
There are many horrible teachers in universities who don't have any education training or talent... but then in that environment the student is supposed to make up for that; k-12 is different.
There is NO REASON to not have an actual MATH EDUCATION major that focuses on the education of math specifically WHICH includes application. They don't need linear algebra or high level calc; and should be learning how to apply it instead. One could pay more for teachers who have math and science degrees... which would encourage them to get the training--- which is one reason teachers get paid for the level of education they have already. We also need something to reward people who stick around more than 2-3 years (which is the typical time they drop out; its not good to have in between job people going in/out either.) But we shouldn't pay them essentially by their age.
Another method:
My high school tried COMBINING english and social studies into a 2 hour course with TWO TEACHERS working together to integrate them. The little I did learn from high school was in that course. It was a WISE MOVE that would ALSO work with science and math. As it stands now, you have science teachers who are working around how far behind the math is and NOT collaborating at all. This makes it difficult without raising math standards 1st.
Teacher IS a career choice for some people; it can be a more specialized major than it currently is. I would also have an entry level student teacher course for weeding people out. I KNOW a few teachers who HATE TEACHING and would have changed course if they had known (whats a music major supposed to do even then?)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
It's near feature nor a bug, it part of the first principals... media covers that which is interesting and exciting. Have nightly math-casts would be as effective as passing a law mandating the value of Pi.
http://www.hawknest.com/
I think that you have a slightly revisionist view of tenure. The "intellectual life" used to include more than just your narrow field of research, and indeed taking a moral stand against abhorrent aspects of society was at least implied as a tenure right. (Notice that sometimes they intersect; for example the Tuskegee airmen experiment. What sense would it make to protest that in a researcher's capacity, and ignore racism elsewhere?)
Nowadays, education is industrialized and with it comes a narrowing view of tenure. I think Vernor Vinge was right; in the near-future, the research class will be replaced by neuro-engineered savants-on-demand.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
A physically fit and smart student is going to realize that the odds are against him/her as far as actually obtaining an athletic career goes.
(That doesn't preclude the attempt - but the smart athletic student is going to have a very good backup plan)
Code or be coded.
I grew up in the Apollo era. Geeks and nerds were even less popular then than they are now. Uber-nerd Bill Gates has actually done a lot to boost the status of geeks.
Totally.
Geek has probably never had a better image in entertainment-- look at the TV shows with geeks in central roles:
- Numb3rs (my least favorite for a lot of reasons, mostly that they're way too serious and the science works out too neatly, but it presents a positive image with science and math as important and useful)
- Big Bang Theory (which I think is a much more accurate portrayal of scientists than just about any TV show. The science throwaway comments tend to be current and accurate, and I know [or am] the real versions of all the people)
- the various police procedurals that revolve around the scientific investigative teams rather than the street cops (CSI:YourTownHere, Bones)
- Mythbusters (sure, a lot of their science is oversimplified and some of their conclusions are incorrect, but they follow a basically good process and show how science works in an entertaining hourlong show).
- House (Medical shows have always been popular, but usually showing doctors as hotties who save lives, House revolves around him being a really smart guy with a lot of flaws)
Amusingly, I think that brilliance in business indicates a failure in teaching a student "to do no harm", to adapt your phrase.
When I think of brilliance in math or science or even technology, when it is challenging to society (e.g. evolution, the atom bomb or even Godel's incompleteness in a limited way), it is nonetheless an inevitable truth waiting to be discovered.
Brilliance in business tends to involve removing as much money as possible, generally from those without very much.
In short, a science genius is making progress even when their products are catastrophic, and I can appreciate genetic technology while having healthy qualms of its repercussion. A business genius has as their intrinsic goal, to screw me out of as much money as possible, either directly or indirectly by marketing or interfering with competition to self-promote.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Adding all the numbers between 1 and 100 would exclude 1 and 100 so the answer would be different.
Also - there are an infinite number of numbers between 1 and 100, so the answer is perhaps infinity. Did you mean whole numbers or integers?
An alternate response might be - "Well, what do you mean by between?" Or, "That depends on the meanings of the words between and numbers." Part of intelligence is understanding that humans tend to be ambiguous or wrong, especially when under stress, like a teacher faced by a smart-aleck (or sarcastic ;-) student.
So you see, there is perhaps much more to being intelligent than you might think there is.
Although I agree that tenure, as it exists in the university, has almost no place in a high school. In fact the very few cases where it might apply are probably worth just ignoring, in order to get rid of the concept entirely.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Definitely time for a rewrite,
Russia and China will become the world powers, Europe will be for tourists and America can go back to mother nature.
