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Bill Gates: U.S. Education Harder to Improve Than Infant Mortality Rates (xconomy.com)
gthuang88 writes:
In a Q&A with Harvard students, Bill Gates said his foundation's work on K-12 education in the U.S. has had little impact, at least compared to its success in reducing infant mortality in developing countries. The challenge with education, he said, is that it is "essentially a social construct" that depends on creating the right culture of accountability and interactions -- and funding, of course. Gates said if he had a magic wand for the U.S., he would fix education, and for the rest of the world, nutrition.
He also said if he were a college student now, he would study artificial intelligence -- and that he was jealous that someone in the room could solve the problem of creating an AI that can read a book and pass an AP exam.
Gates predicted this generation of graduates will "solve" cancer, as well as the pesky problem of infectious diseases.
And even though his foundation's 20-year effort has failed to improve educaion -- "we'll keep going."
He also said if he were a college student now, he would study artificial intelligence -- and that he was jealous that someone in the room could solve the problem of creating an AI that can read a book and pass an AP exam.
Gates predicted this generation of graduates will "solve" cancer, as well as the pesky problem of infectious diseases.
And even though his foundation's 20-year effort has failed to improve educaion -- "we'll keep going."
He's trying to fix problems 30 years in the making to destroy US Education. Lots of up hill battle and nimbyism fueled ideology.
IIRC the Netherlands did it but I might be getting my countries wrong. You mandate equal funding for all schools, public and private. Then the rich are forced to properly fund education. Next make public Uni & vocational schools tuition-free. Lastly do a few social programs so kids aren't getting beaten up (literally and figuratively) at home when the economy sucks. Problem solved.
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Somewhere in all that, parent participation is left out. Parents are the key to a successful education program. That's why some cultures do better than others.
No, the challenge is that it's much harder to define an objective methodology for measuring the success of education than it is for measuring an infant mortality rate.
The education system is fixated on teaching all students the same curriculum. That will never work; any teacher will tell you that a small percentage of the students are really fast learners, some will get by, and some are just plain dumb. Teachers refer to students among themselves as Track 1, Track 2, and Track 3.
The way to fix education is to pour as much resource as you have into teaching the Track 1 kids, because they'll get the most out of it. Quit forcing the rest of the class to put up with Track 3 students who are disruptive or slow. The idea of paying the most attention to the best students is an anathema to liberal/progressive thinkers who believe everyone is equal and should be given an equal chance.
Because everyone has different ideas about what a modern society should be.
It's not hard to see that the problem with U.S. education is that it's a vast pool of political patronage. If you are spending 20k+/year on a student it's hard to imagine how they can't get a reasonable education unless the system is being robbed every step of the way.
Seems Gates is just now learning this one.
K-12 Education has so many variables, not least of which is the state of a developing mind. I get sick of listening to "advice" from parents of kids who sleep through the night from day one, or have a great circle of friends all through their school life, who are un-fazed by deadlines or allergens or self image issues or any of the legion things that can trouble a kid even if they have attentive supportive parents and are in good health. K-12 is a social maelstrom and some of those issues are not eligible to be "fixed"
However if Gates and his foundation can create a more level playing field that would be great - the schools up the hill have better student:teacher ratios etc.
And if he could do something about the condescending parents of the "perfect" kids that would be a bonus - maybe a gulag
Nullius in verba
As a parent of one of your "masses" I have to agree with the OP. Common core is just fucking awful. My kids suffered through that bullshit just because some bright boy thought it was "improving" education. Here's a hint:. It's not. Whole language was not an improvement. Singapore math was not an improvement. Just fucking teach the class without a stupid assed gimmick that changes every couple years.
I logged onto yahoo yesterday when I'd heard about N Korea and it was buried under a bunch of celebrities that I'd never heard of doing something that I did not care about. I grew up in a poorer area of town and all of my Asian friends did well (very well in fact) in school, everyone else was a mixed bag, but tended to be on the lower side of educational attainment.
