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Professors: US "In Denial" Over Poor Maths Standards
thephydes (727739) writes "The maths skills of teenagers in parts of the deep south of the United States are worse than in countries such as Turkey and barely above South American countries such as Chile and Mexico. From the article: '"There is a denial phenomenon," says Prof Peterson. He said the tendency to make internal comparisons between different groups within the US had shielded the country from recognising how much they are being overtaken by international rivals. "The American public has been trained to think about white versus minority, urban versus suburban, rich versus poor," he said.'"
if you teach kids to add, pretty soon they'll start wanting to think for themselves and only bad things can come of that.
No wonder other countries count better, they don't just have math, they have maths!
"South American countries such as...Mexico"
And for god's sake if kids in rural Kentucky are better than people in some areas in the world those teachers are pulling off a goddamn miracle.
Other countries than the US do not only count better, but more and more other countries are beginning to count more....
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
When did Mexico become a South American country?
Morgan Spurlock made the idiotic comment about how Norway is "homogeneous" right before transitioning to his piece on a charter school with minority students who were excelling.
SES or "Socio-Economic Status" is the most common race bait thrown around in the education system. Anyone who has experience outside the public education system figures out real quick that you can't look at the skin color or bank account of a student to see how well they're doing.
Racism is the last excuse that our failed public education system still clings to. That and "we don't have enough money."
It's just one of the many reasons why despite being certified to teach high school math, I have no intention of ever teaching in a public school. I'm more interested in helping out at my daughter's small private school. My summer project is overhauling their library system. I've already fixed all the laptops as well as they can be. If possible I'd like to go into a part time teaching role to help out.
The school is filled with students from a variety of racial backgrounds and financial circumstances and oddly enough I can't judge their grades by any of that.
Work Safe Porn
I remember a completely normal kid in high school who couldn't tell time on an analog clock when he graduated high school. I went to MIT, he went to the NFL, we're both rich. F*ck Chile and Mexico.
Despite quadrupling per-pupil costs of public schools since 1962 (inflation-adjusted), the education remains the same or is getting worse. In some particularly well-managed cities, the costs are even higher and the results — even worse, than national average. This article is about Math, but ability to read remains rather sub-par as well — with only 30% of 8th-graders, for example, considered "proficient" readers.
Clearly, we need to spend more money...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
yes, because the brits just copied english from the states, and didn't do a good job at that.
If you think Jooz are running schools in the Deep South... Well, you're no smarter than these kids who can't add.
I always took the most advanced math classes that were offered and I still didn't hit calculus until I was a junior in high school. Seems we had basic algebra from 6th to 9th grades. I think they should introduce it earlier. I was so eager to learn but there weren't many options back then.
Teach the teachers mathematics.
Just because you're too thick to recognize dialects doesn't mean that a word you don't use isn't a real word. Maths is a word. Aluminium is a word. Noo-kyuh-luhr is a sign of illiteracy.
Translation: With the exception of California (pro-science) and Texas (anti-science), states that promote creationism or suffer endemic poverty, fail maths. I wager those failing states have money-rich athletic programs as well.
Someone remind me: What was 'No child left behind' going to achieve?
It was law that every high school student had to pass algebra, geometry, trigonometry before they could graduate.
They also had to take a class on the constitution.
Please explain how the link you provided supports your claim of a quadrupling of inflation-adjusted per-pupil costs since 1962.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Well, there's uneducated, like these kids, and then there's ignorant, like you.
The US is doing about average for OECD on math (and other areas), which isn't bad given the large number of immigrants and diversity of students and backgrounds. And given that our public school system is not all that different from public school systems in those other countries, we shouldn't expect ours to perform any better. Are there identifiable groups and regions that are below average in the US? Of course there are. That's true for other large countries as well.
The US could do better if we did things differently from other OECD nations; if we reduced our reliance on public K-12 schools and encouraged innovation, self-reliance, and diversity of approaches in education. But as long as people like Obama advocate mediocre European systems as a model, all we will produce is the same kind of mediocrity that Europe produces.
The only people who should be allowed to make educational curriculum decisions should be Associates-Masters in a field. On that note, there should be no such thing as a teaching degree, it should be a minor for a Major in a field. The reason I chose Master's for the decision making is usually Doctorate holders are pretty eclectic individuals whom usually lose empathy, lose sight of everything, and completely screw everything up. Leave them for the research, leave decision making to humans who actually are still capable of interacting with people properly.
This is a BBC Article, so "maths" is the correct term in the article - and for that matter in most of the English speaking world.
Only the USA and Canada use math. Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, India and the rest of the English speaking world use maths.
Of course, one should point out that English was defined in Great Britain with American being a regional bastardisation, a minor dialect.
Indeed, this is true. It's as clear an example as can shown for the toxic influence of class warfare by the left in this country for decades.
From the article:
Southern states Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana are among the weakest performers, with results similar to developing countries such as Kazakhstan and Thailand.
Yeah, I teach math at a large university in the deep south, and this doesn't surprise me at all. Students are unprepared for college math classes, and I see a lot of behavior that I wouldn't have expected in a math class. For example, I always have students that try to memorize their way through class, mostly in calculus 1. They don't practice any problems, they don't try to understand the material, but they've got flash cards and highlighted notes and sticky tabs out the wazoo.
It's like they all had a bunch of "study skills" drilled into them in high school and no one ever bothered to explain that these are supposed to aid actually understanding the material. They're so used to just regurgitating things onto tests that I guess a lot of them really do think memorizing is understanding.
Now I realize the following is just anecdotal, but I know several people who teach high school math throughout the deep south, and all of them say the same thing: they aren't really allowed to teach. School administrators have a death grip on teachers' jobs. Teachers are told what, when, and how to teach the material. They're basically reading scripts. And of course they're all teaching to the state end of course tests too, probably because those are used to measure administrators' performances.
Actually people who say "nucular" are using a latin pronunciation and is probably why "nucular" is most frequently heard in well educated states like Massachusetts and not pathetic hill billy states like where ever the fuck you are from.
I'm Canadian its always been maths in my classes..
Even FDR recognized public employee unions would be fatal to the US. That time has arrived.
When public schools fail, parents have to step up with home schooling, private schooling, private lessons. Our kids finished calculus at 15-16 with some out of public school lessons. It was important to burn through the middle school and lower high school classes that are anchored by remedial students mixed with the average and superior students. Also getting the better teacher in a subject is important, No excuses, parents.
Prof Lynn and Vanhanen wrote the literal book on this subject. Average IQs: Ashkenazi Jew 115, NE Asian, 105, NW White 100, Mestizo 88, Black US and Western Hemisphere 85, Sub Saharan African 70, Kalahari Bushmen and Australuan aborigines 60.
These findings are robust, averaging over 100 years of psychometric studies, and are quietly accepted as reliable by social scientists though never opnely discussed. Absent massive coerced dna mod there is no way to close the Black White achievement gap. None at all.
Admitting lots of low iq people into the West is problematic bc they demand reasonably a Western standard of living but can never with an average ... many are far lower ... iq of 85-88 ever earn one. Thus money must be taken by force from Whites and Asians to pay fr Blacks and Mestizos. A recipe for Balkan style wars.
I spent a couple of years teaching in the Boston Public Schools. Your analysis is too simplistic. I had students who had recently immigrated from Cape Verde, who were fluent only in Cape Verdean Creole and whose parents never completed the 8th grade. I also had a student who had been in foster homes her entire life. I discovered after awhile that she couldn't see the board and that her foster parents were unwilling to pay out of pocket to buy glasses - she had broken two pairs of glasses and hit the limit for what MassHealth would pay for that year.
You can't just ignore the impact that these experiences have on a child's ability to learn. It's completely unfair to compare outcomes from private schools, which would never accept a student who barely spoke English or a sullen, resentful product of the foster care system (not that these children would ever apply) to schools that are required to accept all comers.
There are many problems that public schools create for themselves and have nothing to do with students, but the idea that socio-economic status doesn't effect student outcomes is just not accurate. c.f. this NYTimes article on the University of Texas for a week ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/magazine/who-gets-to-graduate.html?_r=0
My high school math teacher should have been teaching at a university, Jack would fill the room with equations and students had to pay attention to keep up. Algebra, plane geometry, solid geometry, euclidean geometry, matricies, and then Q.E.D.!.
Given that most international academic testing doesn't control for admission criteria, the testing itself is defective. Countries that engage in mandatory streaming can look better academically(Europe, Asia) versus those that accept about everyone(US mostly).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Seriously. I've looked at the problems CC curriculum presents as "math".