We had celebrations for both space man and the people that got them into space at one point in time. So, you have to reward those that go into these fields, point out the usefulness of math to people that do not study it so they at lest understand that there is value to it. Also, Math is a great foundation to get people to follow rules whether they are math laws, social laws, or other. It can help show the power of following rules because it gets you to the correct answer when followed correctly.
However, it much easier to say that answer is correct because I feel it is, as apposed to following a rigid system to get to the answer; which math is. Math normally does not have an easy approach to solving problems so if people do not want to work or follow its rules they move away from it and/or make fun of it; aka the geek culture. Perhaps, this is what needs to be fixed, the value of understanding different views and looking at other people/things as having value and being important instead of going its not important to me or I am not going to use it when I am old or I do not see the value of it. Most of those arguments against Math can be countered with some time and effort but you need to do this for the individual since the group mode does not take effect until that group fines enough like minded people to sustain those believes. In which case, you might have to break up that group before getting them to see the value of Math. Not sure, since changing a group view is much harder then changing a personal view but these also depend on the group, individual, and the people that are trying to change/make them understand the value.
Jobs?
Are you sure you don't mean The Woz?
When I went to school in the Ghetto most of the people in my class wanted to become programmers because I did. The star football players refused scholarships because it would interfere with their studies in engineering. And as long as I didn't appear to be arrogant I had no problem with popularity.
Many of my classmates would have made it, if not for parents that were addicts, boyfriends who decided that the best way to avoid child-support is to kill the mother, and a culture that immediately made anyone who couldn't pretend to be white middle class a suspect.
Then I entered middle-class society and noted what mattered here - like how many shots you can do. Or what car you are driving.
You want to get better math students? Go to Camden and promise a child a meal at the end of the month in return for good grades. That, and make sure they can keep going long enough to get into college.
If the frequency of such intelligence is 1 in a billion, the odds are that there are only 6 such persons in the world. There's not that great a chance that there's a little Einstein in LA... too bad you weren't taught to your full potential. :P
People forget that often government agencies can actually do good jobs, do them much better than private enterprises, do them without ipping anybody off, but it requires a number of things: funds, autonomy of the agency, especially in hiring, for projects to live and die thereby avoiding stagnation of purpose and bureaucracy, and it needs to be given (in the law that creates it) the right message on what it is suppose to be doing. I think the last is the most critical, when the government actually sets out to do something it, and wants to do it, it gets it done---lok at the highway system and NASA.
The present state of computers is amazing and is one of the few things holding up the american economy. Why is america the center of computing? because the government put a huge amount of funding into financial support for students to pursue technical fields. And the crazy thing is, it was all just to the next big asshole and prove that american penises are bigger than soviet ones, politicians who allocated these funds completely missed the point that technology is the key to economic and societal prosperity.
Remember: The easiest laws to pass hurt a vast diverse group of people while benefiting a small select group of individuals. Corporations and greed will always be attemping to set down these sort of laws and only people and government that can counterbalance.
When people think they get this right, when government thinks, and thinks with the people, it gets this really right. Even corporations, when they think can get this right, but their structure more often than not punishes good behavior and replaces it with bad and does this very quickly.
Applaud to parent comment, he said it best.
I like the idea of setting what has to be learned in a semester or year, and once students have tested to show their proficiency, they are on vacation for rest of that period which should be a fair reward to learn. Other permutations involve students having options between different, more flexible, more fun or on to the next curriculum - once they have have tested out. I think this plan would make learning way more popular.
You see, all we have to do is point out the facts!
Less than 1% of school athletics participants go professional in their lifetime... regardless of the sport.
Now compare that to income in geological and research fields; some with government grants in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Of those that pursue such fields, over 80% go on to have a successful career and prosper from it.
Compare that to the 15% of professional athletes that have faced incarceration or criminal charges because of their off-the-field behavior.
I think the criminal activity of geologists is near zero. I'll check my numbers, but I'm pretty sure it's as close to zero as you can get.
So, it's simple... just get the American public to do the math about how math is... well... okay, nevermind then.
This post © Copyrite Duggeek, all rights reversed.
my state doesnt have charter schools and although i have never really seen them in action they seem like the best smal thing i can think of in the near future, allowing at least some control if the students can get sufficient information to choose, etc.
maybe as the internet develops it can actually better vet this type of stuff. Probably not though, google will turn everything on the internet into blog spam advertising other blogs of spam (without paying for it of course) and with digg and giaa all newcomers to the internet will spawn a giant vortex in which new users only function will be to but ci4li5 and penis enlargements so the rest of us can stay online.