Because everyone has different ideas about what a modern society should be.
Apparently they do because different countries have vastly different social policies regarding even basic elements of society like education, crime, and healthcare.
Polio vaccine for millions of children saved many, many lives. At least give him credit for that.
As a parent of one of your "masses" I have to agree with the OP. Common core is just fucking awful. My kids suffered through that bullshit just because some bright boy thought it was "improving" education. Here's a hint:. It's not. Whole language was not an improvement. Singapore math was not an improvement. Just fucking teach the class without a stupid assed gimmick that changes every couple years.
Common core isn't awful.
The state and federally imposed testing regime is awful.
The common core curriculum is just a base list of stuff you should be learning. Try to separate that from all the strawman bollocks that web sites bring up, using badly written textbooks.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Now that those who rebelled against education can get encouragement from others over social media, they don't want their kids to get too educated. They fear that they will have less influence over their kids than conniving, and plotting brain washers/educators. And they vote accordingly.
So you're saying that introducing faux-"free market" fappery is the right solution to this, just like "uncle milty" thinks it's a good idea for bloody everything, even if he had to force-feed it to the population by kicking the system when it's down? Because privatisation works so well for everything, always, ever now and forever? Been in a US hospital lately, or tried to pay for medical insurance?
Some things just don't privatise well, and you shouldn't even try.
Which is not to say that the US schooling landscape can't be improved. Pretty sure it can, but not with "vouchers" -- it's been tried in the wake of Katrina and go look how well that worked out. Nor do I think that notorious huckster and faux-"philantropist" (and convicted criminal, for racketeering) billy g. is the right man to fix this, or any problem. Like any very public rich hombre very publicly in the "philantropy" racket, he is really in it for himself, so you get results about the same as you get from MCSE-certificate mills: The right answer is the one that brings him the most money. Actual understanding entirely optional and not really welcome at that.
It will never happen by anyone who lives in a country like the US. Besides the decline in education, the mindset is wrong.
Capitalism ensures that an ongoing treatment of a disease is far more profitable than curing one.
As a result, the Nobel for curing something like Cancer will never have an American name attached to it.
It seems after getting rich on screwing the whole world with an overpriced bad OS and office package, he finally cares about doing at least something good. The US education system is beyond fixing though, it does serve primarily as a mechanism to teach conformity and already pre-select the next prison generation. It is not about qualifying anybody to be a responsible, capable, insightful person. Why do you think the US has to import so many academics? US citizens are not more stupid or more intelligent than other people, but they are almost universally really badly educated.
On his predictions, I think he is right on cancer, but infectious diseases are a moving target and may actually get mostly unsolved (for those that still respond to antibiotics) in the near future. I would really like to be wrong on that though.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Get rid of loans / cap payback based on imcome with an max time say 10-20 years.
IQ is mostly (80% by adulthood) genetic and is not significantly influenced by education[1].
Expecting education to make someone more intelligent is the same as expecting them to become taller by joining a basketball team.
Immigration and reproduction in the US are dysgenic for IQ: https://iq-research.info/en/average-iq-by-country
These are "hate facts" because you don't have the emotional maturity to deal with them.
[1]https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=iq+genetics&btnG=
And yet, every top 10 education country in the world has a significant testing regime. Using Germany as an example, know what's different from the US? In Germany, the scores matter in a big way from an early age, and they steer the non-book-learners to a trade skills path by 8th grade.
It's going to be way easier to improve something from "crappy" to "not-so-crappy" as compared to improving something from "all right" to "good."
At the top end you are right. But defining success in basic education is easy: can they so simple maths, communicate simple ideas effectively, understand simple concepts.
There are global standards and yearly reports on this stuff.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
U.S.public spending on education is already the second-highest of any OECD country. The problem isn't funding. The problem is most of the increase in education funding over the last 50 years has gone to ballooning non-teaching administrative staff.