The way they lay out and ask you to solve problems is insane. Absolutely and utterly BONKERS (and not in a good way).
If you think the US is bad at math NOW, wait until CC has had a few cycles to sink its hooks in.
You're going to have people actively HATING math in a way that'd be ludicrous even today.
And these people who'd be able to solve even a SIMPLE concrete math problem to save their lives.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
But that exact same segment of the population is only semi literate, has a grasp of history supplied almost entirely by cartoons on television, and quite a few them don't actually speak english.
So yeah... statistics are fun. But if you're going to be fair, please limit the population you're talking about to a segment that is both fluent in the standard language and ideally not from a subculture that is actively hostile to education in the first place.
In my school, we learned calculus in high school... this is a US public high school. So it really has a lot to do with what part of the country you're talking about and who in that part of the country you are addressing. From my segment?... we have nothing to prove.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Me too, eh?
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Remember this viral video?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhm7-LEBznk
Well... think US vs Russia & China instead. I bet that raise and fall of empires could be correlated to math skills of their citizens.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
I was hired to develop a fairly large scale Common Core platform. I walked away out of disgust once I reviewed the actual content. The U.S. public education system has problems, and from my experience, Common Core is /not/ the solution.
Thousands of apologies. I had that page book-marked, but — employing the best web-masters there are to be found, no doubt, the Department of Education has rearranged their pages. The information is now here, or, if you (like myself) are having trouble accessing the Windows-powered site, here the Google-cache of it.
On the page, there is a table. In 1962 the "total expenditure" per pupil per year was (in 2011 dollars) $3,915. In 2010 it was $13,692...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
a place isn't exclusive if it doesn't start excluding people.
If you are going to talk about mathematics in the *US*, it's "math". I assume the submitter is from a Commonwealth country. My guess is Australia (in which case why you you really *care* what the "Deep South" thinks about MATH?
I believe in the USA. Get your act together now...
Hilarious. Dialect includes pronunciation. By your example "cah" is a sign of illiteracy, not just the way a Bostonian pronounces car.
A different time, and for a different objection completely - but don't let that get in the way of your rant.
Then again, you're asking for an educational model that is not only less free, but also reduces opportunities for the rest of one's life based on that lack of freedom. If you want mandatory streaming in education, move to another country.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Scientists and techs are portrayed as either evil or socially inept in the movies. Why would anyone value any form of education that led to that? As long the perception exists people aren't going to value maths, or any other, education that lead them to be enablers of society.
And those perceptions are bought to us by the same people who want DRM everywhere so they continue to harvest money for crap movies that have nothing new.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
White vs everyone else, rich vs poor, urban vs suburban is all about the class struggle tenets of marxist ideology, which has been pushed by the state and thus the state run education system since at least the 1960s.
The students who excel at math will go on to become engineers, scientists, statisticians, etc. and the ones who sit in class all day drooling will get a job digging ditches. You want to see the average math scores go up? Let kids who hate math choose between a trade or college bound course schedule for highschool. God forbid parents actually admit their special little flower isn't college material.
I've often wondered why the public education system spends four years hammering this shit into people who have no interest in learning it. Replace it with one class explaining how you do math on an iPad, should the need arise and that's good enough. Sure, there's always the argument that if society goes to hell in a handbasket that there won't be iPads around to do math on, but let's be realistic - in a hypothetical post-apocalyptic zombie ravaged wasteland, basic survival skills will be more useful than being able to solve a quadratic equation in your head. Last I checked, they still don't teach marksmanship, water purification, shelter construction and gardening in public school, so they're clearly not worried about what would happen in a world where every computer suddenly disappeared.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Math would be so much better if it were taught not class grade based but skill based. I took Kumon math lessons outside of high school to advance ahead of the class. The Japanese method teaches the student to be a master at lower math before they can move ahead. A 50% pass or move to next grade because you are older is not allowed!
The last thing the political class and the 1% want is an educated public.
I have seen similar problems in CS. I've not had enough from the same areas to make any public claims but it seems that certain areas of the USA and certain 3rd world nations teach by wrote learning / memorization and that is all their students know. I've only just begun to ask these students which state or nation they came from. I'm in the Midwest but southern accents immediately get my attention. It is painful trying to get them to listen and break away from a life long bad habits.... which have been positively re-enforced. Testing taking skills along with skimming and quoting from the book (or google) are their strengths. I have to do a whole lecture on problem solving just because so many CAN NOT DO IT other than divide and conquer on multiple choice exams.
I've noticed a trend with the younger students which I think has been greatly impacted by the revamp of the public school system towards standardized tests. I can't tell how much is google culture and how much is the "No Child Left Behind" nightmare. The trend is downward for all, some states just are slower to transition (I bet it is the ones with stronger unions who delay, which is in this case is a GOOD THING.)
I know some teachers in this area and their complaints are similar to the parent posting with the exception that they are still fighting. The push is towards the EXACT same thing and the pressure upon them gets worse every year. Two I know quit the profession, three retired earlier than they wanted because of all these laws. It was as if the whole USA was being transitioned to a Texan education (which was 2nd last when those laws passed.)
I have no problem placing blame here; you don't just experiment with all children in huge ways like this. Also, since the whole scheme they put into place is based upon simplistic metrics, it is going to morph into whatever produces good results for those metrics. (That is a bad thing.) The proper approach is conservative; where you keep doing what was done 60 years ago and for those who don't perform well, you bus them to specialized schools where you try out new techniques. Once they can learn how to learn THEN they get to go to college - and it may take a few years in the military before they are mature enough; the idea that high school kids need to jump right into college is just thoughtless.
At least I'm in college; where I just flunk people who are not serious without any guilt. So far I am still free to flunk the lot of them and as long as the rumor continues they know I WILL do it too! I actually get 9 hours of homework time per week out of my students and they complain like crazy (not realizing that for 4 credits you are expected to put in that amount of time - I get people asking how I do it and those student complaints only make me look better. ) It also helps to have a well planned syllabus since it's legally binding... I should make them sign it just to drive the point home. I'm not running for office; they can hate me, but I'm not going to turn out incompetent people for money.
What you need to do is get rid of that "no kid left behind" crap. Recognise that some kids learn faster then others, some kids learn differently to others (some learn by watching, some by doing, some by having it explained in excruciating detail over and over) and some kids just don't have the mental ability to do certain stuff well. Separate your kids into streams, with each group being of the same learning type, make sure no group gets too little attention. Have a higher teacher to kid ratio in the streams where the kids need more attention, give the fast learners more advanced stuff to learn, etc.
Finally, talk to your unions and make sure that crappy teachers get weeded out. The biggest shortcoming of any kid's education is having a bad teacher (we all have at least one teacher that we still remember decades after schooling that was bad). Having one crappy teacher can negate or waste an entire year of schooling...
Not sure what all this means when you put it together, but it seems like government policies are out of touch with reality of grooming candidates in the US, even to meet their own needs.
It's seems to me that most of these southern states schools like to indoctrinate their students rather than actually educating them. The map below shows schools that teach creationism and not surprising is most of them are in southern states.
Map of schools that teach creationism
http://io9.com/a-map-showing-which-u-s-public-schools-teach-creationi-1515717148
No, streaming does not make results look better. Countries that stream early, such as Germany, have found that while their top tier do very well, as expected, but the PISA results from other tiers do not perform as well as they might. It's partly due to early streaming greatly disadvantaging migrants, who might have caught up to their peers in higher level maths classes had they had the chance. PISA is not about heavy maths, it's about numeracy. It tries to measure the maths and literacy skills needed to navigate in modern society at school leaving age across a population. The countries that look better than they should are the ones who exclude large segments of the population from schooling at all (like excluding girls or particular minorities or rural populations from education). There you have children who become adults who are innumerate, but are not measured by PISA. As these countries start to educate their entire population, they will look worse before they look better.
In most times, most places, by most people, liars are considered contemptible. - Ursula Le Guin
I've been hearing people claim that Americans are bad at math for at least two decades. How is it possible that we are in denial? That's all we hear!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well that's unusual. Math is what I had in my classes.
When i was in high school back in the early 90ies in France, it was the same : people were trying to remember stuff by rote learning, not only in math but also in physic. With the predictable result that by the next year , for many very little was left of it. I have come to think that the few of us which aced the math/physic, we did it because we understood the problem and how to solve it, rather than learn the solution. And once you understand something, it is incredibly easy to remember how to do it. I don't think this is a special problem from south Alabama or where ever, I think it is a general problem in many country that many student are firstly taught rote learning in small school, and later in middle/high school are never taught to understand a problem properly.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
...no it isn't.