True, but then multiple guess exams (I will not dignify them with the word "choice") are void of any kind of merit. By simple examination of the answers, you can usually eliminate 50% or more of the options as absurd and guarantee a pass without knowing anything about the subject at all. On the other hand, the old-style O-Levels and A-Levels I took in the UK were predominantly essay-style questions, which the JMB examining board had no problem with marking. (The Joint Matriculation Board was one of a a number of examining boards in the UK, but was regarded as one of the better ones. It was still very easy to determine what the questions would be, you could eliminate most of the syllabus and focus on a handful of topics without much difficulty.)
Now, this is how you circumvent the privatization problem. You have the exams determined from first principles by a varying pool of academics who teach some given number of years over and above the year being examined, with the uppermost years (BSc, Masters, PhD) being developed by the researchers. The consequence of this is that the researchers will shift the questions as the research shifts - essentially randomly - and exploit the pressure to meet the requirements to create a random shift from year to year downwards, steered by the requirements needed to understand the subject as it is now but not controlled by that as the latencies involved mean teachers have to be guided by the subject, because they can't know either what direction research will go in or how this will stir the examination pot.
Because examinations are thus kept entirely within the educational system, it is not "privatized" in the normal sense. Because the examiner pool would vary, there would be less of a propensity for the system to stagnate into a trivial standard pool of questions, which is what most exam systems do. Because the system is iterative and contains feedback loops, you create a chaotic system where you can describe the system as a whole but not how it is going to change from one step to the next.
This does create a problem for employers, true, because this eliminates any form of standardized testing, which means you cannot compare any two years and cannot absolutely quantify what a specific grade means. But, frankly, as most employers don't give a damn what your grades were, it's not a very big problem. I honestly can't see them even noticing, for the most part. HR can't interpret the grade, even if it is standardized, and in-person interviewers will be far more interested in whether you can do their job, if they're any good. If they're not any good, understanding the subject will prove essential.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Nobel prize winnings: 1.4M (often shared, for several years or decades of work)
Fedex Cup 1st prize: 10M (every year, and second place 3M.)
I like watching golf, so this is not about jealousy. However, why do not give a 10M purse for a national Fedex high school math competition? Maybe I should pitch the idea to UPS...
(IMO 1988, 1989)
If test taking (or, indeed, test taking strategy) is the deciding factor between a pass and a fail, you could modify a simple PROLOG expert system shell to take the exam and pass it more often than the students. Since nobody claims such a shell is intelligent or has any understanding, this is clearly a bug in the examination process. Besides which, researchers and commercial employees have access to texts that can provide any of the information such a shell could spout, making this the least-useful material to test. I have no objection to an AI passing a test, and indeed would expect an AI that has comparable ability to understand as a human to pass with comparable grades, once such an AI exists. The fundamental problem is that humans make for lousy databases, and databases make for lousy humans. If you need one, don't get the other. Tests that would rank SQL Server over and above a genuine expert in the field are clearly tests that are incapable of identifying the criteria that make people useful.
(Knowing the raw facts is useful, but should never attain a person - or machine - more than N points below a bare minimum for a passing grade. Understanding should make up all of the remainder of the grade, where you determine N by how much understanding is the bare minimum to be useful later on.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
All it is is just one big thing saying that society is saying that only asians can be mathmaticians, its just the bullshit backwards stereotype wining crap we allways get. the truth is that america doesnt develop the skils aprotely of all its students.
This article quotes the stats as ready as bad for both boys and girls but then everything it says is heavily bitching a claim of sexism, just look at education these days, the mojority of students are girls, the schol system is doing nothing to discriminate against girls, it infact discriminates against boys. Im sick of this sexist bullshit in our media, women have their equal rights and they need to stop bitching like this. Family rights are strongly in the hands of women, and if a woman actually wants to do the ceo thing they can!, many have. Quite honesly most these days simple have differnt goals, but there are plenty of ceo type women that take those positions and get paid just as must, so stop bitching and get that job, or get that education, stop blaming everyone else when you got your equality and now don't know what to do with it, realizing that it didnt get you as much attention as you hoped. And allow men to get equal rights to, in laws that assume men are guilty until prooven innocent.
