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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.
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 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.
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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!
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 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!
I must say that I completely disagree with what you said. I am a Christian, and I am all for reason. Actually, part of the reason that I LOVE math is because of my religion. I am amazed by the way God set up math, and believe, in the words of Galileo, that "Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe." I'm pretty sure that what I said here won't affect anyones decision, and neither will what you said, but I just had to protest and say that religion doesn't cancel out reason.
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.
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.
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
Have you met a reasonable sample of second-generation Asian-American students (oh, say, more than four)? There's no way you can convince me, that culture doesn't have a whole lot to do with their strengths (and weaknesses). Eastern Europeans? They don't seem to have as consistent a trend in performance here, and again I believe largely cultural.
By the way, I believe in g (although its interpretation is a matter of subtlety) and its heritability; also its explanatory effect about performance in large populations (for example it's not a coincidence to me that nations with overall high g have overall higher per capita income). Still, it has to be balanced against other explanations which I find more predictive and significant for the individual.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
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)
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.
I'm sympathetic to this kind of argument, and I do think that eventually it will be inevitable to treat religion as a sort of mental illness. Note "eventually" as in probably more than a hundred years from now maybe a lot more. You lost my support with calling for religion to be illegal though, nobody should ever be punished for being wrong.
On an only vaguely related point, one of the first uses of calculus was Newton attempting to determine a limit on the second coming of Christ based on population statistics. He calculated that it would have to be before the 3000s because it would be around then that christianity died out.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
If you're a great mathematician, and someone needs a great mathematician, and they hate your fucking guts... ... they'll get a regular mathematician, and a great fucking calculator.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
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"
No, that's not it. It's that we tell them that it's OK not to speak english while they're in school instead of demanding that they learn it in a year or so and putting them in regular classes. For that matter, we don't really demand good results of kids on anything, and it shows.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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...
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.
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.
"Reason" isn't a boolean value. All living human beings, atheists and theists included, have certain areas of their life where their thoughts and beliefs are rational, and other areas where they are irrational.
The original poster's attitude of "people who don't agree with me are wrong and don't deserve to be treated with respect" is indistinguishable from the theist version, and is equally as terrifying to me. His claim that eliminating religion would somehow greatly increase the value of intelligence is laughable.
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.
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.
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.
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
Drop the tech the test system
What does technology have to do with education tests?
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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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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
In college? Yes.
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.
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.
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
...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."
It's simple supply and demand. Top-quality athletes have a much smaller supply than teachers.
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.
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 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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I dunno, that example has something of an Emily Dickinson flavor to it. She may be teaching the next Robert Grenier or Aram Saroyan.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
And you call that not underpaid?
Would you personally work for a lousy $17/hr? That's what the 33K translates to. Nevermind the benefits. It's a full-time career with massive psychological impact.
The entire country is underpaid, but that's besides the point.
Teachers are indeed grossly underpaid. They shouldn't have to work during Summer either. It's one of the most stressful positions and they do deserve a break from the madness.
I know plenty of 100K+/year accountants. I don't know as many teachers.
If teachers made as little as 70K, we wouldn't hear this argument. And yes, that is not much money either. A professional making $35/hr is not really considered successful in professional fields. That's why we can't attract professionals into that business.
Home payments eat whatever salary you make nevermind any savings.
I will go out and get my credentials but only after I have sufficient net worth to treat it as a volunteer position.
Leonid S. Knyshov
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You make it sound like you get any say in it at all.
Millions of people enjoy watching sports on TV and voluntarily shell out big bucks buying tickets to sporting events. Because people love spending money on it, it only makes sense that people involved with professional sports would make a lot of money.
Now look at education. People value it so little that many people eschew the very idea of paying for it themselves, and want other people (aka the government) to buy it for them. Big surprise that people doing jobs nobody wants to pay for won't make very much money. People don't mind paying for "higher education", and you rarely hear college professors bitching about their pay. The funny thing is, if you wanted to pay a teacher more, you probably couldn't - it's all controlled by the government and teachers unions.
Don't take it personally, but your opinion doesn't matter. The majority of people just don't think education is very valuable.
Maybe not
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
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.........
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.
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
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
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)
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