I don't understand what you're talking about.
He knows that becuase he has worked in the education system?
Have you?
circa 1988
The US is Number One! Anyone who disagrees is a communist!
The US has an insanely powerful culture of avoiding self-criticism.
Just a look at the U.N. education data (try http://www.gapminder.org/) and you will see 3rd world nations rising HUGE amounts. As everybody gets to the top, the relative differences are smaller and rankings should fluctuate more as it takes so little to decide between them. The spread is much smaller now. The difference between 1st place and 20th place is small.
Then you have metrics; that was just the distribution of the results and how it's glossed over completely, with metrics you have measurement issues like the demographics (does the top nation only test the top students?) what things you measure and how those differ (sometimes the test changes) and lastly, what should they know? If you teach concepts in math at a young age (which can include calculus and algebra) without technical drudgery until they are older (and better able to sit still) you are going to do poorly when the measurement expects you to learn in a certain prescribed order.
Mediocre is just fine. As long as most people are in the middle of the bell curve and that is "mediocre" which is enough for most jobs, then what is the big deal? We actually have much bigger problems than education that are not being solved. What good is it to have plenty of decent IT workers when industry will claim otherwise simply so they can suppress wage increases or perhaps they just want the best in the world and refuse to make do with mediocre? Even if that mediocre is better than the planet, they still can want more and for less. (In which case who says your top people will stay in the country? Especially when it is not going to be the best place for them to live? We've got a lot of brains here because they moved here and stayed here; so far.)
If you want to work at McDonalds, move to the EU where they make at least $20 and hour; with better healthcare. Middle income profession? Move to Canada, they make more than Americans + better healthcare + it's still a democracy.
The education system here for the most part, isn't so bad that it prohibits upward mobility for most students - IF THEY WORK AT IT. The culture will do them more harm than the education system. When kids get tried as pedophiles or jailed for nothing or shot or ...TV...games...food...legal drugs...consumerism... not to mention available JOBS... doesn't matter how good you teach them; they have bigger problems...
There is nothing wrong with a non-college educated half illiterate person doing construction work at a decent wage; or whatever - not every job requires the education and none should pay so little the economy is borked- which is what is happening among other things.
Yeah, that good STEM degree will make life wonderful and easy for sure! http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-wo...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
So how do you abbreviate "pantaloons", then?
Your first paragraph was good.
Your second= fail. Finland is in Europe and wipes the floor with America in terms of education. They have immigrants too. Country size is another cop out I hear from Americans. China is 3rd world and does as well or better than America in Math. You'd probably go on and make some other idiot remark that Chinese people are inherently better at Math or something. Define better. Europeans invented most of the Math we use today. Students study the work of Europeans. China contributed jack all to Math - Chinese remainder theorem that's about it. It's almost all European.
With a sufficient injection of frictionless ropes and massless pulleys, by George, you could be onto something.
I see that nobody has mentioned the elephant in the room. That's expected...otherwise it wouldn't be an elephant. Let's use critical thinking and examine the words used: "in parts of the deep south of the United States".
It means African-Americans. Any time you see "education" and "deep South" in the same sentence, it's dog whistle racism. This article is criticizing their scores and compares them to other countries without discrimination. This article is racist and should not even be here. Shame, shame on Slashdot editors.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
This is very unexpected news to me. I didn't realize Turkey had such poor math standards.
Mexico is in South America, right?
America will always be #1 if you can't count and don't know any other numbers.
People who waste time arguing over whether it's 'math' or 'maths' probably aren't very good at the subject.
You'll never lose count again.
The US is so heterogeneous that you have to look at different groups, or you are just being stupid.
The rest of the world is technically wrong. Mathematics is a singular noun, due to the way -ics is handled by the original latin/greek. On the other hand, -th indicates a singular verb as well, so when you throw that s on the end of it, you're making it (incorrectly) plural.
However, I said it was technically wrong for a reason. Language is dictated by usage, not semantics. It's the reason why the word "ain't" is in the dictionary today. So even though maths may not be technically correct, the widespread usage of the word dictates that it is.
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
("Seduced by apologists"?) The outlier is Texas. Oddly, despite being part of the Confederacy, children in Texas with poorly educated parents perform inexplicably well. Of course, according to this Harvard University School of Government study, Massachusetts children are the most proficient in mathematics in the United States, second only to Germany and Switzerland...
tempus fugit
Whatever you do, don't look at the relative cost of college tuition. Public education has outstripped consumer inflation (which is what you quote - the cost of milk and TVs and popcorn) for 4x, but private college tuition has outstripped it by 7x. So, if you use colleges as the benchmark, the relative expense of getting a person ready for college has dropped by nearly half. And you wonder why they're not prepared?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
deny our performance relative to the rest of the world?
We deny the age of the earth.
We deny the existence of climate change or global warming and man's effect on it.
We deny the concentration of wealth and power among a few and its potential and real harm.
I could go on...
USA! USA! USA! USA!
Really, 'cause I border the south, and I read "rednecks" not "blacks." Inner city results is the euphemism for failing African-Americans. Border or southwest results is code for Latin-American immigrants. Get your dog-whistle racism correct. ;-)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Once the students see a guy crucified on a plus sign, they'll know we are serious about our math.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
And in a safer environment perhaps her glasses would not tend to get broken...
The truly insane part about your pathetic assumption in that statement: you wrote it right after comlpaining about someone else's assumptions.
a place isn't exclusive if it doesn't start excluding people.
Who says private schools want or need to be exclusive? Some do, but certainly not all. The one my son went to for a few years wasn't. And it was excellent.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I have a series of math text book from the 50's that I bought at a garage sale for $10, when I was homeless high school drop out. I used them to brush up on Algebra Trig and Calculus as preparation for teaching myself higher mathematics, compiler theory, and etc. CS theory. They are far superior to today's mathematics books.
A few years after me, my younger brother became a sophomore in high school and was struggling with mathematics. I tried to help him with his homework, but the terminology was wickedly alien. I said, "Is this even algebra? What the hell are they on about?" I showed him how to solve the problems using the methods that worked for me but he said, "No, you don't get it, I can't do it that way I have to do it the way my teacher wants or it doesn't count." That's asinine, if the solution fits then it's equivalent. However, I had experience with such oppressive systems myself, so I knew the only thing to do was start from the first chapter and re-learned their bullshit terminology so I could show him the book's particular way of performing and wording the calculation. I realized that the textbook sellers changed the wording and methods of teaching mathematics over the years, not only to yield more book sales for newer curriculum and re-assert copyright anew, but also to make mathematics more in line with the (supposed) way girls learn.
It's unconscionable for teachers to remain willfully ignorant that boys and girls think differently in general; Only a complete moron would think that brains were immune to sexual dimorphism that had such drastic effects on the rest of the human body. It was common knowledge that men and women have different personalities in general, but strangely research was lacking in the area of sex differences in behavior. However, the feminist mantra that men and women are not different drowns out opposing facts. Strange when you consider that they lobbied for changes to the way mathematics and sciences were taught to make them more easy for girls to learn them. Drop the damn stereotyped learning, everyone goes at different rates and different methods are better for different folks, and yes, sexual dimorphism will cause a trend in certain graphs, but that doesn't mean we can't embrace outliers too. Just consider the student as individuals for once: If a boy or girl is having trouble learning via one method, then teach them the other. If that means you wind up more girls or boys in the class that teaches more event based and auditory methods vs visual and hands-on methods then THAT'S OK. If you want to end sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. you have to consider the individual's experience regardless of any group you classify them as being; Stop using identity politics, they only create more inequality in the name of equality.
The feminists leveraged their sexist ideology and identity politics quite effectively by pointing to the disparity in female enrollment and graduation from college, especially in STEM fields. What they failed to realize is that my mom was in the slide-rule club in high school, and she didn't need sex tailored teaching. Their changes didn't help girls to learn, they merely made it harder for some to learn than others. The textbooks I have from the 50's and 60's teach mathematics in concise and plain terms. They don't use too many ridiculous analogies and mental gymnastics. Word problems weren't a focal point past elementary levels. It wasn't that all girls learn different than all boys, it was that there are different methods to teaching that individuals are better at understanding, and there is a trend in which methods boys and girls favor. However, these changes just muddled the methods and muddied the waters.
Another problem has been brewing in education for a wile now too: Standardized Testing AKA Poor Penalization.
If dumb people don't do math, how do they know $7.25 an hour isn't enough?