Sorry about the rant, there are many women who get this and take their freedom and make their life how they want. there is a good number of you but some women just don't have a clue what feminism actually was. Fake lesbians and fake vegitarians are a key component of these individuals, and in this article we see more of this whiny, bitchy, bullshit behavior. A man would never get away with this sort of crap, the article is friggen racist for gods sake, read the asian slur. If this article targeted any other group it would never be printed. A article about how stdents are hnderperforming is OK, but a article that article that says only a single group (girls) are underperforming, blames boys, asians, and 'culture' in general, and never even suggests that the girl may have just not been interested in the first place (they are plenty interested and pursuing in other fields to show that lack of interest is not a lack of opportunity) is just blatantly sexist crap and im sick of reading it.
I don't think it's possible to have a negative IQ.
We pulled our kids out of school because we were so disgusted with the "tall poppies" attitude to academic achievement. I.e, the idea that the flowers that stand taller in the flower bed need to be pruned to keep them in line...
It sounds eerily familiar... can you say communism?
It is always better to be a first grade version of yourself than a second grade version of someone else.
The failure of public elementary schools is the recognition of talented students. Sure there are GATE programs, but this still doesn't recognize those who excel at subjects that are slowing them down.
I remember being so bored in math class from grades 5-12. Only once I got to college was I able to start taking classes that pushed my limit of understanding so much that I started becoming interested in learning what was going on. Prior to that however, I was scrapping by from boredom.
I agree with making Math Teaching more financially rewarding, but it must also be personally rewarding. That means the basic curriculum, especially its order and progression, must be changed.
In grade school, after about second grade, I just "knew" math. I was "good" at it, even though I never found it very interesting, because the minor logical progression made "sense" to me. But it could never be exciting, because it was still a form of logic force-fed by rote. No matter what my teachers said, even about fun things about the relationship between statistics and gambling, they couldn't help me do anything but churn through the homework, and study only to the tests. A's were easy but boring.
I can't ever remember being *excited* about math at all, until my first 400 level college course. We went over Euclid's Elements, going through all the axioms, proofs, and corralaries in order. I "knew" the trigonometric and geometric principals involved before this class, but I didn't fully GROK it all. Math never felt like a process of discovery, before that class. Before it was all force-fed logic, and now it is a mountain to be conquered.
If ALL Math was taught the same way, in the same order it was discovered, from the beginning line, it would be a whole different subject. Sure, it might take a little longer to get to the "basics" like Algebra and Calculus, but it would be a lot more fun.
Nerds learn by rote. Adventurers learn by discovery.
Didn't John Nash solve the chicks portion of that problem?
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
http://www.uft.org/member/contracts/moa/salary_schedules/
or
http://jd2718.wordpress.com/2007/01/07/teacher-pay-scale-norwalk-ct/
If you take into account the level of benefits compared to most other jobs (e.g. retire at 55 at 79% of your FINAL salary
http://www.nystrs.org/main/library/handbook/benefits.htm , and health benefits), and days off for holidays and the summer; many, if not most teachers in urban areas make more than the equivalent of $100,000/y. A bullshit MS degree in Education (which you can get over the summer) gets you on the right side of those charts.
I live in a town of 35,000 and there are 3 people singing karaoke that are every bit as good as anybody make hit records; yet everybody wants to be a Rock star too.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
thats just unlikely. those attracted to math tend not to have culture/sports as a viable option to begin with.:P anyways, weren't these mathematicians the ones that got us into this credit mess? and well the pictures in the article kind of say it all:P sadly enough. top math folks do have innate skill at the subject like it or not, like how top athletes have some genetic advantage. it is not all hard work. one can get proficient, but one cannot become extraordinary talent at such fields without innate ability. this is the uncomfortable truth. and no amount of culture change or wishing will fix that.
The best teachers love and teach no matter what the system. This is a tiny minority of all teachers and will ever remain so. Sorting for quality among and improving the performance of the teachers who do not do it as a vocation is the road to improvement. Happiness != union membership.
I always love this argument - let's try rephrasing:
The reasons teachers need a union is because everyone expects them to work no matter the conditions, for "the love of the work". And the sadness is that too many teachers fall for it.
The happiest *and* most successful teachers I know either (a) don't work in education, or (b) have significant off-school sources of income.
Want more kids caring about math? Easy:
I had the opposite experience. I never really cared for science, and I hated mathematics books that tried to make it "interesting" by making mathematics not about mathematics.
"A projectile is launched which follows the parabola given by ..." WTF? Were were solving quadratic equations. Why am I shooting things? How is it I happen to know the equation for this projectile? Will this situation occur often in my life? When do we get back to the math?
