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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.'"
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
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.
I tried to explain the income distribution to a community college student and she had no clue what the hell I was talking about. The one percent can sleep easy knowing fewer and fewer kids even know what a percent is!
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.
Well...I'm afraid that's just wrong (and a very US-centric way of looking at the world).
The "classic" 7 continents model (and the less-common-in-the-anglosphere models with fewer than 7 continents) doesn't include Central America, which can be part of the confusion, but Central America is pretty well accepted to mean all the mainland between Mexico and Colombia. The 7 continents model generally splits North and South America at Panama (either in the country or on one of its borders), thus most or all of Central America is actually the southern tip of North America, with possibly a little bit being the northern tip of South America.
There is basically no disagreement that the US is part of North America. Or even Mexico.
Central America is definitely not a synonym for America. America is a synonym for the US*, and it is also also a term for the combination of North and South America, but not at the same time.
* in English; this is somewhat disputed in part on the basis that it's confusing, in part on the basis that some consider it an insulting synecdoche that erases most of the continent, and in part because nerds like to deconstruct words and figure out what they "should" mean etymologically rather than what they do mean; but it's hard to dispute that it's used as a synonym and that it has historical precedent.
I've had a few good teachers, and am married to one in the 9-12, so I'm going to be a chicken and post anonymously. A few responses to your post:
1. Regarding your union comment, while I don't know the veracity facts you are stating: Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
2. A certain percentage are a big fan of the teachers union, but by and large it's as big of a hinderance as the bloated administration. They are thought of as the same thing by those involved, it's all the administration really.
3. Every time I talk to a teacher admire, they tell me a variant of the same thing: I need decent parents. Not money, equipment, computers, etc: just decent parents involved with their kids.
I'm pretty sure the article could be interpreted to as more evidence to support #3, especially when you consider how wealthy kids here were doing worse than other places: the parents are not involved. This is a serious problem, and isn't entirely about socio-economics (eg, mom working 2 jobs so can't help a kid with homework might be an example) and a lot of it to do with culture that has taken hold in some of the groups that are struggling the hardest in the scores.
I'm not sure it's solvable without solving some of the behaviors and attitudes that have developed: and things like railing on the tests is often just having to avoid talking about that which perpetuates things.
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!
That subtraction example has been going around to "prove" that common core is hard/stupid, but it is very disingenuous. Of course for that particular case it is easy to do the "grade school" subtraction. However, when you get to more complicated numbers it becomes very non-intuitive. You can teach kids to do the "borrowing" from the next column, and they will be able to do it, but they won't understand why they are doing it, which is a bad precedent to set.
I guarantee you that everyone who works with math on a daily basis already does subtraction the "common core" way in their head. In fact, tellers have been doing it for decades! If you give someone $20 for $8 worth of goods, they say "nine, ten, and twenty" when handing you your change. It is the exact same thing. Additionally, doing it that way sneakily introduces you to some concepts of algebra. It also adapts better to other domains where "subtracting" doesn't really make sense, but "finding the difference" does i.e. euclidean space.
For your division example, I am sure that is not the end of the unit. That is a great way to understand the concept of division, you can't argue with that. Of course you need to know the shortcut way to do it, but if you learn just that then you won't really be learning division, you will just be learning an algorithm which gives you the answer. Can you not see how this way is better? Just because you did it a certain way when you were in school doesn't mean it is one way, or even the right way, to learn it.
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.
I completely disagree with this. It is way more important to break stuff up first, that way when you get to the quick and simple method, you know what is going on underneath. I have a 2nd grader who's been doing common core now for a couple years and I'm seeing this stuff every day.
First, they are showing how these numbers break down. They are getting these minds to break things apart into their parts. They can see what makes up these numbers. They are showing them the tricks you can do to shift numbers around, and pull things apart. They are getting their minds a deeper view of numbers.
They did the same thing with language. They treated spelling a lot like math. Their spelling words were mostly NOT memorized. They applied rules to words. Some of these rules got complicated, but it was a formula to break words apart and apply rules. Think about it, how dumb is it to just memorize every word in English, when 80% are rule driven... just memorize the last 20%. Their spelling tests had a section on the 20% that could only be memorized.
I'm surprised every day that slashdotters don't praise common core. I'm guessing it is because they see a single example and aren't seeing the big picture that us parents see. They are driving these little minds to logic!