Are we saying math skills of the general population are an indicator of cultural greatness or even a predictor of where the country is heading? Because I am pretty sure that 99% of people out there don't use calculus or gemology ore really anything beyond basic arithmetic in their daily lives. Why even waste time teaching this stuff to someone who will never use it? We should up to Geometry and then give kids the option to learn vocational useful subjects like welding or how fix a car or an airplane or how to use a spread sheet or database administration.
Private schools are the very definition of "exclusive". If you are unwilling to pay their fees (however high or low they are, for whatever reason), then you are excluded.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
We need more trades / tech schools to free up room in the colleges also that can help cut the student loan loads by having people take say a 1-3 year mixed trades / apprenticeship to learn jobs skills and yes tech / IT can use that.
Right now it can be hard to even get a 4 year degree in 4 years due to the way classes fall in the schedule / fill up. Maybe with less people going to college they will fill up as fast.
Quote: "The American public has been trained to think about white versus minority, urban versus suburban, rich versus poor."
Skimming the actual Harvard report, I see no data nor any claims talking about the performance of students in the United States broken down by minority group, socio-economic status or if they live in an urban or suburban setting.
How can we draw a conclusion when there is no data presented?
And I haven't even touched the apparent inverse correlation between those who go off and become successful starting new businesses and their grade point average. How many million-dollar and billion-dollar American corporations were founded by college drop-outs?
Science is not "settled" about AGW. Consensus isn't science... it's politics. Remember, there was consensus in the scientific community that the earth was flat too.
We do not deny the age of the earth. There are religions that claim otherwise, but you can't claim the US leads the world in "young earthers".
Concentration of wealth is claptrap. There is income mobility in the US, far better than any other country in the Western world. The fact that there are poor people is not because the "rich are hoarding". It is the fact that the US is full of very different people. Come correct me when the average poor person doesn't have a cell phone or a TV. Then we can talk disparity. You are nothing more than a moron who watches too much MSNBC.
The problem is that we are spending so much time trying to teach to the kids who don't value education we are failing those who could succeed. For example, when I kid falls behind, the school is incentivised to not fail the child. Instead they give the other children in the classroom busywork and pull one or two aside to spend extra time with them. This time is time /not/ spent advancing the smarter kids. Indeed, our ideal of giving all children the same education is simply pulling down the smarter kids. It's a shame that someone in the UK has to point it out to us.
Smart, intelligent, educated women just aren't breeding as much as their lesser counterparts. Why would we expect our nations children to be getting smarter? Clearly it's natural selection gone wrong!
I had math as well. Math, being short for "MATHematics"
"The math skills of teenagers in the ghettos of New York, Philadelphia and Washington DC are worse than in countries such as Turkey..."
Nuclear should contain only 2 syllables in any pronounciation. Note the lack of vowels between c and l
It's funny you should mention basterdisation of the English language as according to Oxford University many subsets of American English are much closer to the original Anglo-Germanic root English language than those dialects of Brittish English that exist today.
Go visit the fishermen in Tangiers Island, or the 7th district in Maryland if you want to hear what "English" actually sounds like.
The poorer the background of the student, the more that should be spent on his education. The way things are now, what with those with the nmost getting the most, is completely backwards for an equality for everyone society.c
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I was hired to develop a fairly large scale Common Core platform. I walked away out of disgust once I reviewed the actual content. The U.S. public education system has problems, and from my experience, Common Core is /not/ the solution.
Thanks for taking an opportunity to make it better, and instead leave it that much worse off.
Private schools are the very definition of "exclusive". If you are unwilling to pay their fees (however high or low they are, for whatever reason), then you are excluded.
Well, certainly, though that interpretation of the phrase undermines the original point the AC above was trying to make. The claim was that private schools won't accept difficult kids, the reply was that to be exclusive you must exclude, and the basis for the exclusion being discussed clearly was not money. Other than the financial issue (which, as you note, needn't be a terribly high bar), there's no valid basis to claim that all private schools are exclusive.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
SuperKendall is well known for never proving anything he says. He knows everything and you should just accept it.
Example, please. The examples I've seen in the press about "horrible" math presentations in CC have actually been presentations that actually try to teach non-trivial mathematical concepts like place value or the number line. The complaints I see seem to be that CC isn't teaching the 'easiest' way to get an answer to a numeric problem. i.e. CC uses a number line to solve an addition problem instead of the rote paper and pencil algorithm. As a degree holder in both mathematics and engineering I've formally studied math for its own sake and as a tool. Perhaps as a tool the only goal is the easiest way to get an answer, but real mathematics is not always about the easiest way to get an answer, but the most insightful. I'm open to arguments that we should teach the kids rote algorithms first and the most straightforward problem solving, since a lot of them only need the tool but that is applied arithmetic, not math.
I blame the teachers unions. The south isn't heavily unionized, except for teachers.
But this is slashdot, an American site, so "math" it is.
Posting anon so I can mod down all the foreigners, like any good American should.
I'm kidding... or am I?
They have math skills.
on your ability to succeed in life. I'm a software developer (senior). I'm terrible at math. Absolutely awful.
Common Core is *not* a curriculum. It's a set of standards. Engage NY and its ilk are pretty awful, but awful curriculum existed before the Common Core and will continue to exist.
You can see the standards here: http://www.corestandards.org/Math/
Please explain how the link you provided supports your claim of a quadrupling of inflation-adjusted per-pupil costs since 1962.
As GP already noted, the table can be found via another link. But also, the table he quotes was in a link at the bottom of the first page he cited -- which would be pretty clear if you scrolled down and read the table heading until you found the one on topic.
I know that's asking a lot -- looking at the table on the linked page that actually is on point. But if you did, you'd find (Table 213):
Expenditure per pupil in average daily attendance:
Unadjusted dollars - 1961-62: total $517, current expenditures $419
2009-10: total $13,041, current expenditures $11,445
Constant 2011-12 dollars - 1961-62: total $3,915, current expenditures $2,905
2009-10: total $13,692, current expenditures $12,017
The "current expenditures" excludes things not directly relevant to student instruction, like community services, adult education, as well as expenditures NOT on the current school year, like capital outlay, interest on debt, etc.
So the best numbers to compare would be the inflation-adjusted "current expenditures," which would be $2,905 compared to $12,017. That's actually slightly greater than quadrupling.
In the deep south they also seem to think that the Earth is barely 6,000 years old. It would be surprising if the education children are getting in anything scientific were any good.
From the article: '"There is a denial phenomenon," says Prof Peterson. He said the tendency to make internal comparisons between different groups within the US had shielded the country from recognising how much they are being overtaken by international rivals. "The American public has been trained to think about white versus minority, urban versus suburban, rich versus poor," he said.'"
But let's take a closer look at the information in the article and see if this way of thinking about it makes sense.
Southern states Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana are among the weakest performers, with results similar to developing countries such as Kazakhstan and Thailand. [...] If Massachusetts had been considered as a separate entity it would have been the seventh best at maths in the world. Minnesota, Vermont, New Jersey and Montana are all high performers.
There are some clear patterns here. The low-performing states like Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana are poor, rural, and have large minority populations. Conversely, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Massachusetts are wealthy, urbanized states with relatively low minority populations. So maybe thinking about scholastic achievement issues in terms of "white versus minority, urban versus suburban, rich versus poor" makes quite a bit of sense after all.
And in a safer environment perhaps her glasses would not tend to get broken...
Are you asserting she deserves a bad education because shes in a dangerous environment? Your screwed once so you deserve to be screwed again.
And better socio-economic status generally means you are in a safer environment... so I think you just helped the GPs point.
A universal voucher system would quickly correct this inequity, but the teachers union cannot have that and so the poor remained Fucked by design.
The poor can learn as well as anyone, in a good school.
Bullshit, that's nothing but a socialist redistribution of wealth plan. If you cannot afford to send your kid to school, then they shouldn't go to school.
My tax money going to your kid's vouchers? What's next comrade? America became great by concentrating it's wealth in the best people, and we are failing now because we keep impeding them. I need all of my money, and you shouldn't get any of it. The poor are poor because they aren't as smart/clever/deserving as the wealthy.
Language is dictated by usage, not semantics. It's the reason why the word "ain't" is in the dictionary today.
And what exactly is wrong with "ain't"? It's a reasonable contraction of the phrase "am not," given that "amn't" (the original) is difficult to pronounce and will tend to naturally morph to something better. The usage war against "ain't" is just another one of those stupid arbitrary battles started by random guys in the 19th century who were often imposing their personal preferences rather than any "rules" based on usage or logic. In this case, it was probably motivated by class differences, rather than any sense of grammatical impropriety.
And don't pretend there are no other contractions like this -- see "won't," for example, as a contraction of "will not," which is much easier to say that "willn't."