There's nothing sadder than teachers trying to motivate you by trying to convince you that their class is going to be Practical. The best courses I took in high school and college, by far, were those which were unashamedly "impractical".
give it a few years, as the value of the dollar bottoms out, we'll all be millionairs
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
I see your "TV is less stupid" and raise you "Paris Hilton BFF" and "Real World"
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
Have you looked at the news lately? A lot of people got rich doing math in the last few years.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
I would assert that the real difference is that amazing athletic ability is something that can entertain something like 90% of the population simultaneously.
If all a teacher needed to do was lecture, they might be able to make that kind of economy of scale work for them. Unfortunately, for most subjects and with anything but highly self-motivated learners, you need the teacher to be able to answer questions, adjust to the learner's pace, select and correct appropriate benchmarks and reinforcing material, etc. By the time you're done, even removing the stuff that can be done by someone less talented, you're in a position where it's difficult to simultaneously serve more than maybe a hundred people (probably more like fifty, and yes, I'm fully aware that there are classes that exceed both of those numbers substantially).
So while I still think there's a deeper problem of valuing athletics over academics, there are differences in how big a market each can serve at full ability that will be reflected regardless.
Whoa whoa whoa, stop right there. I remember my early schooling days (up here in Canada). Addition of single digits was a kindergarten activity in my school. By grade 1 we were doing multiplication. If you 2nd grade child was being taught addition, that's a problem.
I think you should watch more sports. there is a MASSIVE shortage of highly skilled athletes in most sports (simply because in pro sports, the bar is set so friggin high).
take the NFL: according to the players union, the average player only lasts for 3.5 years. But every player whose name I can remember lasted for 7+ years. So how does the average drop to 3.5 years? it's because a vast, vast majority of all football players that make it into the NFL don't even last for 3 years (Many don't make it past 1 year).
With that kind of roll over in the pool of active players, it's easy to see why high profile salaries are so high. It's due to the fact that those high profile players are extremely rare and literally are the top 1 or 2 % of the top thousandth of a percent of all people who touch a football in their lives. Now, the minimum wage of the NFL protects the bottom most players from getting nothing or we would see a very steep payout in the NFL.
now take the structure of all competitive sports: you can earn more in TV deals , ticket revenue, and merchandise sales if you are relatively better in the league. So the competition for fan dollars (which is limited) causes owners to try and buy the best possible team while keeping the franchise profitable. since there is a very limited supply of the best players, competition for their services drives up their price.
now I am (or at least, was) a huge sports fan. I'm not sure what you define as world sporting events, but again, payouts seem to be linked ot how profitable the fan base is. Soccer players get paid huge sums of money, as do the best tennis players and golfers. Olympic salaries are reflected 100% in the advertising dollars they can bring in and we see again, that the best of the best get paid huge sums while those athletes in low profile sports get paid very very little to nothing at all.
A good deal of the problem was that the programs failed to account for the fact that a lot of these so-called AAA securities were actually junk.
Quite a few preconditions were violated in the recent market downturn.
'nuff said on the above topic; why would any American wanna become an MOR engineer/mathematician, when TV has taught them that "America's greatest quarterback/dancer/singer/comedian/etc" is the way to go?
Hey- TV doesn't lie to us, does it?
Meanwhile such shows are also being played in China and Japan and India.
The interesting thing is, the performers (trained monkeys) are American.
This is what we expect of America.
Tomorrow morning, we will feel refreshed and go back to work to improve that auto engine, or rocket, or LCD television.
But we love those American trained monkeys! Such fun!
And those monkeys seem to enjoy it also. So what's the problem?
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- aqk
F U
You are absolutely correct, that is what I meant. We often say that our youth is our most valuable asset. This is a capitalistic society where money is king and you should put your money where your values are. There is an old saying... "Put your money where your mouth is". What we say doesn't go well with where we put our money. To those that say we would then just be throwing money at a problem just don't get it. They never suggest a realistic alternative but just moan about how bad things are. To all you naysayers... Do you have another and better solution? And don't say home schooling is a solution. It's good for a few people but it's not an answer for the vast majority.
That's generally bad business. Brilliance is fostoring growth without zero-sum over the long-term. The richest people didn't get there because they collected money from poor people, they got there because they were able to have poor people produce more wealth and take a cut of it - making both parties better off.
Sure you may have a couple get rich quick schleps who gather money, but long-term unless they are growing the economy and helping everybody, their potential gains are limited.
Amazingly it seems there is as much an anti-business attitude on slashdot as there is an anti-intellectual attitude elsewhere. In both cases it comes from short-sidedness and ignorance, focusing on the bad aspects rather than the good potential.