It's the administrators who control the school budget. Any time education funding is increased, they sop it up by raising their own pay and benefits and hiring more administrators, while passing a token amount down to teachers. Every time education funding is cut, they send it straight to the teachers, so they'll generate news stories about how they had to buy paper and pencils for their students out of their own wallet, to pressure legislators into increasing education funding even more. I even crunched some numbers from the Dept. of Education website a few years ago, and dividing the salary + benefits by the number of teachers yielded an overall average pay for teachers over $100,000/yr. There's no way that's possible. What probably happened is administrators shifted some of their pay and benefits into the teacher category, to try to hide how much of the school budget they were sopping up.
The problem isn't funding, it's how the funds are spent.
[I'm Canadian] When I was in university we held a protest asking for more funding for universities. We had 3 politicians come to speak to us. The first two were very sympathetic and said that funding for university was a priority for their parties and if elected they would spend enough to keep tuition the same or lower. The third politician was the former head of my university's student council and a member of the ruling federal party. The protest was in one of the engineering lecture halls where he had been a student years before. He very directly and truthfully explained that we were the most privileged sector of the Canadian population and that for those of us taking degrees that would lead to well paying jobs the cost of tuition could be higher almost all of us would still pay. He then called us selfish and self-entitled and that if he had extra money in the budget to spend there were lots of other groups where the money would make a bigger difference.
The room was silent, the protests ended. I think everyone felt like they were 10 years old and had just been caught doing something wrong.
The major reason we fail when it comes to education is that we keep trying a one size fits all. This is ridiculous.
We actually do a pretty good job of teaching certain gifted students. We offer lots of gifted classes.
But we fail the poor, the homeless, and the less gifted.
I was horrified by the tale of Kalief Browder. Arrested, held at Rikers for 3 years without trial, he commits suicide. This was a 16 year old kid accused of stealing a bicycle and the disgusting, vile, evil prosecutor asked for bail. As part of an attempt to blackmail the kid into pleading guilty for a crime that should have gotten 1 year in jail, he spent 3 years.
But forget about the prosecutor's vile behavior - WHY WASN'T HE EDUCATED WHILE IN JAIL? This was a 16 year old, not convicted of any crime, he is legally entitled to an education and we did not give him one.
If he was convicted and sent to juvy, at least he would have gotten computer based training (ineffective as that is). But because he was in jail awaiting trial, they illegally failed to provide him with the education he was entitled to.
We need to do a better job educating the poor, homeless, and, most importantly the criminals. They need the education the most and we give them the least.
Fine, you don't want to give them a live teacher in jail, at least give them a video conference teacher, NOT just software. Software is simply NOT equivalent to a real education, anymore than giving someone a book is the same as attending a lecture.
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well you just moved something to measure, but we still can't define it. Guy living in a cardboard box under the highway, collecting money from a cardboard sign could still be considered fully functioning to some. As could the mcdonnalds employees.
Your assertion that "the very wealthy do not want their money going to educate the masses" is proven by the fact that Gates pushed for Common Core.
When my son came home one night with a sheet of math problems and the only instructions were he was supposed to GUESS what the answer was, I knew the Common Core was bullshit. I asked him if they were doing estimations or approximations but he had no idea what that was. Another time he brought home word problems and asked me to help on a question. The problem boiled down to a system of three equations and three unknowns. I asked him if they had covered multiple equations, but of course he hadn't. He wasn't yet in algebra.
I made an appointment with his teacher and she admitted the curricula was total shit. I asked him how he was supposed to solve the problem and she she said by using a number line. What the hell??? I couldn't believe it. She agreed with me that it was a terrible way to teach math.
So to the anonymous prick who thinks the anti Common Core people are against education. You can suck my balls.
Just how much bullshit much people ram down a child's throat? By law, at least 12 years of bullshit.
Your comment says a lot more about you than it says about reality. From deep in the trenches of cancer research I have to say that I suspect your tinfoil hat is too tight.
...because he's an IT billionaire, we're supposed to unquestioningly accept him as an authority in education? Corporations and schools are organisations that are about as different from each other as you can get. Corporate know-how will get you into deep trouble in education.
There's a long history of education reform and enhancement programmes that have failed. He could've asked about those and why they failed before trying to reinvent the wheel and do it all over again. He could've consulted with the latest research in the learning sciences and education to find out what interventions have been consistently successful.
Finally, Gates could've looked into how the US education system is actually one of the best in the world and that, if you control for poverty, performs as well as any of the other top countries. The problem is that education is uneven and variable mostly due to poverty, poor investment (e.g. spending billions on ICT infrastructure, classroom gadgets, and ubiquitous and inappropriate computer graded tests), and degrading and vilifying the teaching profession (ever since the Reagan era "Nation at Risk" report). Kids in middle-class neighbourhoods get great education, those in poorer ones get terrible education. When you consider that 40% of Americans live in poverty and the USA has the highest rates of child poverty in the developed world, it's not surprising that the overall performance of the US education system gets dragged down.
There's little room for improvement in middle-class schools. They're doing fine. If you want to push up national performance in education, it's more effective to target those living in poverty, because they have the most dramatic gains to be made. But that would mean helping poor people which isn't really a thing in US politics. They'd rather let poor people starve and fend for themselves (boot-straps mentality) and see their economy decline because of it: When people aren't earning good wages, they aren't spending it back into the economy or paying taxes to pay for things like healthcare and education.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Did she admit that "curricula" is plural and should go with a verb in the appropriate number?
Why is it that any story about education attracts so many people who've never had any?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Top problems with US education
1. Uninvolved/unhelpful parents
2. Teachers unions
3. Lack of funding
So to the anonymous prick who thinks the anti Common Core people are against education. You can suck my balls.
...says the AC troll...
I don't respond to AC's.
Accountability. That's the central problem. My mom is a teacher and she brings in horror stories of parents refusing to accept that their kids are anything less than perfect.
Seriously my generation seems to be fucking awful parents.
Just spent a long time looking for "insightful" thoughts on Slashdot. Today I started with the key words like "divide", "conquer", "property", "elite", and some related terms whose relevance I'll clarify in a moment. Then I went for "funny" in the hopes of finding some disguised insights. Then I went for "insightful", where this brief note by JoeyRox was probably the best of the slim pickings. All in all it felt like a colossal waste of time. Pretty sad.
The fundamental problem with education in America is that public education was deliberately destroyed using a divide and conquer strategy. There are a few residual good schools for the elite or lucky students, but most of the public schools have been converted into obedience schools that you wouldn't send your dog to. Other students were allowed to or even encouraged to "escape" to private schools or home schooling. Sad again.
Why? I used to think that it was mostly to appeal to religious nuts who wanted to insure their own kids were as ignorant as they were, and that has some relevance in terms of capturing their votes. However now I'm convinced the money was much more important. Public education was mostly funded by property taxes, but if you defund and destroy the public schools, it turns out you are eliminating the need for property taxes, which can then be cut more easily. Who benefits? Mostly the large real estate speculators (such as Trump imagines himself to be). More sadness.
Now about those testing standards. Complicated topic. You might start with Head in the Cloud by William Poundstone, even though he's mostly looking in the wrong direction by defending trivia. There really are domains of expertise, but what matters is how you use that expertise to solve problems. You don't need to know all the trivia, but you do need to understand the shape and size of the multidimensional problem space, and sampling your trivia is one way to assess your coverage. Unfortunately, the big problem with that approach that probably negates it is the prior assumption that there is one answer. Any important question is not answered so simply. Yeah, that's sad, too.
Bill Gates of the rose colored glasses? Lottery winners tend to see things that way. Too much sadness.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
"Science" like you can turn Men into Women and there are dozens of genders?
Fucking moron.
Gates said if he had a magic wand for the U.S., he would fix education, and for the rest of the world, nutrition.
Well,while there, Gates could also tackle US nutrition problem. It is not the same as developing countries, but it is still the elephant in the room.
Common core isn't awful.
Yes, it is awful. Parents know this, if they pay attention and care.
But much like communism, apparently it's magically always being done wrong. That should tell you something.
This is a really obvious comparison. Diseases can be treated and cured because the disease doesn't organize, vote, and get legal representation. Meanwhile, improving education requires one group of people convincing another group of people that they are the problem.
"Liberals/progressives don't think everyone is equal"
"To put it simply: Liberals have a heart. Conservatives do not."
They apparently know that those who aren't are all heartless wretches.
This is all more of: Good people like me as opposed to the bad people who disagree with me.
Don't feel lonely. The religious right does it too with Godly people like them as opposed to the Godless ones who will be sent to hell.
It's almost like IQ puts a hard limit on what a person can conceive of and process, who'd-a-thunk-it.
>?When my son came home one night with a sheet of math problems and the only instructions were he was supposed to GUESS what the answer was,
That's the crappy textbook, not the curriculum.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
>Yes, it is awful. Parents know this, if they pay attention and care.
And yet people with vast experience in education and education research know better. Most countries have a standard base curriculum. The trend towards over testing, which was led by the US has led to teaching to the test and bad textbooks and dumbing down. Those things are not the curriculum. A curriculum is just a list of topics that should be learned.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
No, Common Core WAS a consensus standard on what should be taught and best practices for teaching it. Now, however, it is inextricably part of the testing regime. The testing can not be fixed without eliminating common core.
Yes it can. Just stop testing children every five minutes.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Sweden doesn't have our problems with education, They rate teachers very highly and pay them to think and teach.
But it isn't cheap or politically easy.
You need trilingualism starting age 3.
You need many streams and the capacity to not just switch but utilize those to catch up.
You need high quality school lunches and a total ban on junk food.
You need the absolute fewest possible number of tests, no homework (since parents cheat) and proper mediation between teaching and practice. Exams should be at least to the much higher British standard, using floating grades (arithmetic mean score is a C).
You need no fixed reward systems, since kids become addicted to rewards rather than seeking out good work.
Age obsession is unhealthy. If a 13 year old qualifies for university, they need to be in university. 1% of all kids should be at this standard, which means you've enough young students to build a university.
Religion should be banned outside of religious education and history, and restricted to theory not dogma. This includes private and religious schools.
Nationalism should also be banned. No swearing allegiance, no flags in classroom outside of books, nothing from nationalistic perspectives, no filtering. Multiculturalism should be mandatory.
That would fix the problems in American schools.
The problem with Gates is he assumes Clippy and Word are enough.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What people here call Marxism is things like universal health care and a welfare state. When you point to those countries that are very successful despite such "Marxism" you get "but but Venezuela"
It is awful. Saxon math is the best. They tried for years to quash it and finally they did by buying it out. If you want to learn math, find some of the pre 1992 Saxon books.
There is a movement to kill America. Teachers union have changed teachers into educators for the left. Keep 'em stupid. Then they lack the ability to know what they're being told is bullshit.
I thought that testing was performed to help the teacher evaluate how her own teaching was being understood. In our school we have a few teacher assistants. The teacher points out students who need extra help and the assistant works with the student to deconfuse the subject.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Since the creation of the Department of Education in October 17, 1979 (Gee thanks Jimmy Carter), the United States has fallen from 2nd in the World for education to now 17th!
If it ain't broke why did we fix it?
Faith: Belief in Truth. Superstition: Belief in Falsehood.
which is why places like Oklahoma are on a 4 day school week. In America we use property taxes to fund individual school districts. We do this so the well to do and wealthy don't have to pay for poor kids to go to school.
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Don't look at China, Japan and India. They have high marks in math and science because it's a cutthroat world over there. It's like the Charter Schools in America. If you're grades drop you get kicked out of school. One of the things folks like to ignore when they point out that test scores in America have been dropping is that we're no longer kicking kids to the curb when they can't hack it.
Think of it this way: No Shit a pro sports team can beat amateurs. All the amateurs who tried out got kicked off the team before they even made it. Now that's fine for sports. I don't think it's so fine for education. I _want_ a well educated country. A well educated people are less likely to support fascism.
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All of Microsoft and he can figure out the simplest and easiest way to fix education.
1. The worst form of teaching is lecture.
2. The #1 most used for of teaching is lecture.
What really happens: Teach drones on. Kids hear the first five minutes (if they last that long) and then daydream the rest of the time.
With all the power of Microsoft, he can't engage kids in learning that is actually engaging?
Remove lectures. Teachers should teach, they should organize and project plan existing content.
Letter Factory does a better job teaching my young preschool kids than school teachers do. Go LeapFrog. My kids know their letters because they weren't lectured their letters, they watched a fun (at least fun for the kids) video that teaches them their letters. There are two senses involved: Visual and Audio, plus there is a tune, and some humor, like those old E guys saying, "Ehhh."
Want to teach a kid Math, show them some videos that explains and shows:
1. Who uses this math.
2. How they use it.
3. Visuals of math concepts.
Want to teach them history. Instead of paying a million teachers to drone on about history boringly, pay Hollywood filmmakers to make an educational movie with blockbuster budget. Need to know about George Washington? Watch his movie. Need to know about Egypt, there is a movie for each Pharaoh. Such educational films must be created in an engaging way.
Another way to engage kids that is effective is with games. Why are we wasting time lecturing kids, the least effective form of learning, when they will spend hours playing a game that could teach them the same thing. Video games have one up on movies as they engage three sense, sight, sound, and touch. Touch is powerful. Doing usually is orders of magnitude more effective than only listening.
"IT and teaching are not meant to be mixed... computers make people stop thinking while school should make them think more." I'm not sure about that.
Teaching--any teaching, I'll claim--can be done in different ways. Years ago I taught linguistics in one of the best colleges in a certain third world country. The students were paying a lot to be there (college students who couldn't pay could attend one of the national colleges/ universities), and they'd probably done well in high school. But as in many countries, they had been taught facts, not thinking on their own. So one of my first assignments was to explain why one of the analyses in the linguistics text book was wrong. That the textbook could be wrong was an astonishing idea to them. (Not to me, I'd grown up in the 60s.) I'd like to think that that assignment helped teach them to think, not just regurgitate facts.
What I did with linguistics could, I believe, be done in computing or indeed in any other domain. Teach them programming--the programming language doesn't matter, you could use WordBasic or Excel (don't quote me on the latter, though, my knowledge of Excel--and for that matter of WordBasic--is pretty meager). If you assign a problem to a class with 30 students, there will probably be 25 different programs (allowing for a few students who copy someone else's work, or don't bother to do it). Chose 3 or 4 of these solutions, put them up on the screen or print them out, and discuss which ones are better--and why. There, you're teaching them how to think. It's in a particular domain, and I can't guarantee it will generalize to other domains, but you can--should, IMO--do similar things in all the classes: make the students reason about things, not just learn facts.
Disclaimer: I haven't taught since 1981, so I don't have any experience with today's students, so I could be blowing smoke. But then my suspicion is that people today aren't different in what they *could* learn than people in Plato's Academy.
Your comment on memorization reminds me of my experience in chemistry (my minor) in college. This was in the late 60s - early 70s, but I suspect chemistry is similar now. For inorganic, quantitative, and organic chem, I realized that there were a relatively small number of facts that I needed to learn, and nearly everything else could be seen as following from those facts. So I learned those facts, reasoned through everything else, and got high As in all those courses.
Then came biochem. Afaict, God could have made the synthesis of citric acid work in any of a thousand different ways. He didn't; it only works in one way, the Krebs Cycle, used by all aerobic organisms capable of synthesizing it. It therefore has to be memorized, if you want to pass biochem. I did pass biochem, but barely, because of the Krebs Cycle and a lot of other processes that I tried to memorized, since they couldn't be reasoned out. (These facts are where your reference manuals make the most sense! And of course reference manuals are necessary for inorganic and organic chem, when you need to work things out numerically. Don't get me started on my CRC Handbook...)
BTW, I looked up the Krebs Cycle just now (in a reference!), and it apparently is not as random as I thought; it's in fact the most efficient way to synthesize citric acid, with minor variation across aerobic organisms. But my point remains true, I think, from the standpoint of the learner; unlike learning, say, the properties that distinguish hexane from pentane, it's not obvious to the human why it has to work this way. God, of course, has a different viewpoint, and I'm sure He can reason it out.
"Common core math looks awesome. Teaches concepts instead of bullshit rote memorization of crap."
Tell ya what. Watch a couple of Youtoob videos of people doing pushups and exersizes, and then get into the ring with Mike Tyson. Think 'Concepts' will help you much the first time you get punch in the mowf?
You need to work that muscle that is the brain or you will be a slug. I really did not care for working all 80 questions at the end of each chapter or Integral Calculus, but I was a better man for it.
My personal opinion is that spelling is a problem we have brought on ourselves. If English had a simpler spelling system, we could cut spelling out of the curriculum after the first year, and use the time we'd save for more important things. Or if we refuse to reform the spelling system (and I have no expectation that we will, given that we haven't succeeded in going metric), then let the computer handle it. These days, the computer can not only flag English words that aren't in the dictionary (including inflected forms that wouldn't be in a dictionary anyway), and suggest a correction that is usually correct, it can also usually flag and correct homophones like their/ they're/ there. There's of course a long tail of things it won't get, mostly personal and place names, but it's getting better with those, too. And there's no argument that you have to understand the reason words are spelled the way they are (unlike with math, where one can argue--rightly or wrongly--that you ought to know *why* the calculator comes up with the numbers it does).
I have a ten year old daughter that has just completed eighth grade math online through an accredited provider while she sat in her fourth grade classroom. When we saw she had an easy time learning arithmatic concepts, we started her on Kahn Academy learning and I took a look at the Common Core standards which were published on my states Department of Education pages. Kahn tracks well with the standards. She has been introduced to basic statistics, column and row arrays, and dozens of tricks to estimate values and reality check her estimates. The online class demanded many pencil miles, but I stopped making her do every problem because I believe much grade school and middle school math is designed to make children hate math as much as their parents. When the commenter above expressed outrage that 3x5 is five sets of three not three sets of five, he was imprinting a basic disrespect for the precision of order of operations. Yah, I know it doesn't matter in that problem, but the habit of thinking that way will serve in good stead not only when his son encounters linear algebra, but also when he is trying to understand legal documents or engage in basic communication with someone of the opposite gender. Our challenge is finding teachers for elementary or middle school who understand where all this is going, as almost none of them have see linear algebra or approximations or other useful algebras. For what it's worth, I believe many folks are uncomfortable with math because they are uncomfortable with a language in which one may not lie and get away with it for long.
Just fucking teach the class without a stupid assed gimmick that changes every couple years.
My wife is a teacher (not in US) of 20 years and that is her main complaint. Some know-it-all at the Dept thinks they have a new way of doing things so forces change across the whole system. Then a few election cycles later the latest know-it-all changes it all over again.
Watch the segment on Michael Moore's 'Where to Invade Next' on Finland. It pretty much sums up the problems with our schools.
As someone who's seen a bunch of common core and also is fairly adept at the math they're trying to teach i will say this.
In theory, it's a good idea. They're trying to teach all the math tricks and functional process to quickly and easily do math problems. Really. Unfortunately they're failing at it AND they're teaching that INSTEAD OF 'normal' math.
Once I figured out wtf they were doing, i realized most of it very directly aligns with my own mental tricks for doing math. But that's after a decade+ of schooling to learn how to do it and what it all meant and THEN developing the tricks for that. Instead they're teaching these shortcuts before kids even understand the basics of what they're doing and have that down pat. That's the problem. They tried to shortcut education to fit more in...sorry not going to happen.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/m...
And where would we be in medical progress if the US was following the world's example?
My wife has them all on the bookshelves. All the publishers, all the versions. This arises from her PhD, postgrad education research and prior job as a teacher.
The Saxon stuff is not great. It suffers from being procedural and a "remember this formula" style. For example, the trig section in the pre-algebra textbook doesn't have a picture of a triangle in a circle until the last page of the trig section. It's all just formulas to remember, without reasoning. That's ludicrous. I'm at work so I can't check the dates, but the one I'm thinking of was the oldest, so early 90s probably.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Turns out I don't have it either. I sucked down a whole lot of those lessons thinking they were pdfs of early 1980s books, never looked at the title pages. They're all from 2008. I never looked at the pre-algebra stuff back in the day. I did see the primary stuff. Everyone I know that used those books in my neighborhood went on to do very well with math. One family had them. This was in the 1970s and I haven't seen any of those books since. Now I'll have to see if I can round some up someplace.
Formulas are an awful lot of the grade school math, don't you think? You mentioned trig and I can just say "oscar has a heap of apples". Sin, Cos, Tan. I heard that one time and I've never forgot it. Heard Bad Boys Rape Our Young Girls But Violet Goes Willingly...heh. College electronics course for colors.
Whatever works. My problem with my Son was keeping him interested in it. He was a lot more interested in video games. His career and knowledge has suffered because of that. Now I have another chance with my Grandsons. That's why I downloaded what I thought was that whole course. Have to look... maybe it's useful.
I hear CC is more like peasant math.
My UK textbooks were OK. But not great.
What was great was my UK A-level mathematics teacher who was previously an electrical engineer and so understood well the conceptual underpinnings and the importance of understanding those first so the details and formulas came easy. Calculus was a fun class. I enjoyed it muchly.
I'm currently completing what I hope will turn out be a university textbook and learning to structure the information so that learning is a downhill stroll, not and uphill struggle has taken a lot of work and forethought. I may or may not succeed.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I know of a man that would probably help you. He taught me calculus back in the 1980s. He wrote the book on Calculus along with another Prof in 1982. Much to my surprise, he's still around. Hell of a nice guy. Professor Gulick. His book I found to be well written. I think I still have his book and answer key around here someplace. Looks like he probably doesn't teach anymore. He has a secondary education mathematics scholarship that the University awards. The scholarship aims to support promising students in their pursuit of teaching mathematics in secondary school. Sounding like someone that would help? I think so. Worth a try if you want. I remember he was no nonsense with students. Very no nonsense. If someone pulled a fire alarm on a test day, we'd have the test in the parking lot. Even if it was raining. Not hard, we were getting wet though. He told us, this is the test day and we will have our test that day. We always did. He had office hours and you could actually talk to him, which was unusual. Most profs we had to talk to a TA, usually foreign born and hard to understand. Good luck and I hope you write a great book.
http://www.math.umd.edu/~dguli...
I don't need teaching mathematics. I'm a 49 year old principle engineer. I'm referring back to when I was at school.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
You're almost as old as I am. LOL. Your last sentence made me think you were writing a University text. I thought Gulick might have some constructive advice.
The book is probably most usable by engineers working on crypto problems, or university teaching. I work with university profs quite a lot.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
You have your work cut out for you. Teaching people cryptography to the point that they understand it is really tough. You'll probably laugh, I used to teach blowfish, des, 3des... things like that about 20 years ago or so. I've been out of that for years. NSA taught me back in the 1980s. Sometimes I still dump communications to see if things really are encrypted between hosts. Sometimes I find that they are not.
Sounds like you're well on your way.
The book is purely on the subject of random numbers and random number generation.
Such a book has not been published yet. At least a readable one hasn't, as far as I can tell.
https://www.degruyter.com/view...
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.