If anything, the language police should be after people who utter such grammatical monstrosities as "Aren't I great?" As far as I'm concerned, the MORE CORRECT version of that sentence is "Ain't I great," unless you're the sort of person who goes around saying things like "I are sad. I are going to walk the dog. I are stupid for talking like this."
The BBC article shows a table of countries and their ranks. I'd like to see a couple more columns in the table, including the number of years the parents spent in school and some number relating the average income to the cost of living for the particular area in question. I bet the statistics for certain areas of the "Deep Southern" US would show families below the poverty line with parents who did not complete high school. Also, I'm shocked that Israel (rank #29), a country with a modern and high-tech reputation, is actually ranked below the United States (rank #27).
Yes. You were only taught one math. The rest of the maths eluded you because of not enough ESL courses. Why the argument focused on the South, I'm not sure. I think it has something to do with the poor people in Detroit and Brooklyn believing they are "Middle Class".
...South American countries such as Chile and Mexico.
This just it, basic geography skills also lacking.
Even on /., how can one have an argument about this?
It's a long-standing joke that in the US, people practice "math" and "sports" while in the UK similar people practice "maths" and "sport."
I posted this above but I'll post it again: http://www.ijreview.com/2014/05/137962-common-core-approach-solving-basic-math-problem-doesnt-confuse-congrats/
To solve 32 - 12 = ? you do the following:
12 + 3 = 15
15 + 5 = 20
20 + 10 = 30
30 + 2 = 32
Then 3 + 5 = 8, 8 + 10 = 18, 18 + 2 = 20. Therefore 32 - 12 = 20.
Then there's the Common Core math problem my son had: 1.62 / 0.27
He wasn't told to actually divide numbers. Instead, he had to draw 162 "tenths segments" and then redraw them in groups of 27. The number of groups he got was the answer. I want to see them try to scale this method up to dividing 237.235. The kids will be drawing "tenths segments" for hours, if not days.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I wish we could walk away. I have two kids in elementary school and the math they're learning sickens me. They don't actually work with numbers, but need to draw "word sentences" to graphically represent problems. If you have 8 + 3, you don't just add the numbers, you draw 8 boxes and then you draw 3 boxes and then you count all of the boxes to get your answer. If this was just the introduction to the concept of addition, it might be fine, but this is how they expect kids to add (and multiply and divide!) even after they've been doing it for awhile.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
That his reports on math skills around the world only includes the 58% of children that attend secondary school in the first place, right?
I wonder how the US fares when you consider all the children in a given country, not just those that can afford to attend school... The idea is to educate all the children, not just really educate the (comparatively) rich kids.
Ken
Small wonder Americans are not interested.
If Americans are soooo stupid and lazy then why does the US have *way* more than it's share of substantial inventions? We are practically all major tech companies started in the US - by people educated in the US. Why are foreign students breaking their necks to get into US universities?
I love math. I'm the math geek who, in school, would make up and do math problems just for fun. What's 2 to the 100th power? I'd sit down and multiply it out by hand to find out and would think of it as fun.
Yet, I look at the math my kids are doing (1st grade and 5th grade) and if I was in their place I'd hate math too. It's sad. My oldest has gone from being a math geek who would sneak math into art projects (seriously, he'd have a drawing with 1 + 1 = 2 in there for no apparent reason) to hating doing math. At least, until I show him the "old school" way of doing it at which point he loves it again.
Common Core can't die soon enough!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Private schools are the very definition of "exclusive". If you are unwilling to pay their fees (however high or low they are, for whatever reason), then you are excluded.
Yeah. That McDonalds is fucking exclusive too! I asked them to give me a free lunch and they wouldn't! Those exclusive bastards!
From what I understand, the alternative methods are supposed to be taught in addition to the traditional methods, not instead of them. The idea is to get kids comfortable with what the operations actually "mean", not just rote techniques.
The method of using addition to do subtraction is one that I do quite regularly (I'm almost 40). It's handy as an estimation technique, since for a first approximation you can round both numbers to something that's easy to work with, and then factor in the correction if necessary.
As for division, the technique described clearly doesn't scale to the numbers in the example. It was a poor choice of question to demonstrate the technique.
It's called The United States of America. Not 'merika or any other slang like that. It's the only nation in North or South America that calls itself specifically by that name. There are/were other nations that called themselves United States (or Estados Unidos), but with a different "of" part.
I think you're confused because my country has a descriptive name made of mostly common nouns, rather than an arbitrary regional name like France or Germany (Deutschland). Although Germany used to be a region of many small countries. And technically it is now The Federal Republic of Germany ( Bundesrepublik Deutschland).
But really USA isn't such a strange name of a country, at least when compared to The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
I saw a system (in the UK) for place value that added a great deal of complexity and I, who've never had a problem with place value, found it bizarre and confusing, adding extra elements in when the traditional units, tens, hundreds, etc.... seemed a much better way of teaching it.
Sorry I can't remember it but it did seem like a waste of time.
Also Algebra is a rather important applied tool.
No you haven't because there are no "problems" in the common core. Common core is a standard. It says what skills and knowledge you should have by grade level.
It doesn't say how to solve math problems. It's not a curriculum.
They're here if you actually want to read them:
http://www.corestandards.org/Math/
It's more than likely that someone took the standards and made a crappy example problem. Then probably published it on the internet and said "hey aren't the common core problems crappy!".
I do expect a little more from Slashdot posters.
In the interests of "accountability" and "lean" and "metrics" and such there is little flexibility because teachers are forced to "teach to the test".
The problem is not that it's a government-run organization, the problem is that teaching is inherently difficult to standardize. Each kid is different.
Standardized testing is an attractive idea (how do you know how you're doing unless you measure it?) but the problem seems to be that it's *really hard* to come up with effective measurements for everything a teacher does.
Common Core seems so bad I even find myself agreeing with Mr. Levine
Unfortunately, a lot of people who love math or are good at math are really just good at following directions. They learn the little tricks and formulas and they pass the tests and everyone says, oh little Jimmy is so good at math. And they like it because they feel special. But that is not math. I know many people who have gotten to college thinking that way and were in for a rude awakening when they realized that they knew was not math.
Whether you like it or not, common core is teaching kids to think conceptually. They are learning really deep mathematical ideas very early on. In the long run, I think this is going to be great. In the short term, there is a certain "culture shock" that kids are getting who have learned the old ways for a few years and are being abruptly switched to the new ways. It also requires very good teachers who themselves are very comfortable with math, which the old way of teaching did not. There are going to be some growing pains. But in the end I predict it is going to lead to a lot more kids learning and loving math, especially creative types who were turned off by the paint-by-numbers aspect of the old ways.
The Libertarians are getting their way.
They want the public schools system to fail so they can completely dismantle it.
Science is settled on AGW or its not settled on anything.
How about Nu-cle-ar
As I understand it, the problem that CC is trying to solve is that most kids don't have a gut-level understanding of what numbers actually *mean*.
I went to school with a lot of people that just memorized the rules, but didn't really have a feel for them. And so when the circumstances changed they couldn't adjust the rules to deal with the new circumstances. (Dealing with binary or hex, for example. Or curved space, or alternate coordinate systems.)
So with CC they're trying to give kids a more intuitive feel for numbers. That said, the alternate techniques are supposed to be *in addition* to the ones that we all learned, not instead of them. And the alternate techniques are not as efficient as the traditional techniques (which are optimized for the common case) but they're more flexible. So some questions (like those involving large numbers) don't mesh well with techniques involving counting/drawing/reordering/etc.
Lastly, some of the issues are due to bad question design, bad teaching, etc. We've got centuries of experience teaching the traditional techniques, not so much with the new stuff.
closer to the original Anglo-Germanic root English language
I guess the Celtic, Latin & Greek influences have ceased to exist then.
I must admit I've never needed to. I just have trousers.
I have a lot of friends with kids who complain about common core, and I've long suspected that what you just said is the reality here. I hope the public backlash does not stop our teachers from teaching students these valuable tools just because their parents don't understand it.
Republican troll fail. Republicans love, love, love vouchers because they take public money and funnel it into private institutions.
A universal voucher system would quickly correct this inequity
Here's you a thousand dollar voucher, enjoy your choice of crappy thousand dollar schools.
When I was in gradeschool in the 80's, "touch math" was all the rage at my magnet school. I'm pretty sure it damaged me for life. I kid you not. To THIS VERY DAY, I cannot do simple math functions without actually drawing out and touching numbers - or imagining myself touching them in my head. My brothers who had standard math and memorized times tables are far better than I am at math. I really wish I hadn't been some experiment for the latest and greatest teaching fad.