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Where does the whole "give away the razors, sell the blades" thing factor into this? It's the only innovation I've noticed in business, which is not just an application of statistics or machine learning, and it does nothing except exploit people's inability to gauge long-term payouts.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Nobody said TV is less stupid, just that geeks are held in higher esteem on TV.
For geeks as protagonists in incredibly stupid TV:
Beauty and the Geek
There may actually be a long term gain from opportunity cost, even if the long term payouts are higher, so it's not necessarily exploitive. In a society of mass production its cheaper to dispose of something (like razor blades, shoes, clothes) than to have it refurbished to a new-like condition.
The proper application of statistics, ergonomics, automation, etc are where the brilliance in business lies. Improvements in business have led to the expansion of productivity, so consumers can get a higher standard of living.
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Myth-Busters porn episode?
(Is it just me, or is slashdot's CSS screwy this week?)
Table-ized A.I.
Not really. The real trouble is that there is no longer any social consensus regarding what makes a "good" teacher. Fundamentalists for instance don't want their kids taught bad things like sex education and "evilution." Liberals don't want the kids taught capitalism; conservatives don't want the kids taught Marxism. Social relativists don't wan't kids taught that some language format or some kind of logic is better than any other "way of knowing." And, some don't want anything "offensive" taught.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
In other words, it's socially rewarding to be stupid.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
I'm just going to throw this out there...
As a European who's never been to the US, I don't pretend to have any idea of what a "typical American high-school" looks like. The only clues I'm exposed to are the depictions of high-schools in Hollywood movies (bear with me, here).
Now, I know that movies are probably the worst possible source of information for this type of thing, but the fact that high-schools are so consistently portrayed a certain way makes me wonder exactly how much truth is in these plots. Here's what I noticed:
People are stereotyped much more than in my personal high-school experience. You've got the book-smart nerds who are completely socially inept, the athletic jocks who're either either stupid or hide their intelligence, and the girls, who can be anywhere on the spectrum between "nice and smart" and "dumb and mean".
Yes, I know these are stereotypes. Yes, I know movies tend to exaggerate these things to the point of inaccuracy. But all of my limited experience seems to have verified these stereotypes so far, even when talking to US high-school students I know. Feel free to flame, but all I'm really asking is how much these stereotypes really apply to high-school students. Because if they're anywhere close to what they're portrayed to be in the media, then I think I've found a big chunk of the problem.
Of course I didn't RTFA.
Math History and biographies (Pythagoras, Newton, Ramanujan, Hardy, Erdos).
Don't leave out Hypatia and Emmy Noether. Interesting stories and good female role models.
Because otherwise teachers working conditions and pay become even worse than they are, which results in anyone halfway competent to seek other employment, leaving only the desperate to teach children. This, in turn, results in even more ignorant population, making it easier for fundamentalists and crooks to fool them and gain power, making things much worse for everyone.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Again, it seems that all of the "brilliance" is imported talent. In business school, you just "learn" how to implement it most cynically and to maximum personal gain. This "learning" is mostly by spending 2 or 3 years running up a debt partying with other self-styled genius entrepreneurs, knowing that once you have your foot in the door, you can make it all back.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I usually try to fit in references to Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, but have skipped over Noether in the past. I promise not to do so in the future. I'll have to do more research on Hypatia before covering her in class, though. Thank you very much for the tips.
"It's not like the US culture suddenly changed over the last 5 years "
The culture in the USA has not just changed in the last 5 years, it's more like the last 50 years. The change has been so slow that we barely notice it. In the last 5 years, the change for the worse has accelerated.
You mean like Scrapheap Challenge? Or Escape From Experiment Island? Both were pretty good, though the US version of Scrapheap Challenge ("Junkyard Wars") ended up being edited to emphasize the inter-personal conflict that reality TV seems to thrive on.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Again personal gain does not come at the expense of public loss. And applying learnings to a real world setting is not something that anybody can stumble upon. Replaceable parts, mass production, lean manufacturing, just-in-time, quality systems are all advances that have improved the means of production and led to on overall economic gain, not just personal one.
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What do you get if you put four libertarians in the same room?
Six contradictory theories about the optimal minarchy.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Doesn't change the fact that it is a legal cartel. The availability of professional football is highly limited.
What you are saying is that there are a total of perhaps 240 people in the ENTIRE world qualified to play professional football.
That's just daft.
