More specifically: U.S. elementary-school teachers are the weakest at math, and the most hateful about math, of our entire college-going population. This suggests that we really need math-specialist elementary teachers like every other modernized country.
I agree with everything you wrote there, except for the claim "the problem is the focus on grades".
Thought experiment: Let's remove grades and just replace it with an honest pass/fail system about whether you've mastered the skills or not. Now the education majors are all flat-out failing all their math courses. And now they're surely even more upset, right? The problem is not really the grades per se, it's that the math/science courses are where there's an unavoidable demonstration that U.S. education majors are perennially the dumbest people going to college. And those people are then the ones in charge of teaching broken math to our elementary-school students, in a repetitive cycle. If anything, the grades (polite C's and D's to the weak students) are serving to mask how completely broken at math the education majors are; the fact that those same students are so confused as to think it's a GPA-number issue is just a Dunning-Kruger type effect.
No, CUNY administration right now actually wants to get rid of even the most basic elementary algebra -- and even arithmetic! Check out the bottom of this page here for CUNY's current "List of Learning Objectives" required for all students: exponents, radicals, scientific notation, variables.... This is what they want to get rid of. Because only about 50% of open-admissions graduates from NYC high schools can pass a test on those subjects. See the sample tests on that page for the specific questions currently tested.
Hacker is a professor emeritus from CUNY in Political Science. He has a new book coming out right now, his second on the subject. He personally gets a lot of publicity for the "Man Bites Dog" headlines that can be written about the professor-who's-against math. (Also, he's a regular book reviewer for the New York Times, who usually start off his PR tours by publishing an op-ed from him.) On the other hand, CUNY administrators have plans to get rid of even the most basic math requirements (7th-grade level) for any of their degrees, so as to boost retention/graduation rates in the face of a tidal wave of unqualified open-admissions students from NYC high schools. Hacker gives them political cover for that project by writing stuff like this. Journalists don't know any better... heck, the writer of the Slate article actually thinks that pi is 3.14!
Remember: "Priming studies" (like here: being reminded of prior winning makes you more like to cheat) are notorious for showing anything under the sun and then failing to be reproducible later.
Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman called priming studies the "poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research":
In the Many Labs Replication Project, the two "priming studies" landed at the very bottom, showing no evidence of any real effect in the replication trials:
Looking at the graph in the article, there's on obvious inflection point that occurs on 7-Apr. Prior to that, the two lines (opened and closed items) are basically tracking each other. After that point, the opened items (red) retains the same slope; but the closed items (green) switches to a different, shallower (but thereafter basically constant) slope. And thus the two curves veer away from each other from that point.
So: What happened on 7-Apr? Did one or more developers quit, burnout, take a long vacation? Maybe they haven't been replaced yet?
After that I'd try real hard to stop new features from coming in, and start thumbing through a Brooks book to look for suggestions in an emergency like this.
Wisconsin is a blistering disaster of an example. The worst thing about education in this country is that classroom management has been taken out of the hands of the people in the classrooms, organized in their professional union, and taken over by political wonks with axes to grind in spite of the kids.
I seriously don't believe this. Unions don't dictate classroom activities. If anyone does that, it's city and state departments of education, or local principal/school board. I'd like to hear two or three examples of a "right thing" desired by one of your friends that was blocked by a union.
"They honestly would be smarter to recommend that attendees come armed with concealed weapons. Then an attacker could never be sure if any given crown would counterattack."
It's just so convenient that right-wingers flag their bad reasoning with equally bad spelling.
I always think the same at the college where I teach; the single biggest attack surface, and the easiest to reach, is the large packed line outside the school on days when they decide to do universal ID checks. (Fortunately they only do this on the days immediately following some national tragedy.) It seems much safer on the days where a security guard is just alert and actually watching the people walking in, instead of doing mindless heads-down busy work checking ID cards.
In addition, there's also a moral hazard problem with the politicians shepherding these deals. They get positive PR for "making big deals", "bringing business to the state", photo ops shaking hands and breaking ground, etc. The fact that in the long run it's a net negative is not a problem for them -- in a few years they'll be gone to another post and the public will be holding the bag of debt, as usual.
It's not a claim or an aspiration. It's simply a fact of how evaluations and promotions are made at all colleges, for at least the past century in academia. How people can be skeptical when this gets brought up is among the weirdest and most delirious aspects of U.S. culture.
"...since 1967 the second has been defined as the duration of 9192631770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom."
This "second", what an inelegant unit to use for the basis; it's not inherently based on an order of magnitude count in the first place; really it's just a legacy of some base-60 divisions of Earth's rotation time. Don't you think it would be better to define the second more simply as 10^10 periods of cesium 133 radiation? Then you'd really be on to something.
I actually do this in my classes. My department has an in-house written College Algebra text, but I recommend to my students as an "alternative" that they get Sullivan College Algebra, 8th edition, for about $5 online.
Two things with this: One is that potentially I could, like the professor in the story, get in trouble with my department for this arrangement (it's a bit of a gray zone). Second is that the college bookstore can't stock old editions from the publisher. So it's a one-by-one acquisition process. You can't depend that students have it on day one; therefore I have to provide handouts for the first few weeks before they get books. And if you did this across the institution, you would likely deplete available sources of the old editions (e.g., I allow one edition back of Weiss Introductory Statistics, and I'm pretty sure that I've single-handedly caused the depletion of it at Amazon -- I already need to keep exercise lists two editions back, which is a maintenance problem when I adjust my assignments, and further back than that and certain exercises have values changed or don't exist at all). Online homework is chimerical, IMO; college students students should have the maturity to do their own homework and then verify with odd-numbered answers at the back of the book; when I tried online homework in the past, it just threw up more technical barriers for students to say they couldn't do it.
So I agree with the GP that open textbooks are the way to go. OpenStax at Rice University recently upped their offerings quite a bit; not perfect, but finally over the threshold where I could work with them. I'm currently trying to puzzle out how I could switch to using their College Algebra and Introductory Statistics books, in the face of officially required in-house texts from my department.
"If they are so incompetent as to not be able to choose their own classroom material, then how the hell did they become an Associate Professor?"
For published research. I have multiple acquaintances who are new professors who don't even write their own lectures (they are given canned PowerPoint presentations and tests from the department), and this is considered roundly to be a good thing by all parties, because it frees up time for the research by which all promotions and advancements are judged. Professors' primary job is research; teaching is a secondary side-issue.
But other than that I agree with your observation on textbooks; they should have more authority.
"Also known as the fucking reason chairs and vice chairs exist."
Common misconception.
The primary goal of university faculty is published research. Faculty are promoted for that, and effectively nothing else.
The side-goal of university faculty is teaching students. This generally does not effect promotions or salary. I had a dean at a prior school laugh in my face when I said I thought I was valuable because I was an excellent teacher. "We don't care about that...", he said, "We can get any body off the street in to teach a class."
My current school is better, and I do now have a position which focuses on teaching, but it is by nature non-tenure-track, and for significantly lower salary. I wish this could be changed, but the corporatized environment is making it even less likely over time.
The "point" of having separate states in the U.S. was not remotely to provide different choices for where people could live. The "point" was that the various state leaders were simply going to refuse to join any union that didn't mostly keep their existing little fiefdoms -- most notably in the case of the slave-owning states. For an excellent read on how the sausage was made, consider Robertson's "The Original Compromise: What the Constitution's Framers Were Really Thinking".
The ability of lower-class people to move between states is relatively very limited, and fraught with risk (like leaving behind existing family and community support structures).
Slashdot Mirror
More specifically: U.S. elementary-school teachers are the weakest at math, and the most hateful about math, of our entire college-going population. This suggests that we really need math-specialist elementary teachers like every other modernized country.
MadMath: Who Has the Math Anxiety?
As a math educator, I wish I could upvote this past the 5 maximum.
I agree with everything you wrote there, except for the claim "the problem is the focus on grades".
Thought experiment: Let's remove grades and just replace it with an honest pass/fail system about whether you've mastered the skills or not. Now the education majors are all flat-out failing all their math courses. And now they're surely even more upset, right? The problem is not really the grades per se, it's that the math/science courses are where there's an unavoidable demonstration that U.S. education majors are perennially the dumbest people going to college. And those people are then the ones in charge of teaching broken math to our elementary-school students, in a repetitive cycle. If anything, the grades (polite C's and D's to the weak students) are serving to mask how completely broken at math the education majors are; the fact that those same students are so confused as to think it's a GPA-number issue is just a Dunning-Kruger type effect.
No, CUNY administration right now actually wants to get rid of even the most basic elementary algebra -- and even arithmetic! Check out the bottom of this page here for CUNY's current "List of Learning Objectives" required for all students: exponents, radicals, scientific notation, variables.... This is what they want to get rid of. Because only about 50% of open-admissions graduates from NYC high schools can pass a test on those subjects. See the sample tests on that page for the specific questions currently tested.
Hacker is a professor emeritus from CUNY in Political Science. He has a new book coming out right now, his second on the subject. He personally gets a lot of publicity for the "Man Bites Dog" headlines that can be written about the professor-who's-against math. (Also, he's a regular book reviewer for the New York Times, who usually start off his PR tours by publishing an op-ed from him.) On the other hand, CUNY administrators have plans to get rid of even the most basic math requirements (7th-grade level) for any of their degrees, so as to boost retention/graduation rates in the face of a tidal wave of unqualified open-admissions students from NYC high schools. Hacker gives them political cover for that project by writing stuff like this. Journalists don't know any better... heck, the writer of the Slate article actually thinks that pi is 3.14!
Counterargument from the mathematics side -- MadMath: Lower Standards are a Conspiracy Against the Poor
Counterargument from the political science side -- Gin and Tacos: A Very Stupid Argument Gets the FJM Treatment
Remember: "Priming studies" (like here: being reminded of prior winning makes you more like to cheat) are notorious for showing anything under the sun and then failing to be reproducible later.
Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman called priming studies the "poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29#Criticism
In the Many Labs Replication Project, the two "priming studies" landed at the very bottom, showing no evidence of any real effect in the replication trials:
https://osf.io/wx7ck/
Can every child with, say, Downs syndrome learn to play an instrument?
I agree with this comment 100%.
http://www.madmath.com/2012/07/teach-logic.html
Looking at the graph in the article, there's on obvious inflection point that occurs on 7-Apr. Prior to that, the two lines (opened and closed items) are basically tracking each other. After that point, the opened items (red) retains the same slope; but the closed items (green) switches to a different, shallower (but thereafter basically constant) slope. And thus the two curves veer away from each other from that point.
So: What happened on 7-Apr? Did one or more developers quit, burnout, take a long vacation? Maybe they haven't been replaced yet?
After that I'd try real hard to stop new features from coming in, and start thumbing through a Brooks book to look for suggestions in an emergency like this.
Wisconsin is a blistering disaster of an example. The worst thing about education in this country is that classroom management has been taken out of the hands of the people in the classrooms, organized in their professional union, and taken over by political wonks with axes to grind in spite of the kids.
I seriously don't believe this. Unions don't dictate classroom activities. If anyone does that, it's city and state departments of education, or local principal/school board. I'd like to hear two or three examples of a "right thing" desired by one of your friends that was blocked by a union.
In all the countries with better education results, unions are stronger and more respected have more input to the educational process.
"They honestly would be smarter to recommend that attendees come armed with concealed weapons. Then an attacker could never be sure if any given crown would counterattack."
It's just so convenient that right-wingers flag their bad reasoning with equally bad spelling.
I always think the same at the college where I teach; the single biggest attack surface, and the easiest to reach, is the large packed line outside the school on days when they decide to do universal ID checks. (Fortunately they only do this on the days immediately following some national tragedy.) It seems much safer on the days where a security guard is just alert and actually watching the people walking in, instead of doing mindless heads-down busy work checking ID cards.
In addition, there's also a moral hazard problem with the politicians shepherding these deals. They get positive PR for "making big deals", "bringing business to the state", photo ops shaking hands and breaking ground, etc. The fact that in the long run it's a net negative is not a problem for them -- in a few years they'll be gone to another post and the public will be holding the bag of debt, as usual.
Isn't it amazing how strongly correlated the quality of an argument is with its spelling and grammar?
It's not a claim or an aspiration. It's simply a fact of how evaluations and promotions are made at all colleges, for at least the past century in academia. How people can be skeptical when this gets brought up is among the weirdest and most delirious aspects of U.S. culture.
"...since 1967 the second has been defined as the duration of 9192631770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom."
This "second", what an inelegant unit to use for the basis; it's not inherently based on an order of magnitude count in the first place; really it's just a legacy of some base-60 divisions of Earth's rotation time. Don't you think it would be better to define the second more simply as 10^10 periods of cesium 133 radiation? Then you'd really be on to something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second
"But I'm smarter than other people, it'll be easy!", they all say.
I actually do this in my classes. My department has an in-house written College Algebra text, but I recommend to my students as an "alternative" that they get Sullivan College Algebra, 8th edition, for about $5 online.
Two things with this: One is that potentially I could, like the professor in the story, get in trouble with my department for this arrangement (it's a bit of a gray zone). Second is that the college bookstore can't stock old editions from the publisher. So it's a one-by-one acquisition process. You can't depend that students have it on day one; therefore I have to provide handouts for the first few weeks before they get books. And if you did this across the institution, you would likely deplete available sources of the old editions (e.g., I allow one edition back of Weiss Introductory Statistics, and I'm pretty sure that I've single-handedly caused the depletion of it at Amazon -- I already need to keep exercise lists two editions back, which is a maintenance problem when I adjust my assignments, and further back than that and certain exercises have values changed or don't exist at all). Online homework is chimerical, IMO; college students students should have the maturity to do their own homework and then verify with odd-numbered answers at the back of the book; when I tried online homework in the past, it just threw up more technical barriers for students to say they couldn't do it.
So I agree with the GP that open textbooks are the way to go. OpenStax at Rice University recently upped their offerings quite a bit; not perfect, but finally over the threshold where I could work with them. I'm currently trying to puzzle out how I could switch to using their College Algebra and Introductory Statistics books, in the face of officially required in-house texts from my department.
"If they are so incompetent as to not be able to choose their own classroom material, then how the hell did they become an Associate Professor?"
For published research. I have multiple acquaintances who are new professors who don't even write their own lectures (they are given canned PowerPoint presentations and tests from the department), and this is considered roundly to be a good thing by all parties, because it frees up time for the research by which all promotions and advancements are judged. Professors' primary job is research; teaching is a secondary side-issue.
But other than that I agree with your observation on textbooks; they should have more authority.
"Also known as the fucking reason chairs and vice chairs exist."
Common misconception.
The primary goal of university faculty is published research. Faculty are promoted for that, and effectively nothing else.
The side-goal of university faculty is teaching students. This generally does not effect promotions or salary. I had a dean at a prior school laugh in my face when I said I thought I was valuable because I was an excellent teacher. "We don't care about that...", he said, "We can get any body off the street in to teach a class."
My current school is better, and I do now have a position which focuses on teaching, but it is by nature non-tenure-track, and for significantly lower salary. I wish this could be changed, but the corporatized environment is making it even less likely over time.
"the teachings arn't doing their fucking job."
Indeed.
The "point" of having separate states in the U.S. was not remotely to provide different choices for where people could live. The "point" was that the various state leaders were simply going to refuse to join any union that didn't mostly keep their existing little fiefdoms -- most notably in the case of the slave-owning states. For an excellent read on how the sausage was made, consider Robertson's "The Original Compromise: What the Constitution's Framers Were Really Thinking".
http://www.amazon.com/Original-Compromise-Constitutions-Framers-Thinking/dp/0199796297/
The ability of lower-class people to move between states is relatively very limited, and fraught with risk (like leaving behind existing family and community support structures).
Incoherent counterargument.