"Cah" is an accented variation of "car". It's strange to an ear that's not familiar with the accent, but it's still the same word. Nuclear is "noo-clear". A mere accent can be blamed for mangling "clear" into "queue-lar". That's just bad learnin'. :)
If you did your research, you would know that "maths" is a very recent invention in Great Britain. It only started in the 1970's, and didn't become common until the 1990's. That doesn't change the facts of what I stated, which is that mathematics is not a plural word, and the abbreviation, according to the rules of English as the British themselves define them, is math. This isn't an American vs. British issue, this is about a misunderstanding of the language. Just because it has taken foothold in Britain and some of its former colonies doesn't make it correct.
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
Remember, there was consensus in the scientific community that the earth was flat too.
Oh, horseshit. You're parroting the fairy tale you learned in the fifth grade about flat-earthers trying to stop Columbus, and the science-denial mafia is working it for all it's worth.
The shape and approximate size of the earth have been known since at least 500 B fucking C. Of course, if you think that's false, you could always cite a few members of the "scientific community" you refer to...
I see you learned your maths in quadrupling at an American school......
You are using a contrived example to "prove" your point by taking a trivial problem and taking the most absurd route possible to solve it. The "Common Core" method (which, by the way, is the method that most people will use intuitively) is used to reduce the complexity of nontrivial problems, not to make a mockery of the trivial ones.
By way of example, what's 426 - 298? Well...
298 + 2 = 300
300 + 100 = 400
400 + 26 = 426
And now... drumroll please... 100 + 26 + 2 = 128.
And you and I both know that if you had faced this problem in the real world that this is exactly how you would have solved it. You probably wouldn't have drawn a box or any such nonsense, but you would have reduced it to manageable chunks like that because that's the sensible way to solve it.
Sorry to have rained on your common core bashing session.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I think the bigger issue in there is a parental culture shock when they can't help the kids with their homework. Getting help at home is really key to a child's early academic growth and many implementations of CC are making it hard. There really should be some resources that help the parents with the transition. I'm loving seeing the stuff my kindergartener was exposed to this year, but there were times when we got a sheet with some numbers and maybe some boxes and instructions with words that had no contextual meaning to us.
I posted this above but I'll post it again: http://www.ijreview.com/2014/05/137962-common-core-approach-solving-basic-math-problem-doesnt-confuse-congrats/
To solve 32 - 12 = ? you do the following:
12 + 3 = 15
15 + 5 = 20
20 + 10 = 30
30 + 2 = 32
Then 3 + 5 = 8, 8 + 10 = 18, 18 + 2 = 20. Therefore 32 - 12 = 20.
Then there's the Common Core math problem my son had: 1.62 / 0.27
He wasn't told to actually divide numbers. Instead, he had to draw 162 "tenths segments" and then redraw them in groups of 27. The number of groups he got was the answer. I want to see them try to scale this method up to dividing 237.235. The kids will be drawing "tenths segments" for hours, if not days.
Please read the post that you were responding to and try and understand it. You aren't understanding the post you are responding to, and you don't understand the purpose of math education.
I don't want to defend CC math stuff too much because I'm agnostic to it. I haven't studied it in enough depth to have an opinion. But your examples here are crap and make me think that people attacking CC math don't know what they are talking about.
The purpose of math education shouldn't be to teach kids the quickest way to get the right answer to arithmetic questions. That's fairly pointless - a certain amount of mental arithmetic is certainly important, but if you get to stuff like 1.62/0.27, people are just going to use a calculator anyway. Teaching kids the fastest way to do even intermediate difficulty calculations like that is fairly pointless - in real life they are just going to use a computer of some sort.
It is far more important to get kids good UNDERSTANDING of the math, as the above poster was trying to point out. This is not always the same as the quickest way to solve the problem.
The "tenths segments" stuff is certainly a slow algorithm. And it certainly isn't a very general algorithm since, as you point out, it breaks down pretty quickly. But it will help the kid UNDERSTAND how to divide two decimal numbers much better than the standard rote method of long division would (in my opinion).
And the ultimate inefficiency of the algorithm would be a good thing in the hands of a good teacher. "What happens if we try and divide 237.235...Oh, it takes you forever? Why is that? How could the method be modified for such cases". That is GREAT teaching that gets kids to really think about what is going on in ways that would be very difficult with the standard rote stuff.
Yeah it doesn't get the answer as fast, but who cares? The kids can get a fast answer if they need it with the phones, and they will have better understanding of mathematical concepts.
The example with subtraction is certainly weird (it seems to be motivated by change counting?), but its probably being taken out of context.
And to head off any ad hominem attacks - I taught STEM fields at a major US college for years and now do math related stuff (mostly calculus based) every day as part of my job. Math gets me my paycheck.
The teenagers in the "deep south" dragging down those results probably can't read all that well either. There are all sorts of systemic problems in for example rural Mississippi that go way beyond good math scores but at the same time those kids lead very different lives from the average suburban or urban teenager so I don't think it really tells you much to get an "average" math test score including these groups and then extrapolate something about about the US education system -which granted has its problems.
Last time I checked, Mexico wasn't in South America. Looks like math isn't our only learning deficiency.
Exactly; as an illustration, take those three "unreasonable CC homework" questions for his 3rd grade daughter comedian Louis C.K. posted on twitter, and got a storm of support for in the "finer" media. Ignoring the fact that the homework questions were not part of the CC as such, I disagreed on all 3 accounts:
- first question: you get 6 boxes (the picture showed only the top 3 of them) and are asked to write "A" in half of them, "B" in 1/3 of them, and "C" in 1/6. For crying out loud, what kind of number-dyslectic moron thinks this is a difficult assignment? He must be hoping his daughter aspires to also be a comedian (or a journalist apparently), because she sure as hell won't get into higher education if she's being led to think she shouldn't learn to solve that. The media storm that followed was eerily reminiscent of idiocracy...
- second question: sure, you and I, as a parent, may not know what a "pictograph" is. However, you and I hopefully know how to use Google. After a 30-second search, I discovered "pictograph" is just a scary term for an innocuously simple concept. I bet his daughter was drilled in class on what a pictograph is and how to construct one before being given that assignment; not the teacher's fault if she wasn't paying attention, and as a parent, you shouldn't balk at a word you don't know unless you never want your offspring to learn more than you know.
- third question: he apparently deleted that one after a few days because I don't see it on his profile anymore; probably he realized just how stupid it made him look. Anyhow, the question consists of a number of separate, very simple equations. He pretty much admits in his tweet that the equations are not really too hard as such, except for the last one, which doesn't seem to make any sense at all. Just stare at that last one for 20 seconds... right, it's a simple typesetting error ! Specifically, what you're seeing is two equally easy equations that are unfortunately concatenated on one line by lack of a line break. Was this guy drunk when he posted it? And even if not, is lashing out without thinking what he considers "being a good role model"?
A colleague teaches business statistics at a public university located in the southern U.S.. In class this spring, a student from the south asked, "What is that vertical line through the equal sign?"
This experienced full professor took a deep breath before turning away from the whiteboard and calmly and compassionately explained the concept to the student. But he has needed to debrief and discharge his shock and horror in private many times since then. I was grateful the student at least asked, at least grabbed this opportunity. (I teach at the same institution.)
This student had graduated from high school and then passed College Algebra and Quantitative Business Analysis taught by the university's math department to get into this business statistics class. How early is 'not equal to' taught in K-12? How many opportunities did this student bypass or space out in class to have not learned this basic concept? (Texting maybe? Getting someone else to do homework, maybe?)
And I must add that there are many students in our classes who are competent at math and a few who are brilliant at it. But as a group, they are far from excelling at this subject. That same colleague commented after we reviewed our 'assurance of learning' measures that we had made some progress at quantitative reasoning. We had moved our students, as a group, from really bad to just bad.
...that public schools have to accommodate, often at great expense. It's a lot easier to succeed when you can pick and choose who gets to attend your school.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
math or mathematics in the United States of America
This is more of a general comment about the study, just picked this point for convenience...
This entire "analysis" is extraordinarily flawed.
Whenever someone wants to throw stones at the US educational system, they always artificially cut off any analysis at the high school level. Here's a big news flash: PEOPLE GO TO COLLEGE. Shocking, I know. It is absurd and pointless to measure educational attainment at a middle point. The only logical way to measure a country's educational system is at the endpoint. (Obviously people can continue to learn as adults, but a majority of people complete their formal learning by their 20's.)
The US has one of the highest levels of college attendance in the world. For a long time we were first in number of years of attendance. A country or two may have slightly exceeded us lately, but most countries are still far behind US numbers. And the US has the best colleges (overall) in the world. I'm not talking about a few elite schools, but rather the large number of schools that the vast majority of people attend. We have hundreds, even thousands, of very good colleges. Some countries have surprisingly poor colleges - notably Japan.
It's this college-level education where the country really excels. There is an ongoing international test of scientific knowledge. The US places SECOND IN THE WORLD (only Sweden is ahead of us). The UK's score is only half that of the US. And this isn't a test of just college-educated people, it's the entire population. What accounts for this? Both the high level of college attendance, and the fact that the US is the only country that requires virtually all college students to take science courses.
We also require all of our college students to take math courses. If this study were to have any credibility at all, it should be testing the population after they had completed college, not after (or during) high school. That's beyond ridiculous. Based on the science literacy test, I guarantee the results would be wildly different. My math knowledge was decent after high school. After college (a year of calculus, multiple years of statistics), my math knowledge was many times higher - and I majored in business, not a technical major.
Of course some education snob will say everyone should have a deep level of math knowledge. This is absurd. There are numerous jobs in any society that simply don't require much math. You can't make a serious case that a crab fisherman (just watched Deadliest Catch last night, so this comes to mind) needs to be able to do integrals or calculate the variance of a set of statistics. Counting is all they need. And they make plenty of money using the specialized skills that job does require. Whatever need our economy has for tech jobs is easily satisfied with the high percentage of college graduates the US produces.
If the US were in "deep, dire, impending trouble" from this supposed low level of math knowledge, our economy would have tanked decades ago. People have been issuing these dire warnings for decades. Nothing has changed much in that time, either here or overseas. If Japan is doing such a perfect job teaching its children math, why has their economy stagnated for 20 years? Why has the US economy not spiraled into a deep depression? Because the true level of US math education is much higher than this stupid study implies. (That, and economic performance is based on many factors, not just this one - but the dire sky-is-falling predictions we keep hearing keep not happening, because the analysis is so fundamentally flawed.)
One thing I learned in college was how to differentiate a good study from a poor one. This was a poorly done study.
I am not a Common Core expert, but let's change the solution a bit:
12 + 8 = 20
20 + 10 = 30
30 + 2 = 32
8 + 10 + 2 = 20
Getting rid of the 12+3=15 equation makes the solution cleaner and more intuitive. There's no reason to have it in there, it's just more numbers to keep track of. It's noise. Since this equation seems to be a staple in "look how stupid Common Core is!" articles, I can't help wondering if it was ginned up a bit to make it extra confusing. Having said that, some of my daughter's math textbooks made me shudder with their incomprehensibility.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Mexico is not in South America...
Hahahha
Well, the word 'maths' didn't really surface before 1911, so I guess it's the English that in this case have introduced a break with tradition. The word was 'math' before.
What were the names and authors of those math books? Would love to check them out.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
About the correct way to spell "math"
You're not supposed to have to study for these damn tests, and you're not supposed to copy the test material, but that's exactly what teachers are making students do.
It struck me in college that studying for tests is a fundamentally flawed idea. Really, all tests should be given at random intervals to demonstrate that you actually are learning the material. If you don't know when the test will be, you don't know when to cram.
Of course, that would be a huge inconvenience for the teachers, unfortunately. Some professors like to write the test once and rotate between 3 different sets of wordings, and just fudge the coefficients around when they loop back.
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We could just use "I'm not" instead of "I amn't." If we're going to mangle it, let's at least do it in a logical, predictable manner, yeah...or else we end up learning that half the verb conjugations in German are Regular and the other half...well, a lot of them are just random vowel replacements (although you could observe there's something of a "sub-regular" shift, too).
You do raise a good point about "won't." I hadn't noticed that before....I don't understand "if I were the king of the world" either. Why isn't it "if I was?" You don't say "I were going to bed," but "I was going to bed." Maybe it would help if we had an actual different-sounding conjugation of it.
Hypothetical case is all crazy-like in German too from what I remember, though, so apparently it's not just us. And "sie" can mean any of "they," "her," or "you (polite)" depending on conjugation clues and capitalization, so hey.
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Why do women wear a pair of panties but only one bra?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'm also Canadian.
Interestingly enough, even after graduating from university (engineering), I have never seen or referred to it as "maths" in my entire academic career.
Interesting essay, my elementary math books are all gone. I still have my elementary algebra book but I've not seen latest books used in today's public schools. I have my great grandfather's textbook he used to when he taught high school math (I need to try some of those exercises!)
mfwright@batnet.com
So, when you're given a shovel and told to fill a hole with shit, it's better to fill that hole with shit than to walk away?
Common core isn't designed to teach kids anything but a touchy, feely "I hate school".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Did you even read what I wrote? The body that admisters the entire thing is mostly irrelevant if you have a pointy haired boss with an MBA in shouting in charge at the school level instead of someone with teaching experience.
Given the way the English language works it does actually make it correct. This isn't French.
I read what you wrote. I'm telling you you are jumping to conclusions. You assume that you know how schools would deliver better results.
I'm telling you, I don't know how schools can produce better results. There is little evidence about the effect putting teachers in charge, spending more money, or smaller class sizes accomplish that. And pointing to Europe doesn't help because the Europeans are actually not doing better than we are; the differences we see in PISA are minor, and largely attributable to choice of samples and factors that have nothing to do with education.
And we're certainly not going to produce better schools by picking the academic-fad-du-jour, spending 20 years to implement it, only to discover that it didn't make a lot of difference and cost a lot of money and trying to implement another fad for another 20 years. At that rate, it will take us forever to go through all the things we need to try before we accidentally hit on something that works better.
The way to improve schools is to let many schools try many different things, and let parents decide for themselves what they believe works and doesn't work. In fact, Obama and Democrats even play lip service to this, they simply don't actually do it (like so many of their policies, they say the right thing and then do the wrong thing).
You make too much sense my good sir. Prepare to never be listened to. Unless you change your name to Cassandra. Which would be fitting, and might get a few of the dumb feminists to change their minds simply because you'd have a female name now.
I know it's too late now, but I would have looked into this:
http://www.ted.com/talks/yoav_...
There are multiple mathematics, however.
If you look at the american culture vs. academics, you will see that for decades academics have had a social stigma attached to them. Especially mathematics which appears to be the most "nerdy" of them all.
Just look at how movie and tv culture ridicules the smart kids and idolizes the athletic, attractive, charismatics. Many stories are about the 'maverik' who doesnt follow the rules and goes by the 'gut' feeling overcomes the odds and wins the day. Even the science fiction buys into this! Examples: Captain Kirk sleeps around, cheats on his tests, has other people do his science and engineering. Spock has a great intellect, but is really a comic character and only wins when he goes with his 'human' side. The android Data really just wants to be human and have feelings.. doesnt care about making scientific breakthroughs even though he has the intellect for it. Luke uses the "force" -a mysterious power that is a metaphor for having a lot of "heart".
None of the stories talk about years of study, winning because you are better prepared, succeeding by hard work, etc.
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
I think at least some of what has gone wrong in Math education is that the linguists have infected the teaching of Math with a whole lot of over-descriptive buzz words. One that I recall from my sisters years at primary (elementary) school was the "commutative law of addition". She was 3 years younger than me, and has never really dealt with Math well. I don't think it helps when kids have to learn lots of wordy rules, instead of just getting in and tackling the numbers.
Mathematics is a language in it's own right : you don't need to overload it with extras to make it comprehensible.
What I've read in other comments about Common Core Math seems to simply be a different way of breaking down the numbers into easily handled bits.
The way I was taught was with simple sums at first: 2 + 3 = 5; 7 - 4 = 3. But our Math books had squares, not just lines, so we were taught to structure the sums to give numbers a proper place to simplify the operations we carried out on them:
2
3 +
-----
5
and later
2 3
3 5 +
-----
5 8
The significance of the additional columns to the left was that they were 10 times the immediate neighbour to it's right.
So, a large subtraction operated by adding 10 (in this case) to the number in the "units column", and 1 to the number at the bottom of the "tens column".
Same value (10 units / 1 ten), different number to express it.
[+10]
8 2
3 9 -
[+1]
---------
4 3
So, descriptively it operated as "2 minus 9 won't go, add 10, 12 minus 9 is 3, 1 (to 'put the 10 back') plus 3 is 4, 8 minus 4 is 4".
It's an array, with a handy sub-array, to facilitate operations that rely on the relationship of 1 and 10 and 100 (etc.) each in it's proper place.
The operation described in the Common Core examples is linear, they're "climbing a ladder, a step at a time" using addition to find the value between the two numbers. It teaches a linear operation that is more easily described in words, but is less structured in mathematical terms.
Don't blame me, it's usually 2 in the morning when I post
I can't help but notice how close this method is to how cashiers would compute how much change to give back by rounding up at each step from smaller coins to larger bills until they reach the amount given.
Maybe it's a foretelling of things to come, of the kind of jobs we expect these children to end up with.
Inbreeding doesn't help matters. Being Tea Party Republicans doesn't help either.
It is high time Americans realized they don't live in a country. They live in a fuck up.
Laughed at by almost all countries, run by a guy who would not be out of place in a Banana Republic and who spends hundreds of millions of dollars on holidays the place is being rapidly pushed down the country league table by places like Russia and China. The US is a country that cannot win internationally at sport so they invent their own dumb sports like DumbBall - it is played with the hands and the US idiots call it football. No longer able to put a man into space the space agency is now tasked with showing how clever Muslims are and proving global warming.
Despite armed to its teeth it has not won a decisive war since the Korean War. It trundles around the world in its big ships impervious to the fact that one or two hypersonic missiles would take out almost every American ship.
The inmates obsess about stupid thinks the whole time: whether gays can marry, how terrible to insult someone of a different colour and whether they should stop millions of low IQ fools invade from Mexico. No one points out the obvious. Detroit is the product of black genius and left wing politics and now, stunningly, Dearborn actually has the Muslim call to prayers ringing out five times a day across the American mid-West. Southern California is now really part of Mexico - with new Hispanics arriving daily and city officials all over the US encouraging them. In many US places now Mexican holidays and customs are now followed. And the American flag is unacceptable.
I visit often and cannot believe how dumb and uneducated Americans are. Grammar, spelling, math - they lag behind everywhere. Geography? They hardly know it exists. History? I actually spoke to some Americans that had not heard of WW II. Of course though they have heard of slavery since how bad Americans have been - well at least white ones - is the watchword in almost all schools, colleges and universities. Tertiary education no longer subscribes to freedom, but rather to coercing a standard pattern of thought.
Perhaps there is a conspiracy to make Americans illiterate (which has surely succeeded) so that dumb third worlders can migrate to the US with aunts and uncles and grannies and the whole extended family and show up the Americans as stupid. It is remarkable when stupid Indians with their crappy educational system are smarter than so-called educated Americans.
And Americans float through the day thinking they are special oblivious to the fact that they are hated from Cairo to Cape Town, from Tokyo to Teheran. An empty country doing empty things led by an empty man.
America has a poor educational system that turns out idiots that is the laughing stock of the world (attracting only peasants from around the world).
PS> Go on, mod me down. That's how Americans operate. They don't like the message - the truth - so they just change the message. They make a lot of noise. But turning away from the truth is not going to change a thing. You can educate for self regard all you want, but shit it shit.
I had the advantage of using these textbooks when they where new. Actually most of the books I had in elementary school where printed in the 40's. I have a son attending college. Last weekend he drove home to help me celebrate my sixty second birthday. He had to finish some homework for his summer calculus class while he was here. He sat at the kitchen table and spread out his materials, a graphing calculator, smart phone, laptop, and his textbook.
He never attended public schools instead we sent him to a small church based school where they used paced self study booklets. Motivated, intelligent students with involved parents have no problem leaning. Government schools are indoctrination centers where the people in charge only care about bonuses and pushing a political agenda.
My two older children are professionals with advanced degrees. The oldest teaches college English. Half of her students come in ill prepared for the work and think passing grades should just be given to them, even if they don't show up for class.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/03/07/about-that-common-core-math-problem-making-the-rounds-on-facebook/
Seems better to me. They are teaching math, subtraction for example, the way we actually do math in our heads.
Do you add ten, carry the one, etc... in your head? No, instead you look for shortcuts to round the number, and deal with the round parts first, to make it easier.
Most public schools are exclusive. You have to have a residence in the right area to attend them. Schools in the wrong areas are not exclusive enough and the few disruptive students ruin the education of the rest.
People in education in every country on the planet know what I have written but shortcuts deliver career opportunities for cronies that need to be rewarded.
It's not about a new insight. It's about ignoring an old one and having predictable poor results.
Improvement by ignorant brownian motion instead of getting help from domain experience? Please have at least some respect for the intelligence of people reading what you are writing, and please identify your attempts at humour clearly if it was at attempt at a joke.
A vouncher system? The ones that give tax rebates to the rich that already have their children in private school, but have no effect on the proportion of poor in private schools?
Remind me again how that benefits the poor.
Learn to love Alaska
Common core turns simple math complicated
I know it's heresy on here, but the dumbing down, common core is the liberalizing of our educational system. No longer strive to be better, don't stand out, Obama is working hard to destroy exceptionalism and make us another 3rd world country. Has a darn good start too.
Sure, government can fund things without providing whole services but even the education they do provide is competing with private schools; they don't outlaw those. No monopoly; which again, doesn't apply to government which is always a monopoly.
The next step people often forget to think about is what happens when you fund something with gov money. You have accountability (real or lip service) and regulations that are necessary. Most private schools would not like vouchers. When they have to treat everybody equally it will not be so great for them. Then you have the whole religion issue where they can't give money to fund religious indoctrination of children; which is one reason many people go private (in my state most the private schools under perform but the faithful have no problem believing their schools are superior... or that the lesser education is not as important than brainwashing their children into not thinking for themselves.) I've been to private school, BTW.
Charters are the current fad. They do not perform any better on average and cost a great deal more money-- this is despite their ability to chuck all the kids they don't like! You'd think they would average out better given that HUGE advantage they have over public accept-anybody school.
As far as the invisible hand of the false god; the market... that is BS. Wake up to reality. Consumers do not have much say or care much - the impact is there but it is not absolute. Look at how Americans screwed their own economy with the rise of Walmart and other corps who ruined everything - it doesn't take much indirection and the consumer will fuck themselves over eagerly. It also has the problems of a direct democracy where only a few people can be experts and nobody can keep up with all the issues going on so people couldn't run anything larger than a single person could run (and while holding another job, having a life etc.) I don't buy a huge list of things but I can't keep up with all the boycotts. Then you apply this to education where parents do not know jack shit about education and the majority doesn't even care enough to get involved like they should be doing (remember, most people have both parents working and more combined hours than in the past; the time constraints alone are a problem.)
So, that private school going to open early so the poor kids who DO NOT EAT at home can get breakfast? nah, they don't allow those people in the school. Voucher schools can add fees on top of the gov money to do away with that... unless you regulate them; then they take in the minimum amount which is likely not enough.
Educators in most states are required to take continuing education themselves. Depends on how the program is run how well that works. The private colleges cater to the teachers the best with lots of pure BS courses that let you off the hook. I know educators. I even taught a course for them which surprised some because it wasn't a BS course like they expected; they made a mistake of not going to a private college. Don't know how bright they were, you don't take a course on robotics and computers in education and think it will be a joke... Like those courses on multiculturalism where they just go around town eating ethnic food (I'm not kidding, that is a course! not at my less prestigious public university but the fancy private college down the street.)
As far as latest education research-- teachers are the worst at learning new things! They are extremely set in their ways. I think it has to be a result of conditioning; they spend decades doing similar things that work well enough for them so it should naturally be hard to get them to change. Even if your great new thing works well, it may not work well for the individual teacher or the subject matter or the demographics. Sure, fire them and get a new sucker who is into the new fads and you might not end up any better for years while they get broken into the job. Although they can have advantages, educational fads do come and go. Some have bad
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No, they don't know. Nobody knows how to improve education. People have tried a lot of things with no clear path to success. What you state is unfounded ideology, not knowledge.
Yes, improvement by "Brownian motion", combined with selection: that's the bedrock of modern biology (Darwin) and modern economics (Adam Smith).
I do. I assume that people who claim to understand Darwin also understand Smith because they are talking about pretty much the same thing: how mutation and selection lead to gradual improvement. Only people who for ideological reasons are wedded to intelligent design deny either theory.
Aluminium is wrong, though. The person who discovered Aluminum spelled it "aluminum".
My daughter is wrapping up second grade. A few months ago, my wife and I had a conference with my daughter's teacher. She was concerned because my daughter wasn't completing her timed tests, and it might impact her annual testing. However, the teacher then commented on how my daughter was the only one in her class to get each answer correct. It's a real shame that we continually place value on completion over accuracy. As an employer, I'd take the employee who took their time, but had accurate work.