There are 6.2 billion people in the world man. If only 1 in a million people were qualified to play professional football, there would be 6,200 people qualified to play. Hell- if only 1 in TEN million were qualified to play, that would be over the current team rosters.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Roughly 1 out 10 young men in high school qualify to play varsity football (chances are that you'd probably get smashed in high school football). Roughly 1 out of 1,000 men qualify to play college football. Roughly 1 out of 150,000 men are qualified to play in the NFL. It's simply a matter of fact that very few people can run a 4.2 second 40 yard dash, bench press 600 lbs, rifle a football 60 yards down field through a truck tire, or weigh 280 lbs in lean muscle. I am not one of those people and I peaked in high school football, but I'm not going to hate somenoe because they can do things and make the kind of money I can't. You sir should take a breather out of your tin foil hat.
I don't like "geeks" either, or rather geek culture. What that generation valued was intellectual achievement. Today's is anti-intellectual. Fuck geekness, long live intellect.
Actually in the DFW area Science and Math teachers earn an additional stipend. It's 1-3K not much but it is something.
If you look beyond the USA, you can see that there really is a consensus that teachers are more effective when the classes are smaller. Sources differ about where the "sweet spot" is in the ratio between teachers to pupils, but it seems to be somewhere between 15 and 25.
Classes with more than 30 pupils do progressively worse, in general. Things like maintaining discipline and individual attention play a very important role in education up to the end of high school.
I don't think unions are the evil bugaboos you suggest that they are. More often it's tradition that is the main roadblock to restructuring the school system into one that is more effective. I have seen terrible schools with no budget or resources resist change simply because "we've always had a school in this part of town" or "we've always done it this way".
Trouble is, you don't generally get famous and rich solving derivatives.
You can get rich and infamous selling them though.
no taxation without representation!
Tennis player Jesse Levine (100th in ATP ranking) has his own Wikipedia page in four languages. I conclude that many people know his name.
However, I think that you are making a valid point. Just change 100th by 1000th.
Remove the education system from the hands of the politicians and bleeding hearts. Remove the Politicians from the education boards and replace them with parents. Send all the teachers to Drill Sergeant School so maybe they will get some balls and teach.
We don't need bleeding hearts who are more concerned with the self esteem of the children than their academic developement. What we need are educators who aren't afraid of their students and can identify those who have problems learning and get them the help they need while drilling the basics back into the younger generation. I litteraly have seen people who have graduated and can't even read because of dyslexia and his teachers didn't want to deal with him.
My father used play math quiz games with us when were young. Made it fun and challanging. I havent heard other people do this. And he was Italian, not Asian.
The fact that congress makes an exception and allows this business to limit competition in a way that would be illegal for any other non-sports business is not evidence of a tin foil hat.
It's more related to the fact that I've always lacked excitement in cheering for a group of random millionaires (not even residents of my own city or state any more-- and some from other countries) who via free agency now randomly change cities and allegiances from year to year like ronin.
I don't care what you do with your time- but when you start taking my frakking tax dollars to pay for your stadium's for your cartel of millionaires, it does piss me off just a bit.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Some organizations manage to pull this sort of collaborative environment off and those that do have demonstrated a competitive advantage dating back decades. I think that any honest union advocacy has to acknowledge that dysfunction in the workplace is the start of all unions. Said dysfunction in the schools, I believe, will always negatively affect the children no matter what amelioration the unions achieve (and often unions will make things worse for workplace dysfunction).
School reform that is child and education centric should always go after the dysfunction. It should be identified, attacked, and cured. If it takes a wholesale replacement of the school board and the entire school district administration, a 100% management turnover, so be it. I want kids to have the best learning environment. A long-term dysfunctional work environment will never give them that.
Anything less than curing the underlying dysfunction is bullshit.
If I were to treat teachers like the resource they're supposed to be, I'd end up firing the worst, promoting the best, and encouraging the entry of a large number of new entrants to provide superior teaching.
I have 3 kids, 2 of which are old enough to go to school. I have already (1st grade) tripped across one teacher that is atrocious and only later found out that she's been an ongoing problem for lots of other families. This teacher should be fired because she objectively damages children. She will not be because it's too hard to do it.
My local school does not say "if you give us these resources, we can provide this level of service". Were they to do so, I would support them until they blew their metrics at which point it's time for a new team to come in. But that's not how union based public schools work. It would be how a "teachers as a resource" system would work.
I'm not sure whether they would. If that's your only objection, aren't you making the perfect the enemy of the good?
We're talking about schools that have had rape in the stairwells and gangs dominating the playground (the original offer was made pre-Giuliani). These are incredibly incompetent and actively damaging institutions with graduation and literacy/numeracy ratings that are in the cellar and have been there for a long time.
