Thursday, December 30, 2010

I spoke too soon. Boo! Hiss!

My alma mater finally gets pretends to get it right.

Effective with the current academic year FIU has dropped its secondary education major and replaced it with a requirement to major in your selected discipline and take education classes.  To think I wrote a paper making this recommendation back in 1992! Better late than never, I guess.

FIU's new BA in "mathematics" with a major in math education
Notice what's missing from this curriculum ... differential equations, abstract algebra, advanced calculus.  And it's short one two math courses relative to a real math major (even though history of math isn't valid for math majors it's required by the state so I'll let that slide, but there's no way I'll ever accept Problem Solving Seminar as a legitimate math course).  And they still allow the farcical substitution of statistical methods in place of mathematical statistics. 

FIU's new BA in physics education
The gaps here are even more appalling than in the mathematics program ... the differential equations mathematics prerequisite, the second semester of classical mechanics, BOTH semesters of quantum mechanics and BOTH semesters of electricity and magnetism.

In summary, these are EXACTLY the same watered down crap they gave in the college of education, except now they're polluting the College of Arts & Sciences.  This is actually WORSE than before!  For shame!!  (I'm actually a little disappointed in myself that I allowed myself to believe that anything was going to get better.)

Sunday, December 26, 2010

Incompetence and recognizing competence in others

When the researchers then shared the performance of other participants with the people who performed poorly (hoping that they would then adjust their self-perception downward) people who scored poorly failed to adjust their self-perception of their performance.  In other words, they are completely unaware of their own incompetence and can't detect competence in others. (Justin Kruger and David Dunning, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)