The fact is that there are plenty of non-christians in Catholic schools, always have been. Were we to roll back to a 1940s conception of appropriate state/church interrelation, the Republic would not fall and a lot of kids would likely have improved outcomes. The AFT and the NEA have stood in the way of others with a proven track record taking a crack at doing a better job for generations. How can they look themselves in the mirror when they see the results, I don't know. Perhaps you could explain it?
Look, money does not have to be the entire motivation in getting people to find education to be desirable.
I don't mean to give the movie as an example, but if I did not come across that movie in the 80s and love it, there is no way I would have seen science and math as 'fun' and even attempted to do it.
I would have just ignored it, taken some generic business degree and had been working in some atypical job that everyone else is doing these days.
People completely underestimate the power of media and if you can show in a REAL way that education can be fun and powerful, they'll eat it up.
Wow...where do you live that math teachers (any teachers) make $100K a year?
Long Island, NY
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Pay the Teachers enough to make more Science and Math majors WANT to be teachers (in other words support the union).
The schools need to do a better job attracting (and not alienating) teachers who want to be teachers. That means treating teachers more like professionals and less like babysitters.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
If you're physically inclined you can attract a lot of attention (and thus popularity and girls) in school by becoming a star athlete. If you're not physically inclined then you can do the same by getting into the arts. Pick up an instrument, start doing drugs and attract a different kind of girl and become popular that way.
If you go into math and science most of the girls (and the people having all of the fun) will label you a nerd and want nothing to do with you because you are associated with courses that they find hard and boring.
This is an oversimplification, and ignores that people can be well-rounded.
I lettered in 3 sports, and got 4s and 5s on all of my AP exams--none of which I did to try to pick up chicks. I did sports because I am an adrenaline junky, and I took AP classes because they were more interesting and were taught by better teachers.
Regarding chicks, I had much better luck with chicks at other schools. The stakes were lower (I didn't have to get made fun of over a rejection for the next year or so), and none of them knew about the time I wet my pants in 5th grade. I could just be myself. God only knows why that actually worked.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
For crying out loud - MAKE IT INTERESTING. I remember doing what I referred to as "Math for the sake of Math". Show how it's useful - the easiest way is through teaching Science.
Everyone says that, but no one can agree on which applied math to teach. Many people here argue that it should be physics, but I think it should be finance (I am an economist).
I guess the bottom line is that everyone thinks math should be taught, as applied to whatever they personally find interesting. Personally, I hated physics just as much as math. Shoehorning math into physics would not have made me enjoy either discipline. But econ... what a great class.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I remember that one of her first assignments was to write down every detail of their trip home from school that day, just to get a feel for their capabilities. A typical result would be something on the order of: "Left school. Side door. Went to car. Got in. Went home."
The student communicated all of the requested information in a clear and concise fashion. Sounds like the problem is with your ex, not the students.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I remember that one of her first assignments was to write down every detail of their trip home from school that day, just to get a feel for their capabilities. A typical result would be something on the order of: "Left school. Side door. Went to car. Got in. Went home."
The student communicated all of the requested information in a clear and concise fashion. Sounds like the problem is with your ex, not the students.
Dude, if you consider that an example of proper college-level English, you're part of the problem. She had some serious faults as a human being, but I had to admit she was a damn good teacher.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
she was a damn good teacher.
I seriously doubt that.
She failed to communicate her expectations to the students, and then whined when the students did not meet those expectations. Apparently she did this year after year after year, so she learns slowly, to boot.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
she was a damn good teacher.
I seriously doubt that.
She failed to communicate her expectations to the students, and then whined when the students did not meet those expectations. Apparently she did this year after year after year, so she learns slowly, to boot.
Doubt all you want ... you're a tad off-base. Waaay off-base. Much I hate to defend that woman, I got to read those papers too. Frankly, I was better at creative writing in seventh grade, and had a substantially larger working vocabulary to boot. These were college kids that were incapable of writing even that well. Furthermore, I saw the improvement in their writing over the course of the term they spent in her class: this was not a case of "expectations." This was a case of ignorance and borderline illiteracy, in a significant fraction of incoming freshmen. These kids got that way for a reason, and if there were any failures to communicate, it was in the schools they previously attended.
... but there are a hell of a lot of others that are not, and they have incompetent or uncaring administrators to back them up.
You can defend the quality of primary and secondary education in this country if you wish, but that would be a mistake. I'm sorry if you happen to be a teacher yourself, and perhaps you're good at what you do
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Ahh, so once she finally divulged her expectations the students magically performed better.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock