Discussion on Education

Abandoned Blog

2011-08-28T15:05:00.003-04:00

I am abandoning this blog due to lack of time. I will instead be dedicating some time to my educational curriculum wiki at http://threecolumnsofinstruction.wikispaces.com/

I spoke too soon. Boo! Hiss!

2010-12-30T13:03:00.000-05:00

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.)

Incompetence and recognizing competence in others

2010-12-26T11:38:00.000-05:00

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)

The Shadow Scholar

2010-11-15T10:08:00.001-05:00

(Normally I would not reproduce an article wholesale like this, but given the author is scum I don't really mind being yet another client who presents his words as my own. The original article can be found in the Chronicle of Higher Education. - ALD)

The request came in by e-mail around 2 in the afternoon. It was from a previous customer, and she had urgent business. I quote her message here verbatim (if I had to put up with it, so should you): "You did me business ethics propsal for me I need propsal got approved pls can you will write me paper?"

I've gotten pretty good at interpreting this kind of correspondence. The client had attached a document from her professor with details about the paper. She needed the first section in a week. Seventy-five pages. I told her no problem. It truly was no problem. In the past year, I've written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won't find my name on a single paper.

I've written toward a master's degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I've worked on bachelor's degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I've written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I've attended three dozen online universities. I've completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

You've never heard of me, but there's a good chance that you've read some of my work. I'm a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can't detect, that you can't defend against, that you may not even know exists. I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I've worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments.

In the midst of this great recession, business is booming. At busy times, during midterms and finals, my company's staff of roughly 50 writers is not large enough to satisfy the demands of students who will pay for our work and claim it as their own. You would be amazed by the incompetence of your students' writing. I have seen the word "desperate" misspelled every way you can imagine. And these students truly are desperate. They couldn't write a convincing grocery list, yet they are in graduate school.

For those of you who have ever mentored a student through the writing of a dissertation, served on a thesis-review committee, or guided a graduate student through a formal research process, I have a question: Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you?

I live well on the desperation, misery, and incompetence that your educational system has created. Granted, as a writer, I could earn more; certainly there are ways to earn less. But I never struggle to find work. And as my peers trudge through thankless office jobs that seem more intolerable with every passing month of our sustained recession, I am on pace for my best year yet. I will make roughly $66,000 this year. Not a king's ransom, but higher than what many actual educators are paid.

Of course, I know you are aware that cheating occurs. But you have no idea how deeply this kind of cheating penetrates the academic system, much less how to stop it. Last summer The New York Times reported that 61 percent of undergraduates have admitted to some form of cheating on assignments and exams. Yet there is little discussion about custom papers and how they differ from more-detectable forms of plagiarism, or about why students cheat in the first place. It is my hope that this essay will initiate such a conversation. As for me, I'm planning to retire.

It is late in the semester when the business student contacts me, a time when I typically juggle deadlines and push out 20 to 40 pages a day. I had written a short research proposal for her a few weeks before, suggesting a project that connected a surge of unethical business practices to the patterns of trade liberalization. The proposal was approved, and now I had six days to complete the assignment. This was not quite a rush order, which we get top dollar to write. This assignment would be priced at a standard $2,000, half of which goes in my pocket.

A few hours after I had agreed to write the paper, I received the following e-mail: "sending sorces for ur to use thanx." I did not reply immediately. One hour later, I received another message:
"did u get the sorce I send
please where you are now?
Desprit to pass spring projict"

Not only was this student going to be a constant thorn in my side, but she also communicated in haiku, each less decipherable than the one before it. I let her know that I was giving her work the utmost attention, that I had received her sources, and that I would be in touch if I had any questions. Then I put it aside.

From my experience, three demographic groups seek out my services: the English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich kid.

For the last, colleges are a perfect launching ground—they are built to reward the rich and to forgive them their laziness. Let's be honest: The successful among us are not always the best and the brightest, and certainly not the most ethical. My favorite customers are those with an unlimited supply of money and no shortage of instructions on how they would like to see their work executed. While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn't get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top.

As for the first two types of students—the ESL and the hopelessly deficient—colleges are utterly failing them. Students who come to American universities from other countries find that their efforts to learn a new language are confounded not only by cultural difficulties but also by the pressures of grading. The focus on evaluation rather than education means that those who haven't mastered English must do so quickly or suffer the consequences. My service provides a particularly quick way to "master" English. And those who are hopelessly deficient—a euphemism, I admit—struggle with communication in general. (Whatever helps you sleep at night. - ALD)

Two days had passed since I last heard from the business student. Overnight I had received 14 e-mails from her. She had additional instructions for the assignment, such as "but more again please make sure they are a good link betwee the leticture review and all the chapter and the benfet of my paper. finally do you think the level of this work? how match i can get it?" I'll admit, I didn't fully understand that one. It was followed by some clarification: "where u are can you get my messages? Please I pay a lot and dont have ao to faile I strated to get very worry." Her messages had arrived between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. Again I assured her I had the matter under control. It was true. At this point, there are few academic challenges that I find intimidating. You name it, I've been paid to write about it.

Customers' orders are endlessly different yet strangely all the same. No matter what the subject, clients want to be assured that their assignment is in capable hands. It would be terrible to think that your Ivy League graduate thesis was riding on the work ethic and perspicacity of a public-university slacker. So part of my job is to be whatever my clients want me to be. I say yes when I am asked if I have a Ph.D. in sociology. I say yes when I am asked if I have professional training in industrial/organizational psychology. I say yes when asked if I have ever designed a perpetual-motion-powered time machine and documented my efforts in a peer-reviewed journal.

The subject matter, the grade level, the college, the course—these things are irrelevant to me. Prices are determined per page and are based on how long I have to complete the assignment. As long as it doesn't require me to do any math or video-documented animal husbandry, I will write anything. I have completed countless online courses. Students provide me with passwords and user names so I can access key documents and online exams. In some instances, I have even contributed to weekly online discussions with other students in the class.

I have become a master of the admissions essay. I have written these for undergraduate, master's, and doctoral programs, some at elite universities. I can explain exactly why you're Brown material, why the Wharton M.B.A. program would benefit from your presence, how certain life experiences have prepared you for the rigors of your chosen course of study. I do not mean to be insensitive, but I can't tell you how many times I've been paid to write about somebody helping a loved one battle cancer. I've written essays that could be adapted into Meryl Streep movies.

I do a lot of work for seminary students. I like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction in paying somebody to help them cheat in courses that are largely about walking in the light of God and providing an ethical model for others to follow. I have been commissioned to write many a passionate condemnation of America's moral decay as exemplified by abortion, gay marriage, or the teaching of evolution. All in all, we may presume that clerical authorities see these as a greater threat than the plagiarism committed by the future frocked.

With respect to America's nurses, fear not. Our lives are in capable hands—just hands that can't write a lick. Nursing students account for one of my company's biggest customer bases. I've written case-management plans, reports on nursing ethics, and essays on why nurse practitioners are lighting the way to the future of medicine. I've even written pharmaceutical-treatment courses, for patients who I hope were hypothetical.

I, who have no name, no opinions, and no style, have written so many papers at this point, including legal briefs, military-strategy assessments, poems, lab reports, and, yes, even papers on academic integrity, that it's hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I'd say education is the worst. I've written papers for students in elementary-education programs, special-education majors, and ESL-training courses. I've written lesson plans for aspiring high-school teachers, and I've synthesized reports from notes that customers have taken during classroom observations. I've written essays for those studying to become school administrators, and I've completed theses for those on course to become principals. In the enormous conspiracy that is student cheating, the frontline intelligence community is infiltrated by double agents. Future educators of America, I know who you are.

As the deadline for the business-ethics paper approaches, I think about what's ahead of me. Whenever I take on an assignment this large, I get a certain physical sensation. My body says: Are you sure you want to do this again? You know how much it hurt the last time. You know this student will be with you for a long time. You know you will become her emergency contact, her guidance counselor and life raft. You know that for the 48 hours that you dedicate to writing this paper, you will cease all human functions but typing, you will Google until the term has lost all meaning, and you will drink enough coffee to fuel a revolution in a small Central American country.

But then there's the money, the sense that I must capitalize on opportunity, and even a bit of a thrill in seeing whether I can do it. And I can. It's not implausible to write a 75-page paper in two days. It's just miserable. I don't need much sleep, and when I get cranking, I can churn out four or five pages an hour. First I lay out the sections of an assignment—introduction, problem statement, methodology, literature review, findings, conclusion—whatever the instructions call for. Then I start Googling.

I haven't been to a library once since I started doing this job. Amazon is quite generous about free samples. If I can find a single page from a particular text, I can cobble that into a report, deducing what I don't know from customer reviews and publisher blurbs. Google Scholar is a great source for material, providing the abstract of nearly any journal article. And of course, there's Wikipedia, which is often my first stop when dealing with unfamiliar subjects. Naturally one must verify such material elsewhere, but I've taken hundreds of crash courses this way.

After I've gathered my sources, I pull out usable quotes, cite them, and distribute them among the sections of the assignment. Over the years, I've refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I'll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph.

I've also got a mental library of stock academic phrases: "A close consideration of the events which occurred in ____ during the ____ demonstrate that ____ had entered into a phase of widespread cultural, social, and economic change that would define ____ for decades to come." Fill in the blanks using words provided by the professor in the assignment's instructions.

How good is the product created by this process? That depends—on the day, my mood, how many other assignments I am working on. It also depends on the customer, his or her expectations, and the degree to which the completed work exceeds his or her abilities. I don't ever edit my assignments. That way I get fewer customer requests to "dumb it down." So some of my work is great. Some of it is not so great. Most of my clients do not have the wherewithal to tell the difference, which probably means that in most cases the work is better than what the student would have produced on his or her own. I've actually had customers thank me for being clever enough to insert typos. "Nice touch," they'll say.

I've read enough academic material to know that I'm not the only bullshit artist out there. I think about how Dickens got paid per word and how, as a result, Bleak House is ... well, let's be diplomatic and say exhaustive. Dickens is a role model for me.

So how does someone become a custom-paper writer? The story of how I got into this job may be instructive. It is mostly about the tremendous disappointment that awaited me in college.

My distaste for the early hours and regimented nature of high school was tempered by the promise of the educational community ahead, with its free exchange of ideas and access to great minds. How dispiriting to find out that college was just another place where grades were grubbed, competition overshadowed personal growth, and the threat of failure was used to encourage learning.

Although my university experience did not live up to its vaunted reputation, it did lead me to where I am today. I was raised in an upper-middle-class family, but I went to college in a poor neighborhood. I fit in really well: After paying my tuition, I didn't have a cent to my name. I had nothing but a meal plan and my roommate's computer. But I was determined to write for a living, and, moreover, to spend these extremely expensive years learning how to do so. When I completed my first novel, in the summer between sophomore and junior years, I contacted the English department about creating an independent study around editing and publishing it. I was received like a mental patient. I was told, "There's nothing like that here." I was told that I could go back to my classes, sit in my lectures, and fill out Scantron tests until I graduated.

I didn't much care for my classes, though. I slept late and spent the afternoons working on my own material. Then a funny thing happened. Here I was, begging anybody in authority to take my work seriously. But my classmates did. They saw my abilities and my abundance of free time. They saw a value that the university did not.

It turned out that my lazy, Xanax-snorting, Miller-swilling classmates were thrilled to pay me to write their papers. And I was thrilled to take their money. Imagine you are crumbling under the weight of university-issued parking tickets and self-doubt when a frat boy offers you cash to write about Plato. Doing that job was a no-brainer. Word of my services spread quickly, especially through the fraternities. Soon I was receiving calls from strangers who wanted to commission my work. I was a writer!

Nearly a decade later, students, not publishers, still come from everywhere to find me. I work hard for a living. I'm nice to people. But I understand that in simple terms, I'm the bad guy. I see where I'm vulnerable to ethical scrutiny. But pointing the finger at me is too easy. Why does my business thrive? Why do so many students prefer to cheat rather than do their own work? Say what you want about me, but I am not the reason your students cheat. You know what's never happened? I've never had a client complain that he'd been expelled from school, that the originality of his work had been questioned, that some disciplinary action had been taken. As far as I know, not one of my customers has ever been caught.

With just two days to go, I was finally ready to throw myself into the business assignment. I turned off my phone, caged myself in my office, and went through the purgatory of cramming the summation of a student's alleged education into a weekend. Try it sometime. After the 20th hour on a single subject, you have an almost-out-of-body experience.

My client was thrilled with my work. She told me that she would present the chapter to her mentor and get back to me with our next steps. Two weeks passed, by which time the assignment was but a distant memory, obscured by the several hundred pages I had written since. On a Wednesday evening, I received the following e-mail:
"Thanx u so much for the chapter is going very good the porfesser likes it but wants the folloing suggestions please what do you thing?:
The hypothesis is interesting but I'd like to see it a bit more focused. Choose a specific connection and try to prove it.
What shoudwe say?"

This happens a lot. I get paid per assignment. But with longer papers, the student starts to think of me as a personal educational counselor. She paid me to write a one-page response to her professor, and then she paid me to revise her paper. I completed each of these assignments, sustaining the voice that the student had established and maintaining the front of competence from some invisible location far beneath the ivory tower.

The 75-page paper on business ethics ultimately expanded into a 160-page graduate thesis, every word of which was written by me. I can't remember the name of my client, but it's her name on my work. We collaborated for months. As with so many other topics I tackle, the connection between unethical business practices and trade liberalization became a subtext to my everyday life.

So, of course, you can imagine my excitement when I received the good news: "thanx so much for uhelp ican going to graduate to now".

High School Graduation Mathematics Requirements

2010-10-07T14:25:00.001-04:00

Algebra I = CA, FL, GA, IN, MS, NC, ND, NH, NM, OK, SD
Geometry = AL, IL, KY, MD
Algebra II = AR, MI, DE, LA, TN, VA
The remaining states = zippo

http://www.mathcurriculumcenter.org/PDFS/HSreport.pdf

College Required Reading Lists

2010-06-25T10:28:00.000-04:00

The National Association of Scholars released a report on the books that colleges are requiring their incoming freshmen to read. Leaving aside the usual liberal bias debate, their incontrovertible conclusion is that the list is pitched at an intellectual level well below what should be expected of college freshmen and it is hard to find anything on the list that poses even a modest intellectual challenge to the average reader.

Here's the list ... see for yourself ...

A Good Fall Jin, Ha
A Home on the Field: How One Championship Soccer Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America Cuadros, Paul
A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League Suskind, Ron
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier Beah, Ishmael
A Pearl in the Storm: How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Ocean McClure, Tori Murden
A Thousand Splendid Suns Hosseini, Khaled
A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age Pink, Daniel
A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge Neufeld, Josh
Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation Patel, Eboo
Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic De Graaf, John and David Wann and Thomas H. Naylor
An Ordinary Man Rusesabagina, Paul
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Kingsolver, Barbara
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress Sijie, Dai
Blink: the Power of Thinking Without Thinking Gladwell, Malcolm
Blonde Roots Evaristo, Bernardine
Blue Hole Back Home Lake, Joy Jordan
Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It Royte, Elizabeth
Brooklyn: A Novel Tóibín, Colm
Brother, I'm Dying Danticat, Edwige
Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam Pham, Andrew X.
China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power Gifford, Rob
China's Son: Growing Up in the Cultural Revolution Chen, Da
Cion Mda, Zakes
Confessions of a Radical Industrialist: Profits, People, Purpose--Doing Business by Respecting the Earth Anderson, Ray C.
Copenhagen Frayn, Michael
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers Appiah, Kwame Anthony
Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism Yunus, Muhammad
Crossing into America: the New Literature of Immigration Mendoza, Louis and Subramanian Shankar, eds.
Cry, the Beloved Country Paton, Alan
Day of the Locust West, Nathanael
Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account Of The Death Penalty In The United States Prejean, Helen
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future McKibben, Bill
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Dick, Philip K.
Dreams from My Father Obama, Barack
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood Ray, Janisse
Einstein's Dreams Lightman, Alan
Enrique's Journey Nazario, Sonia
Escape from Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity and My Journey to Freedom in America Bok, Francis
Everything Matters Currie, Ron Jr.
Farewell, My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living Fine, Doug
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal Schlosser, Eric
Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change Kolbert, Elizabeth
Flight Alexie, Sherman
Frankenstein Shelley, Mary
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything Levitt, Steven D. and Stephen J. Dubner
Freedom Writers Diary Gruwell, Erin
Friday Night Lights Bissinger, H.G.
Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America Dumas, Firoozeh
Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage Rogers, Heather
Half of a Yellow Sun Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi
Half the Sky Kristof, Nicholas D. and Sheryl WuDunn
Here, Bullet Turner, Brian
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet Ford, Jamie
Hunger Chang, Lan Samantha
In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto Pollan, Michael
Into the Wild Krakauer, John
Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit Quinn, Daniel
It's Kind of a Funny Story Vizzini, Ned
Letters to a Young Brother: MANifest Your Destiny Harper, Hill
Light and Darkness Anthology Anthology
Listening is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project Isay, Dave
Make the Impossible Possible: One Man's Crusade to Inspire Others to Dream Bigger and Achieve the Extraordinary Strickland, Bill
Man, Controller of the Universe Rivera, Diego
Maus Spiegelman, Art
Me Talk Pretty One Day Sedaris, David
Miracle in the Andes Parrado, Nando
Mountains Beyond Mountains Kidder, Tracy
Mudbound Jordan, Hillary
Muskingum College (History Series) Giffen, Heather, William Kerrigan and R. Worbs
My Own Country: A Doctor's Story Verghese, Abraham
Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America Ehrenreich, Barbara
No Impact Man Beavan, Colin
Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade--and How We Can Fight It Batstone, David
Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town St. John, Warren
Outliers: The Story of Success Gladwell, Malcolm
Peace Like a River Enger, Leif
Persepolis Satrapi, Marjane
Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption Thompson-Cannino, Jennifer and Ronald Cotton and Erin Torneo
Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around Wagner, Cheryl
Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet Mackinnon, James & Alisa Smith
Regeneration Barker, Pat
Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet McNeely, Ian F. with Lisa Wolverton
Rescue Warriors: The U.S. Coast Guard, America’s Forgotten Heroes Helvarg, David
RFK In the Land of Apartheid Shore, Larry
Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life Fisher, Len
Rooftops of Tehran Seraji, Mahbod
Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, And The Search For The American Dream Shephard, Adam
Searching for God Knows What Miller, Donald
Secret Daughter, a Mixed-Race Daughter and the Mother Who Gave Her Away Cross, June
Song Yet Sung McBride, James
Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time Loeb, Paul Rogat
Sounds of the River Chen, Da
Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan Mortenson, Greg
Strange as This Weather Has Been Pancake, Ann
Strength in What Remains Kidder, Tracy
Telex from Cuba Kushner, Rachel
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian Alexie, Sherman
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Twain, Mark
The Alchemist Coelho, Paulo
The Bean Trees Kingsolver, Barbara
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009 Eggers, Dave
The Bitter Sea: Coming of Age in a China Before Mao Li, Charles
The Blue Sweater Novogratz, Jacqueline
The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World Pollan, Michael
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind Kamkwamba, William and Bryan Mealer
The Brief History of the Dead Brockmeier, Kevin
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Diaz, Junot
The Cathedral Within Shore, Bill
The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts Farley, Tom Jr. and Tanner Colby
The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother McBride, James
The Colors of the Mountain Chen, Da
The Communist Manifesto Marx, Karl
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Haddon, Mark
The Devil's Highway Urrea, Luis Alberto
The Dew Breaker Danticat, Edwige
The DNA Age Harmon, Amy
The End of the Spear Saint, Steve
The Family Bible Delbridge, Melissa
The Geography of Bliss Weiner, Eric
The Glass Castle Walls, Jeannette
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society Shaffer, Mary Ann and Annie Barrows
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter McCullers, Carson
The House on Mango Street Cisneros, Sandra
The Housekeeper and the Professor: A Novel Ogawa, Yoko
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Skloot, Rebecca
The Kite Runner Hosseini, Khaled
The Last Lecture Pausch, Randy & Jeffrey Zaslow
The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir Yang, Kao Kalia
The Learners Kidd, Chip
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil Zimbardo, Phillip
The Maltese Falcon Hammett, Dashiell
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals Pollan, Michael
The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama Iyer, Pico
The Pact: Three Young Men Make a Promise and Fulfill a Dream Davis, Sampson and George Jenkins and Rameck Hunt
The Perks of Being a Wallflower Chbosky, Stephen
The Poe Shadow Pearl, Matthew
The Reluctant Fundamentalist Hamid, Mohsin
The Road of Lost Innocence Mam, Somaly
The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal Mooney, Jonathan
The Soloist Lopez, Steve
The Sparrow Russell, Mary Doria
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: a Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures Fadiman, Anne
The Things They Carried O'Brien, Tim
The Translator: A Tribesman’s Memoir of Darfur Hari, Daoud
The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World’s Most Powerful Company Really Works – and How It’s Transforming the American Economy Fishman, Charles
The White Tiger Adiga, Aravind
The World Without Us Weisman, Alan
The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future Watkins, S. Craig
These Shining Lives Marnich, Melanie
This I Believe II: More Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women Allison, Jay and Dan Gediman
This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women Allison, Jay and Dan Gediman
Three Cups of Tea Mortenson, Greg and David Oliver Relin
Tracking Desire: A Journey After Swallow-Tailed Kites Cerulean, Susan
True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society Manjoo, Farhad
Under a Papery Roof: A Memoir About Life in Post-Revolutionary Iran and Exile Sanati, Panteha
Walden Thoreau, Henry David
What is the What Eggers, Dave
When the Emperor Was Divine Otsuka, Julie
Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman Krakauer, John
Where We Stand: Class Matters hooks, bell
Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World Goldsmith, Jack and Tim Wu
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Tatum, Beverly Daniel
Will This Be on the Test? Anthology
Wish You Well Baldacci, David
Work Hard. Be Nice.: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America Mathews, Jay
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto Lanier, Jaron
Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body Shubin, Neil
Zeitoun Eggers, Dave
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina Rose, Chris

Save Are Teachers

2010-04-24T15:00:00.003-04:00

Perhaps your teachers are not worth saving. Also, perhaps you should understand the issues before you protest.

Tough guys don't do math. Tough guys fry chicken for a living.

2010-03-31T10:28:00.002-04:00

RIP Jaime Escalante, now you have a ticket to see the show.
Thank you!

Claudia: You're worried that we'll screw up royally tomorrow, aren't you?
Jaime Escalante: Tomorrow's another day. I'm worried you're gonna screw up the rest of your lives.

Jaime Escalante: Do you want me to do it for you?
Pancho: Yes.
Jaime Escalante: You're supposed to say no.

Jaime Escalante: You know the times tables?
Thug: I know the ones, the twos...the threes (shows him The Finger)
Jaime Escalante: (whispering) Ahhh The Fingerman ehh? I am The Fingerman too; you know what I can do? I can multiply by nine. Three times nine? (starts counting with his fingers) one... two... three, what do you got? (shows fingers) twenty seven; six times nine, one... two... three... four... five... six, what do you got? (shows fingers again) fifty four; how about something more difficult? How about eight times nine? one... two... three... four... five... six... seven... eight, what do you got? (shows fingers a third time) seventy two.

Widespread Cheating on Georgia's CRCT

2010-02-13T09:49:00.006-05:00

This article provides a list of all the schools that were flagged because more than 25% of classrooms had answer sheets with wrong-to-right changes in excess of three standard deviations above the norm. Forty-three Atlanta Public Schools are on the list.

Exceeding three standard deviations is expected to happen only in 0.15% of the cases, so the state has clearly set an extremely conservative rule in order to avoid unfairly tainting any school's reputation. The odds of hitting this rule without there being cheating in at least some of that 25% of classrooms is literally infinitesimal (so small as to be unmeasurable).

And even more astounding, there are schools on the list where 80%+ of classrooms exceeded this amount. ALL FOUR of these were within the Atlanta Public Schools system.

* Frank L Stanton Elementary, 83.3%

* Peyton Forest Elementary, 86.1%

* Gideons Elementary, 88.4%

* Parks Middle, 89.5%

With school rates this insanely high it strains credibility that these were individual teachers acting alone, and with 58% of all elementary schools in Atlanta Public Schools implicated it strains credibility that these were individual principals acting alone. Numbers like this can only point to the top of the system's administration. Either the superintendent Beverly Hall was in on it or she is a blithering idiot of monumental proportions. Either way, she has to go. Now!

Talk about bad judgement

2009-11-16T17:33:00.001-05:00

Selling candy didn't raise much money last year, so a Goldsboro middle school tried selling grades. However, the fundraiser came to an abrupt halt today after a story in The News & Observer raised concerns about the practice of selling grades. Wayne County school administrators stopped the fundraiser, issuing a statement this morning. "Yesterday afternoon, the district administration met with [Rosewood Middle School principal] Mrs. Shepherd and directed the the following actions be taken: (1) the fundraiser will be immediately stopped; (2) no extra grade credit will be issued that may have resulted from donations; and (3) beginning November 12, all donations will be returned." A $20 donation to Rosewood Middle School would have gotten a student 20 test points - 10 extra points on two tests of the student's choosing. That could raise a B to an A, or a failing grade to a D.

Is our teachers learning?

2009-05-20T09:25:00.001-04:00

The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is releasing the results Tuesday. They say that only 27% of the more than 600 candidates who took the state elementary school teacher’s licensing exam passed. Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester was not surprised by the results. He told the Boston Globe that these results indicate that many students are not receiving an adequate math education. Tom Scott, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, says "The high failure rate puts a shining light on a deficiency in teacher-prep programs."

Zeros Aren't Permitted

2009-04-29T12:10:00.001-04:00

What can I possibly say? Just read for yourselves.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS308&q=zeros+aren%27t+permitted&btnG=Search

Two Education Pieces in Today's AJC

2009-04-27T16:46:00.000-04:00

I was a curious student early in high school, anxious to learn more about the world. But I had to hold back to wait for slower learners. All children should have the option of getting a good education. But an education that is watered down so it can be taught to all kids produces graduates with a minimal education. I’m not curious anymore. Will I now be just another drone who graduates from UGA with honors because I am a good test taker? Will this skill be beneficial to this country’s future? If so, I will do well.

Today’s students are a “lost generation," unfortunately lost in the hard glare of technology, blinded by the promise of cyber salvation on a distracted globe. What I used to take for granted — an engaged core of students who could think, read and write—has morphed into an assembly line of packaged minds fresh off the factory farm of iPod, “American Idol” and Facebook, a vast herd of electronic sheep stuffed with fast facts and establishment filler.

Obama's College Proposal

2009-02-27T22:15:00.001-05:00

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/02/25/obama

On grading...

2009-02-24T19:48:00.003-05:00

“Shouldn’t effort count for something?” We all know students who attend every class and turn in every assignment yet still do poorly, sometimes because they don’t test well or because they didn’t have the prerequisites to succeed in the course. Such students may not deserve to fail, but should they earn an A for their effort? And what about the students who are so far ahead of their peers that they can goof off in class, blow off homework and yet ace the midterm and final. Do they merit an A? Shouldn’t a student earn credit for showing up on time, for being respectful of the teacher and peers and for trying, even when the results fall short?

I once taught a cocky 20-year-old who’d been suspended from his prestigious university and ended up in my evening class at a community college in Florida, where the average student was about 60. The young man had already taken a similar course at his former school, so he was disgruntled to be repeating the same material and sitting next to classmates wearing orthotics. His displeasure showed. I gave him the A, but it hurt. On the other side of the grading equation, I’ve taught diligent students who respected their classmates, arrived early, stayed late, but flubbed the tests, usually because they entered college without the necessary fundamentals.

The author somehow misses the obviousness of an idea that she actually includes in her text. Shouldn't grades represent what you know? How did we get away from the idea that a grade represents what you have mastered of the subject matter at hand, nothing more and nothing less?

Sweating the small stuff

2009-02-08T01:25:00.003-05:00

The Weekly Standard recently reviewed this book; a great read for anybody interested in seeing what actually works. The book also explains why we see more of what doesn't work instead of what does work...

The three legs of the education establishment tripod--teacher unions, education schools, and the district bureaucracy--are all unlikely to embrace key elements that make paternalistic schools work. Requiring teachers to work longer days and years would violate union contracts. So would allowing principals to handpick teachers (who may or may not be certified), evaluate and pay instructors based on their effectiveness, and fire those who are not successful in the classroom. Frequent testing, teacher-directed instruction, and flunking students who fail to meet academic standards are all unpopular at schools of education. District bureaucrats, meanwhile, are loath to grant individual schools the freedom to do things differently.

Is college too much to ask?

2008-12-15T11:52:00.004-05:00

Charles Murray (of The Bell Curve fame): While half of our high school graduates march off to four-year colleges each year, only about 10% meet the intellectual benchmark suggested by College Board data - at least an 1180 on the SAT math and verbal tests - to master traditional college-level work. Murray contends that it’s cruel to steer kids to college when most lack the intellectual chops to handle it and will flounder. America holds a romanticized view of education, he says, and propagates a fairy tale, unsubstantiated by the hard truths of inborn abilities, that students are limited only by their ambition and will. Murray claims that the most schools can do is cause children who are intellectually below average - by definition about half of all kids - to be a little less below average. Even the best teachers under the best conditions cannot overcome the limits set by a child’s own cognitive abilities. “The 9-year-old who has trouble sounding out simple words and his classmate who is reading ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ for fun sit in the same classroom day after miserable day, the one so frustrated by tasks he cannot do and the other so bored that both are near tears.”

In countering Murray, Anthony Carnevale (director of Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce) attacked his major premise, “that there is something in each of us that is innate and fixed, that doesn’t change over time. … It is true that cognitive ability affects people’s prospect in life, but it’s also true that people’s prospects affect cognitive ability.” In looking at high-scoring first-graders across incomes, Carnevale says 75% of the more affluent kids will still test high in fifth grade, compared to only 45% of the poorer students. That gap is not created by some inherent deficit in the children, he says, but to the quality of the educational opportunities afforded the two groups.

http://www.ajc.com/search/content/opinion/stories/2008/12/15/learned.html

Carnevale (like most researchers looking at similar results) completely miss the point. They are confusing cause and effect. The largest factor influencing the facts that the affluent parents are affluent and the poor parents are poor is the cognitive ability of the parents, which IS hereditary. Therefore, the primary reason that financially disadvantaged students underperform is NOT financial; that is simply a side effect of the fact that they are below average on the cognitive ability scale.

WSJ Editorial on Alternative Certification

2008-12-13T15:31:00.000-05:00

Like all unions, teachers unions have a vested interest in restricting the labor supply to reduce job competition. Traditional state certification rules help to limit the supply of "certified" teachers. But a new study suggests that such requirements also hinder student learning. Harvard researchers Paul Peterson and Daniel Nadler compared states that have genuine alternative certification with those that have it in name only. And they found that between 2003 and 2007 students in states with a real alternative pathway to teaching gained more on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a federal standardized test) than did students in other states.

Obama's Education Transition Advisor

2008-11-20T15:17:00.001-05:00

Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University education professor and one of Obama’s advisors, will head the Education Department transition team that is tasked with drafting policy for the incoming administration. Darling-Hammond is a self-described advocate of “progressive” education, the methods of which she believes are “grounded in a deep sense of curricular intentions, arise from compelling questions, and include rigorous intellectual challenges such as critical thinking and problem solving across disciplines.” The best progressive educators “engage in a dialectic between the subject and the student” and in so doing, the student “is constantly moved to a broader and more thoughtful place in the curriculum.”

What can your humble servant possibly add to that towering monument of edu-speak?

88% of DC 8th-graders can't read

2008-09-09T12:00:00.001-04:00

Well, not really, although that is the sensationalist headline that CNN used. If you actually watch the news clip the actual statistic is that only 12% of eighth graders are proficient at the eighth grade level per NAEP exams (and only 8% in math). Isn't that bad enough without a misleading headline?

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2008/09/07/bolduan.fixing.dc.schools.cnn

Fake Diploma Mill Degrees

2008-03-26T11:00:00.002-04:00

http://spotlight.encarta.msn.com/Features/

One fact from the article jumped out at me.

"The number of fake doctorates sold each year is in the range of 50,000 to 60,000," states John Bear, author of "Bear's Guide to Earning Degrees by Distance Learning." "The number of real Ph.D.s awarded is around 40,000."

Bear goes on to say "In America right now, more than half of all the Ph.D.s are fake." but that is not correct. I assume he meant more than half of all PhDs issued each year are fake.

Wall Street Looks Abroad

2008-03-24T08:22:00.001-04:00

Senior executives at some of the largest U.S. corporations say stringent immigration policies are hurting New York's ability to compete with other financial centers. Investment bank officials say visa issues have forced them to move jobs to other countries. "New York's ability to compete with London, which has much more open immigration, or with the emerging financial capitals in Asia and the Middle East, depends on mobility of talent," said Kathryn Wylde, president of Partnership for New York City.

Source: NYT

Now even Wall Street claims it can't find talent, another chink in our educational armor.

Georgia Tech employee stole $350,000 in grant funds

2008-01-19T08:09:00.001-05:00

Discussion of Physics Education Major

2007-12-31T15:57:00.001-05:00

Same idea, for the physics ed major now...

Requirement: A minimum of 25 hours, selected from the following list:
AST 3033 Recent Advances in Astronomy and Cosmology
ISC 3121 Science, Technology, and Society
PHY 2048C General Physics A
PHY 2049C General Physics B
PHY 3101 Intermediate Modern Physics
PHY 3221 Intermediate Mechanics
MAP 2302 Differential Equations or MAP 3305 Engineering Mathematics
PHY 3424 Optics
PHY 3802L Intermediate Laboratory
PHY 4040C Physics of the 20th Century
PHY 4323 Intermediate Electricity and Magnetism
PHZ 3113 Mathematical Physics

Of course, this looks quite reasonable on paper. The somewhat low 25 credit requirement is due to the fact that the major wants to accommodate introductory chemistry and biology sequences. But the first problem is that General Physics eats up 10 of the 25 credits. Then physics ed majors stay away from classes that physics majors take, so you end up with the following very unreasonable collection of courses:

PHY 2048C-2049C General Physics A&B (10)
PHY 3424 Optics (3)
AST 3033 Recent Advances in Astronomy and Cosmology (3)
ISC 3121 Science, Technology, and Society (3)
PHY 3101 Intermediate Modern Physics (3)
PHY 3802L Intermediate Laboratory (3)

Here's how I would toughen this up...

1) Given how often biology, chemistry and physics teachers end up teaching each others' classes, I agree that the 25 credit limit is appropriate and will work within its confines

However...

2) Physics majors have to take General Physics as a lower division prerequisite; I see no reason why physics ed majors could not do the same.

3) Drop the AST and ISC courses. No question. There's simply no room for this. Drop the Physics of the 20th Century course too; it doesn't count for physics majors - too fluffy.

4) This removes the elective nature of the existing list. Modern Physics, Intermediate Mechanics, Differential Equations / Engineering Mathematics, Intermediate Electricity & Magnetism, Mathematical Physics and Optics should all be required. But since this is just six courses, I have actually opened up space for two electives.

So we end up with the following eminently reasonable collection of courses:

PHY 2048C-2049C General Physics A&B (prerequisite)
PHY 3424 Optics (3)
PHY 3101 Intermediate Modern Physics (3)
PHY 3221 Intermediate Mechanics (3)
MAP 2302 Differential Equations or MAP 3305 Engineering Mathematics (3)
PHY 4323 Intermediate Electricity and Magnetism (3)
PHZ 3113 Mathematical Physics (3)
Two electives selected from courses that satisfy physics major requirements (6)

And I've even saved a credit. My proposed program requires 24 credits instead of 25.

Discussion of Math Education Major

2007-12-31T14:58:00.003-05:00

Trying to resurrect this blog...

When I argue that, at almost every college in the country, the math ed major is unnecessarily weak relative to the math major, the response I get is always that because of all the education courses required, there is not enough space left within the confines of a 120 credit degree to fit in all the courses that a math major usually takes. Fine, I will leave aside my opinion that the education courses are not anywhere near as valuable as the math courses they displace. I will work strictly within the confines of this restriction.

Let's look at one school's BS in math ed...

Subject Matter Specialization: Thirty semester hours of mathematics at the 3000 level or above including 3 semester hours in geometry, 6 semester hours in probability or statistics, and 3 semester hours in linear or abstract algebra.

This sounds rigorous, until you start dissecting it. First of all, the calculus sequence is somewhat oddly numbered 3000-level, so there's 12 credits right there. Then 6 credits of introductory statistics (also numbered 3000-level), 3 credits of linear algebra, 3 credits of geometry and 3 credits of history of mathematics, and you're at 27 credits without taking a single substantive upper-level college math class. One class (introduction to advanced mathematics is customary) and you're done.

Let's see if this can be improved...

1) First of all, math majors are expected to complete Calculus I-II-III and Linear Algebra as part of their lower division preparation. Since the math ed major does not require any lower division prerequisites, it should be possible for them to fit these courses into their first 60 credits the same as math majors. I've just freed up 15 credits.

2) Instead of the introductory statistics sequence designed for social science majors, I would require the Mathematical Statistics sequence that math majors are required to take. No change in the total number of credits, but I've just toughened up this requirement.

3) Geometry is fine as is. History of math is a little fluffy for my taste, but it is required by the state. No changes.

4) I would definitely add differential equations, which is a lower division prerequisite for the math major.

5) I would also require Advanced Calculus and Algebraic Structures. Together with introduction to advanced mathematics and mathematical statistics, this will give all math ed majors exposure to at least the common core required of all math majors.

To summarize, we started with the following course selection...

Calculus I-II-III (12)
Linear Algebra (3)
Introduction to advanced mathematics (3)
Geometry (3)
History of mathematics (3)
Introductory Statistical Methods (6)

And we've ended up with

Calculus I-II-III (prerequisite)
Linear Algebra (prerequisite)
Introduction to advanced mathematics (3)
Geometry (3)
History of mathematics (3)
Mathematical Statistics (6)
Differential Equations (3)
Advanced Calculus (3)
Algebraic Structures (3)
Two electives selected from courses that satisfy math major requirements (6)

Quite a difference, n'est pas? And all without removing a single education class.

Additional Data

2007-09-16T18:01:00.001-04:00

Here's an updated graph of the percentage of temporary visa holders in mathematics, physical science and engineering graduate programs. In 2005 (the most recent year for which data is available), the percentages were 42% for physical sciences, 44% for mathematics and 54% for engineering. These numbers reflect a slight drop from their peaks in 2001-2 due to a reduced number of visas in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

For those who want all the gory details, they can be found at the NSF website.

Restarting a conversation from October 2004

2007-09-16T17:42:00.000-04:00

It should be deeply troubling that admissions for students from countries which have previously been enthusiastic consumers of American education is up (apparently in double-digit percentage increases), especially in fields where American student participation has already declined dramatically, and in which international student participation already exceeds 50%.

It is facile and [dis]ingenuous to claim that this is a problem related to a lack of competitiveness on the part of American students. The real issue is whether the departments in question have been compromised to the extent that they no longer function for the populations that they were built to educate. Ohio University’s experience over the last two years indicates that such a compromised culture flourished for over two decades in its graduate mechanical engineering department — allowing international students to plagiarize with impunity and thus “outcompete” US citizens. Ohio is not alone and the problems detailed there may be spreading.

Realistically, American students really have very few other options to fulfill their educational needs. Degrees taken in most other nations (with the exceptions of the UK, Canada, and Australia) are usually not considered equivalent to US degrees in the US job market, and most nations are not particularly open to the notion of welcoming immigrant labor. There is also a certain amount of resentment and hostility generally directed at Americans abroad primarily owing to political issues — even in nations that are presumably allies — and it would be foolish to assume that this does not have a negative impact on those subjected to it.

There are other substantive issues involved, including the indiscriminate dissemination and loss of intellectual property, the exploitation of graduate programs to provide means and opportunity for international espionage, and the probability of successful integration of people from countries where ethnicity and religion are conflated with national identity. There are issues of representation and not-so-subtle racism — is it sound for a nation to enroll large numbers of people from a given nation (e.g. India) when it has substantial minority populations that are underserved (i.e. Hispanic, African-American, or better yet, Native American)? Not least is the issue of whether a nation has a duty to at least try to ensure the productive employment of its citizens, and whether large-scale international participation interferes with that duty.

Comment on the Inside Higher Education wesbite

A hilarious blog

2007-05-19T20:49:00.001-04:00

Still very relevant commentary on the state of education today, but with a much needed humorous attitude that helps keep us sane.

http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/

Blog Post by Joanne Jacobs

2007-05-18T17:50:00.000-04:00

Forty to sixty percent of students who start California schools as “English Learners” never reach full English proficiency; many won’t graduate from high school.

My article How Good is Good Enough? Moving California’s English Learners to English Proficiency is up on the Lexington Institute web site.

California schools lose funding when students are reclassified as “fluent English proficient,” an obviously perverse incentive. Many set high standards for reclassification: ELs have to do as well or better than the average native English speaker to qualify as proficient.

But the larger issue is that many ELs go to schools that don’t do a very good job teaching reading and writing to anyone. They’re not reclassified as proficient because they score below-average in English Language Arts on the state exam, even though they may speak “playground English” as their preferred language. ELs become proficient in English more quickly if they attend schools that focus on building the reading and writing skills of all students.

This isn’t really about teaching in English (more than 90% of ELs are in mainstream English classes) or teaching in Spanish. It’s about teaching well.

Dean at M.I.T. Resigns, Ending a 28-Year Lie

2007-04-27T12:28:00.000-04:00

Marilee Jones, 55, originally from Albany, had on various occasions represented herself as having degrees from three institutions: Albany Medical College, Union College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In fact, she had no degrees from any of those places, or anywhere else, MIT officials said.

I continue to be amazed at the attitudes that come out when something like this happens.

"something she did long ago came back and trumped [the good she did]” said Leslie Perelman, director of the program in writing and humanistic studies

No, it's not someTHING she did "long ago." It's a pattern of lies stretching across 28 years. Every time she signed a letter with her "degrees" (which is quite common for directors of admissions) she was committing fraud. I am sure the back cover of the book she co-authored prominently features her "degrees."

I am not normally pro-litigation, but I hope every student who got turned down from MIT since she became dean in 1997 sues the school.

Software Has No Effect on K-12 Performance

2007-04-06T22:30:00.000-04:00

Going high-tech doesn't lead to higher math and reading scores, according to a federal study. The study on the effectiveness of education technology was released by the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, a research arm of the US Department of Education. The study found achievement scores were no higher in classrooms using reading and math software products than in classrooms without the new products.

Researchers looked at elementary and secondary classes in 132 schools. The teachers that participated used more than a dozen software products to help deliver their lessons. Nearly all the teachers received training on the products and believed they were well prepared to use the technology in their classrooms. When asked whether they would use the products again, nearly all teachers indicated that they would. The report was based on schools and teachers not using the products in the previous school year. Whether products are more effective when teachers have more experience using them is being examined in a follow-up study. The report detailed the effectiveness of the products as a group and did not review the performance of particular programs.

[Sorry, no link]

Get a job, doofus!

2007-01-02T20:55:00.000-05:00

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/1110student-perpetual10.html

http://www.badgerherald.com/news/2006/04/20/lechner_aims_to_grad.php

He has compiled a 2.9 grade-point average

He has 242 credits (that's 20/year - noticeably less than full-time)

He has accumulated $30,000 in student loans

He has majors in theater, communications, and liberal studies; his minors are in pre-school education, health education, and women's studies. (One could not get a more useless collection of majors by throwing darts randomly at a school catalog.)

UW-Whitewater is not even a national university; it's ranked as a master's university by USN&WR.

Here we go again

2006-10-09T09:34:00.000-04:00

The homework debate

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/webwatch/2006/09/homework_under_fire.html

http://www.slate.com/id/2149593?GT1=8592

http://kerryfoxlive.com/wordpress/?p=3286

One comment stuck in my mind:

[...] Many teachers lack the skills to design homework assignments that help kids learn and don’t turn them off to learning. Today, schools of education provide varying levels of training in the art of designing homework assignments that are more than busywork, usually imbedded in courses about curriculum. Many, however, offer none [...]

Cheating!

2006-09-24T11:45:00.000-04:00

MBA students are the biggest cheats of all graduate students, with 56% admitting to using crib notes in exams, plagiarism or downloading essays from the web.

Among engineering students 54%, and among science students 50%, admitted to cheating. And even among the most honest group, the social scientists and those studying humanities, 39% admitted cheating.

Even more cheating is reported in undergraduate degree programs.

Words fail me.

Fox News Story on College

2006-08-28T08:11:00.000-04:00

Fox News ran a special on college tuition, which discussed whether or not college was worth it. I often propose the unpopular notion that college is not for everyone and is often not the right decision. However, the misinformation propagated as news in this story made my blood boil.

The most appalling error was a comparison of (a) lifetime earnings of college graduates minus tuition versus (b) lifetime earnings of high school graduates. So many errors permeated this story that it is impossible to explain them all, but here are the biggest (and keep in mind we're talking about a one minute clip here). Let's look at the smaller items before I point out the most egregious of the errors.

The story used the earnings of an average college graduate, but tuition from an elite private institution (whose graduates will earn more than the average college graduate).
The use of the average earnings of college graduates was incorrect, since the earnings of those who have MORE than a college education would have also needed to be taken into account.
The calculation did not account for time value of money (interest, inflation).

Each of these errors changes the magnitude of the difference between the high-school number and the college number but does not have a huge impact. What most shocked me about this calculation was that it double-counted the effect of college tuition, and this DOES have a huge impact on the calculation - to the extent that it makes the decision come out the opposite of what they were saying in the story.

What they did was subtract tuition from the college graduates's earnings - fair enough. But then they also took the tuition money and projected it at (an unreasonably high) interest over the working lifetime of the high school graduate. You can't have it both ways! ARGH!

Interesting

2006-07-29T10:57:00.000-04:00

From the Yale's math department's "Tips for Teachers" web page:

It is dangerous show your students that you are wasting your precious time teaching these ignorant fools.

Note the choice of words. It doesn't say "have your students think that"; it says "show."

Repeat to your students, colleagues and to yourself that you like to teach.

And maybe you will even start to believe it.

No wonder the really high-end departments have such a reputation for bad teaching.

Talent Shortage

2006-07-20T16:49:00.000-04:00

From a WSJ article today...

Corporate America is desperate to find technical talent, prompting many to step up retention efforts, while making a mad dash to move higher paid research operations to China and India. It raises new debate about caps on visas for foreign workers and the need to attract more U.S. students to the careers in math and science.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the U.S. needs 135,000 new computer professionals a year, but its universities are producing only 49,000 computer science graduates annually. The agency also predicts the need for science and engineering graduates will grow 26% to 1.25 million by 2012. However, the number of graduates in those fields has remained relatively flat for two decades.

Typical

2006-07-07T11:20:00.000-04:00

Kentucky is piloting a math program that that costs $300,000 per 30 students, owned and promoted by a contingent of politicians. The ridiculous cost is partly due to the required hardware and furniture purchases - "it's necessary to buy both the hardware and software because the software seems to interfere with other programs."

[Thanks to DVD for the link]

Student Totally Out of Line, and doesn't even know it

2006-05-11T20:40:00.000-04:00

As a former teacher, a local story that caught my eye...

Twist on an ol' song earns teen suspension

Beth Anne Cox says she meant no harm. Gwinnett County school officials see it differently: They say the 16-year-old threatened her teacher when she sang a parody of the folk song "On Top of Ol' Smokey" in class. Administrators suspended the Peachtree Ridge High School junior for five days. School officials say she disrupted the class with a threatening and inappropriate twist on the familiar lyrics. Beth Anne, who has since apologized to the teacher in writing, says she was humming the tune in class Friday and sang the words out loud when a classmate asked her about the song. "I wasn't talking to my teacher. I was talking with my friend," Beth Anne said in an interview Tuesday. "I would never threaten anyone."

The story doesn't point this out, but in the picture of Miss Cox that accompanied the story, in which she was holding up her "apology," you can clearly make out the comment, "The tone is threatening."

However, Sloan Roach, the school system's spokeswoman, said Beth Anne was upset about a grade and talked about it with her German teacher. Roach said Beth Anne later interrupted the lesson and sang the song. "What she did was perceived to be threatening," Roach said. "It caused a disruption, and the remarks were inappropriate. Based on the facts, the decision was made. It was an appropriate response." Beth Anne disputes the school's account. "I don't know where they got that from," she said. "Yes, I got a bad grade, but I wasn't going to scream and moan and cry about it. I would never threaten my teacher over one bad grade." Classmate Erik Hildebrandt supported her version of the story. He said the classroom was noisy as students played a game to review for a test. "She sang the song to me, and she wasn't looking at anyone else," Erik said. "But I'm not really surprised this happened. They have had their troubles before." Beth Anne acknowledged that tension has existed between her and the teacher. "He's very submissive, and I'm very loud and outspoken, and we just both just get irritated with one another."

This comment seems highly inappropriate to me. Miss Cox has apparently never learned that in the classrom, the teacher is in charge.

Apologies for 'Ol' Smokey' not enough

The Gwinnett County student suspended for disrupting a lesson and threatening a teacher says she won't be in that teacher's class when she returns to school next week. She has since apologized to him in a letter. When Beth Anne's suspension ends Monday, she won't return to her German class, she said Wednesday. "I don't know where I will be second period, but the school said they would find somewhere to put me," Beth Anne said. "They said I can't go back to the class because I threatened the teacher. How afraid can you be of a 16-year-old? I think he just wants to avoid me because he knows he's wrong."

I thought an apology was an acknowledgement of being wrong. If she not only thinks that the teacher was wrong, but that he KNOWS that he was wrong, then what exactly did she write in the apology?

Beth Anne said she wasn't worried about what students would say when she returned to school and that she had received more than 70 e-mails of support. A few students wore T-shirts to school Wednesday with iron-on pictures of Beth Anne, said Alex Baker, Beth Anne's best friend. Alex wore one of the shirts to school Wednesday and said she'd made bout 15 shirts for other students. She said she planned to wear her shirt for the rest of the week. "Beth Anne didn't disrupt the class or do anything wrong," said Alex, who is also in the German class. "What they're doing to her is just wrong."

In addition to the suspension, the school principal revoked permission for Beth Anne to attend Peachtree Ridge next school year. She has attended the high school since her freshman year. Beth Anne said her family prefers the school because it is less crowded than North Gwinnett High, her neighborhood school. Beth Anne will be required to attend North Gwinnett next year, said her mother. Roach said Wednesday that Beth Anne will be able to make up all missed work and receive full credit. Roach said principals review permissive transfer requests annually. She said the principal's decision not to allow Beth Anne to return to Peachtree Ridge next year is final. Beth Anne's mother would like her to graduate from Peachtree Ridge and wants assurances the suspension won't hurt her daughter's grades.

You know, what Mrs. Cox wants is completely irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. Perhaps instead of making demands of the school, she should teach her child some manners!

Roach said Wednesday that Beth Anne will be able to make up all missed work and receive full credit.

Make up all work!? Full credit?! Then she didn't really get a suspension, did she? More like a week's vacation. Appalling.

Book by Joanne Jacobs

2006-05-05T20:56:00.002-04:00

Joanne Jacobs has just published a book Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the School That Beat the Odds (Palgrave MacMillan, New York, 2005) about a charter school that prepares Hispanic students for college. After 19 years as a San Jose Mercury News editorial writer and Knight Ridder columnist, she quit in 2001 to do freelance reporting, start an education blog and write Our School.

Our School enables readers to step inside a charter school that’s struggling, learning from mistakes, adapting and improving. Our School follows the principal, teachers and students at Downtown College Prep, a San Jose charter high school that’s 90% Hispanic. Most students come from Spanish-speaking immigrant families; most earned D's and F’s in middle school and enter ninth grade with fifth-grade reading and math skills. They were left behind academically but promoted anyhow. Operating with a work-your-butt-off philosophy, DCP now outscores the average California high school on the state’s Academic Performance Index and sends all graduates to four-year colleges.

Thursday, May 11
Washington, DC
On Thu 5/11 at 5:30 pm, she will be speaking and signing books at William E. Doar Jr. Public Charter School for the Performing Arts, 705 Edgewood St. NE, Washington, DC (near the Rhode Island and Brookland-CUA metro stops). In addition, the school’s musical troupe will perform and guests will be asked to donate a children’s book to the school library.

Founded in 2004, WEDJ enrolls students from all over the city. Students take classes in music, dance and theater and perform in at least one public exhibition or performance each year. A longer school day and Saturday classes ensure enough time for academics and arts. Currently an elementary, the school is adding middle and high school classes in the fall.

Wednesday, May 17
Philadelphia, PA
On Wed 5/17 at 5:30 pm, she will be speaking at Russell Byers Charter School, 1911 Arch St., in downtown Philadelphia.

Founded in 2001, the school educates children in kindergarten (a two-year program starting at age four) through sixth grade using the Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound program. The school was created to honor the memory of Russell Byers, a Daily News columnist killed in a mugging.

(Both the Washington and Philadelphia charter schools primarily serve black students.)

Here's what Jacobs has to say about the book: I observed classes, faculty meetings, board meetings, disciplinary hearings, parent sessions and school assemblies. I shadowed the principal, sat in on a teacher evaluation, helped the Mock Trial club and tutored ninth graders at the school. I hung around. Our School shows how a do-it-yourself school with a work-your-butt-off philosophy can make a difference for left-behind students. While the book puts DCP in the context of the charter school movement, it doesn’t pretend to be a scholarly study. Think Tracy Kidder meets Up the Down Staircase.

You can learn more about the book at http://www.ourschoolbook.com/, and you can learn more about the school at http://www.downtowncollegeprep.org/.

Reviews of the book

“Our School, a vivid account of the creation and first years of a charter high school, reads like a novel whose characters are both stereotypical and improbable. But this isn't fiction. The challenges are real, the stakes high, the lessons important, and the achievements extraordinary.” - Henry Miller, Wall Street Journal, 11/17/2005

“Our School is eye-opening, chilling and inspiring. Up-close and personal, it follows the lives of the students, parents and faculty who had faith that they could break free and succeed.” - Daniel Weintraub, Sacramento Bee, 11/20/2005

“Our School at once illustrates the possibilities and the challenges of urban education. But it's the former that makes it an exciting and important book.” - Andrew J. Rotherham, New York Post, 1/29/2006

“The story delves into the heart of the charter school movement with a glimpse into the life of a single charter school. Jacobs takes the reader into the lives of the struggling students as they shed their troubled pasts and learn to appreciate the rules and strive for a future in college.” - NewsWire, Center for Education Reform

“DCP is enthusiastically experimental. When something's not working (e.g., trying to teach algebra when kids don't know fractions), they try something else. As Jacobs tells the story of DCP's amazingly committed teachers and their (mostly) courageous students, even hardcore opponents of charter schools may soften.” - Publishers Weekly

“Our School is wonderfully written and wonderfully informative. I cannot think of another book that provides such a close and honest look at a successful charter school serving immigrant kids in grave danger of striking out in American life. The fascinating story that Joanne Jacobs tells zips along like a good novel, but it also delivers an important and optimistic message to educators who want to rescue kids.” - Abigail Thernstrom, co-author of No Excuses and America in Black and White

“Jacobs has written a ground-breaking book about the most interesting, and potentially important, change in American schooling in the last 15 years.” - Jay Mathews, Washington Post education columnist, author of Harvard Schmarvard, Escalante, and Class Struggle

“Our School is today's Up the Down Staircase. It's not often a book about my profession gets it right.” - Robert Wright, teacher, Morrill Middle School, San Jose CA

On NCTM Mathematics

2006-04-18T17:10:00.000-04:00

Essays by William G. Quirk on various aspects of NCTM math:
Understanding the Original (1989) NCTM Standards
Understanding the Revised (2000) NCTM Standards
Understanding the Shallow Learning Expectations Promoted by NCTM Standards
Memorization and Practice are Ruled Out in NCTM Standards
The Anti-Content Mindset of the NCTM Standards
How the NCEE Limits K-12 Math

Truly excellent! My own views are almost exactly reflected by those articles. I have long wished to find the time to develop articles of similar depth explaining what is wrong with NCTM math.

FL bill would allow HS students to pick "majors"

2006-03-27T15:47:00.000-05:00

The Florida House passed a bill that would require incoming high school freshmen to declare a major, just like college students. The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate.

Students would be able to major in humanities, English, communications, math, science, history, social studies, arts, foreign languages and vocational skills. To graduate, students would have to earn 15 core credits in courses like math, science and English, 4 credits in major courses, and 5 credits in elective courses like drama and Spanish.

Source: CNN

I think this is a terrible idea! Our high school students graduate with little enough knowledge as it is. We are now going to remove 4 credits of general education and make it a "major"? What kind of "major" is a high school student equipped to handle? Backing up a step, how many high school freshmen are ready to choose a major at 14, when a considerable number of college students change majors?

Most College Students Lack Skills

2006-01-23T14:29:00.000-05:00

More than 50% of students at four-year schools and more than 75% at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks. That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.

And that's not even the scary part of the story...

Overall, the average literacy of college students is significantly higher than that of adults across the nation!

Saxon Lovefest?

2006-01-01T13:00:00.000-05:00

If you Google "Saxon Math Textbooks" to find information on this series of math textbooks, every link is breathless with worship of these books. I don't understand it.

I know some studies proved that the books were very effective with children from low-income families. Now, I am not a fan of the new new math or constructivism or putting lots of pictures in math books or any of that crap, but all the sites I read chastised state textbook adoption boards for not adopting these books. The fact is these books suck! Having used them in an actual classroom setting, I believe the claims that they work well with below-average students, but if you have an average (or God help you, an above-average) student, these books are worse than useless. I believe they are detrimental.

Ebonics

2005-07-19T17:34:00.000-04:00

Incorporating Ebonics into a new school policy that targets black students, the lowest-achieving group in the San Bernardino City Unified School District, may provide students a more well-rounded curriculum, said a local sociologist. Mary Texeira, a sociology professor at Cal State San Bernardino, commended the San Bernardino Board of Education for approving the policy in June. Texeira suggested that including Ebonics in the program would be beneficial for students.

Note the subtle switch from "may" to "will be." Evidence? Dr. Texeira thinks so. A couple of her more liberal colleagues think so too.

Ebonics, a dialect of American English that is spoken by many blacks throughout the country, was recognized as a separate language in 1996 by the Oakland school board.

So a school board is qualified to decide what is or is not a separate language? Wow! Those guys are really good out there in Oakland. But maybe they should have deferred to the folks at the Linguistic Society of America, who disagree with them. An article which took a very balanced view of the Oakland decision can be found here. It (and other articles I have seen on this decision) ignore the question of whether Ebonics should be called or language or a dialect, since this is only a matter of semantics anyway. However, it disagrees with almost everything else in the 1996 resolution. Quite an interesting read.

Len Cooper, who is coordinating the pilot program at the two city schools, said San Bernardino district officials do not plan to incorporate Ebonics into the program. "Because Ebonics can have a negative stigma, we're not focusing on that,' Cooper said. "We are affirming and recognizing Ebonics through supplemental reading books (for students).'

Translation: Because Ebonics can have a negative stigma, district officials plan to incorporate Ebonics into the program WHILE CALLING IT SOMETHING ELSE.

"At every step we will see positive results,' [Board member Danny] Tillman said.

Only in education do we make such conclusions BEFORE the results are out. Hey, Danny, why don't we wait until the END of the year and then objectively analyze whether or not the results were positive?

[Texeira] said a child's self confidence is tied to his or her cultural identity.

Huh? It is? Why? Because she says so? What's the basis for such an absurd position?

She compared the low performance of black students to starvation. "How can you be angry when you feed a family of starving children?'

I disagreed with the previously quoted sentence, but I was at least able to discern some actual meaning in it. But here I am at a complete loss. What does this mean? Can anyone tell me what either the tortured metaphor or surreal question means? This is the kind of obtuse thinking that I've come to expect from the edu-left. Sentences like this do not betray an inability to communicate as is often suggested; they betray an inability to think.

[The complete article can be found here. Thanks to DVD for bringing it to my attention.]

Question

2005-02-26T14:25:00.000-05:00

http://www.onlinemathcourses.org

Middle Mathematics
Algebra I
Algebra II
Geometry
Pre-Calculus
Calculus I
Calculus II
Probability & Statistics

Each course awards 3 semester hours of graduate credit (500 level or higher) from the School of Graduate Studies.

Can someone explain to me why a course in high school algebra merits 3 graduate credits?

Computer Education Research

2005-02-12T22:55:00.000-05:00

A topic interesting to me in a personal way, since Cobb County Schools where I live are talking about spending $70 million to get every student a computer.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1206/p11s01-legn.html

From a sample of 175,000 15-year-old students in 31 countries, researchers at the University of Munich announced that performance in math and reading had suffered significantly among students who have more than one computer at home. And while students seemed to benefit from limited use of computers at school, those who used them several times per week at school saw their academic performance decline significantly as well.

Computer technology "is used too much and very unwisely in the younger years, and not wisely enough in the older years," says Todd Oppenheimer.

Georgia Education System Challenged in Court

2005-01-28T15:00:00.000-05:00

Fed up with his options, Williams joined two other Atlanta parents in filing a lawsuit Thursday in Fulton County Superior Court, asking that the state's education system be declared unconstitutional. The parents seek fundamental changes that would greatly increase their educational choices. The suit suggests several ways to accomplish this, including new attendance rules allowing parents to send their children to any public school, no matter where they live. It also proposes that parents be allowed to use tax money to help pay private school tuition, though the hot-button word "vouchers" is never mentioned. The parents also suggest the virtual elimination of regulations that have limited the number of charter schools.

Big Surprise!

2004-12-22T09:56:00.000-05:00

One of the feature articles in the January 2005 issue of Scientific American states...

Boosting people's sense of self-worth has become a national preoccupation. Yet surprisingly, research shows that such efforts are of little value in fostering academic progress.

"Surprisingly"? I don't see what's so surprising. I'm not surprised. Are you surprised? The entire article is worth a read and can be found here.

Teachers Who Fail

2004-12-13T17:29:00.000-05:00

http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041212/NEWS/412120357/

More than half a million Florida students sat in classrooms last year in front of teachers who failed the state's basic skills tests for teachers. Many of those students got teachers who struggled to solve high school math problems or whose English skills were so poor they flunked reading tests designed to measure the very same skills students must master before they can graduate.

A Herald-Tribune investigation has found that fully a third of teachers, teachers' aides and substitutes failed their certification tests at least once. The Herald-Tribune found teachers who had failed in nearly every school in each of the state's 67 counties.

Nine percent of teachers failed portions of the tests at least four times, according to the Herald-Tribune study.

[Thanks to DVD for the link.]

Apologies

2004-12-07T15:58:00.000-05:00

Apologies for my lack of recent posting in this blog. I am by no means abandoning this blog. It's just that, as I mentioned before, it is difficult to come up with material suitable for this format. I am continuing to work on an analysis of the NCTM Standards and hope to have some posts on this topic which will be of manageable length for this blog. I am also reading through the new (old?) California curriculum and expect to be able to compose a short review in the near future. Beyond that, I'm not sure what to do.

Comments, questions, suggestions or rants are always welcome.

Quick Blurb

2004-12-07T15:56:00.000-05:00

High school students in Hong Kong, Finland and South Korea do best in mathematics among those in 40 surveyed countries while students in the United States finished 28th.

The survey also questioned students about their own views of themselves and their work, and found that while good students were more likely to think they were good, countries that did well often had a large number of students who did not feel they were doing well. In the United States, 36% of the students agreed with the statement, "I am just not good at mathematics," while in Hong Kong, 57% agreed. In South Korea the figure was 62%. Of the United States students, 72% said they got good grades in mathematics, more than in any other country. In Hong Kong, only 25% of the students said they got good marks, the lowest of any country.

[Thanks to DVD for providing the NYT link.]

National Test of Student Math Skills

2004-11-18T19:25:00.000-05:00

http://www.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/11/18/math.test.ap/index.html

The national test of student math skills is filled with easy questions, raising doubts about recent gains in achievement tests, a study contends. On the eighth-grade version of the test, almost 40% of the questions address skills taught in first or second grade, according to the report by Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at The Brookings Institution.

So, is the test flawed? Maybe...

The study analyzed questions from the 2003 math tests, and then determined a grade level for those questions based on the Singapore math textbook program. Loveless said he chose that program because of its clarity and strong international reputation, and he said it compared well to the math-class sequences used in states such as California and North Carolina. But using Singapore as a model presents skewed results, said Sharif Shakrani, deputy executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board. Math is taught differently in that country, with heavy concentration on computation early before other topics are introduced. U.S. schools go for breadth, he said, with more math skills to cover each year. Overall, he said, the questions on the national in fourth grade and eighth grade are commensurate with what's being taught in those grades.

I think I understand. If Mr. Shakrani is to be believed, it's not the TEST that's flawed; it's the instruction. Math is taught "differently" (meaning "well") in Singapore...

"I contend that if we do what he suggests, moving to much more complex skills, it would be akin to giving a test in Russian," Shakrani said. "We already are not doing well. If you increase the cognitive function of the math concepts and the way you test them, you will end up with scores so low you will not be able to make sense of the results."

OK, I guess I don't understand after all. WTH does this mean? Don't test at the appropriate level because the scores would be "too" low?? Then what are the exams measuring . . . and what are they supposed to measure???

Number of foreign graduate students down

2004-11-05T16:50:00.000-05:00

A new survey indicates the number of foreign graduate students enrolling for the first time at American universities is down 6 percent this year -- the third straight decline after a decade of growth. Educators worry the trend is eroding America's position as the world's leader in higher education.

But the results of the survey, of 122 member institutions by the Council of Graduate Schools, are still alarming to educators. American universities are highly dependent on foreign students for teaching and research help, particularly in the sciences and in engineering, a field in which foreigners comprise 50 percent of graduate enrollment.

How did we allow ourselves to get into a situation where if foreign students do not arrive at our graduate schools in sufficient numbers, these institutions can't function properly ("alarming" is the word used in the article)? Surely, policies should be enacted to ensure that we have sufficient home-grown talent to fill these slots?

California Mathematics Draft Framework

2004-11-02T22:31:00.000-05:00

Wow! I’m genuinely impressed. California, which so often is a force for idiocy in education, is blazing trails towards a new (old?) mathematics curriculum.

http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/index.asp

I’ll go over all the standards in more detail later, but for now I’ll make a few quick observations on the chapter on geometry.

Students demonstrate understanding by identifying and giving examples of undefined terms, axioms, theorems, and inductive and deductive reasoning
Students construct, and judge the validity of, a logical argument and give counterexamples to disprove a statement.
Students perform basic constructions with a straightedge and compass, such as angle bisectors, perpendicular bisectors, and the line parallel to a given line through a point off the line.
Students write geometric proofs, including proofs by contradiction.
Students prove basic theorems involving congruence and similarity.
Students prove and use theorems involving the properties of parallel lines cut by a transversal, the properties of quadrilaterals, and the properties of circles.
Students find and use measures of sides and of interior and exterior angles of triangles and polygons to classify figures and solve problems.
Students prove theorems and solve problems regarding relationships among chords, secants, tangents, inscribed angles, and inscribed and circumscribed polygons of circles.
Students prove the Pythagorean theorem.
Students know the definitions of the basic trigonometric functions defined by the angles of a right triangle.
Students prove theorems by using coordinate geometry, including the midpoint of a line segment, the distance formula, and various forms of equations of lines and circles.
Students know the effect of rigid motions on figures in the coordinate plane and space, including rotations, translations, and reflections.

Sincere kudos to the drafters of this curriculum!

Review of "A Core Curriculum"

2004-11-01T21:21:00.000-05:00

Some comments on "A Core Curriculum"

Page 1: "A need to enlarge the scope of this Newtonian mathematics curriculum began to emerge as mathematics increasingly became a tool in the social sciences."

What exactly do social scientists need from math that is not covered by the standard curriculum? A course in statistics in lieu of pre-calculus or calculus has always been available for students so inclined. Beyond that, the traditional curriculum provides the training to "think mathematically" of which NCTMers are so enamoured. Replacing the "Newtonian" mathematics curriculum with a bunch of vaguely connected statistical concepts dooms students to a lifetime of misunderstanding and misapplying statistics to their daily lives. The unassailable fact is that calculus is still the keystone to understanding all of this allegedly "new" math.

Page 8: Dart Throwing Exercise - "Measure a distance eight feet from the target and place a piece of tape on the floor. Standing behind the tape, the dart thrower throws some number of times at the target."

The purpose of this exercise is basically to do a simulation to discover the percentage of darts that fall within the white area on the target. The mathematical point to take away is that the white area is 78.54% of the square regardless of how many circles are circumscribed in the square. Of course, the number of darts that could reasonably be thrown by the students is not even remotely sufficient to get a reasonable accurate approximation. Even if sufficient accuracy were somehow obtained, statistical fluctuations will ensure that the percentages will never be the same for all the scenarios.

Page 34: "Assessment matters: One approach is to incorporate more student self-assessment. Ask students to write a brief self-assessment after they have completed a written assignment. Writing in a journal is also a good way to get students to reflect on their own performance."

Page 37: "When the instructional emphasis is on concept building through situations reflecting real-world questions and activities, the assessment should be of a similar nature. Open-ended holistically scored questions, interviews, observation of group work, testing with the use of physical models like those used in instruction, and student self-assessment are appropriate approaches."

I will let these monuments of edu-speak stand on their own.

Page 73: "Our axiom is that concepts are more powerful than procedures and more accessible to more students."

Brilliant. Evidence? Experiments? Research? Fuggedaboutit. Assume the very statement you're trying to prove. Then nobody can challenge you. You'd think mathematics educators would be familiar with the meaning of "axiom," but let's go through the motions. "A self-evident or universally recognized truth; A self-evident principle or one that is accepted as true without proof as the basis for argument." Should we really be accepting the statement above as an "axiom"? Come on now.

Page 113: "Old habits inconsistent with the new must be discarded."

Whether or not the old habits were effective and whether or not the new habits are effective.

Page 115: "The half-life of the education of an engineer has been estimated at ten years. In one decade, half of an engineer's training will become obsolete."

This statement is constantly used in support of the plan to replace "Newtonian" mathematics with a statistics-based curriculum. To me, this statement provides support for the diametrically opposite position. If engineers trained with "Newtonian" mathematics can survive the obsolescence of half their knowledge base and continue to function effectively, then this is precisely the training we should give everyone.

Page 117: "Use inductive reasoning to develop ideas where deduction requires too many underpinnings. Consider postulating important chunks of content, then use deductive reasoning from that base of understanding. Conclude coursework with modest deductive systems."

This would destroy the entire logical structure of the deductive system under investigation. As the NCTM should understand, the purpose of introducing deductive systems in high school is not so much to present the material itself but rather to present the concept of a deductive system. Presenting it in the way suggested above would destroy the rationale for doing this and eliminate any educational benefit in doing it at all.

Page 117: "Encourage students to investigate questions of interest to themselves."

Without the teacher controlling this process, most of the questions investigated will be of no value and irrelevant to the content. The uncomfortable (to the ed school powers-that-be) fact is that certain avenues of investigation are fruitful and most others are not; the teacher must provide this direction.

"Reshaping Assessment"

2004-11-01T20:51:00.000-05:00

"A Core Curriculum", NCTM (1992), page vii

Analysis of students' written work remains important. However, single-answer paper-and-pencil tests are often inadequate to assess the development of students' abilities to analyze and solve problems, make connections, reason mathematically, and communicate mathematically. Potentially richer sources of information include student-produced analyses of problem situations, solutions to problems, reports of investigations, and journal entries. Moreover, if calculator and computer technologies are now accepted as part of the environment in which students learn and do mathematics, these tools should also be available to students in most assessment situations.

Let's analyze this innocuous looking statement from the preface of A Core Curriculum.

"Single-answer paper-and-pencil tests are often inadequate." – Why? What's the evidence for this statement?

"Student-produced analyses of problem situations" – What does this mean?

"solutions to problems" – Exactly how is this different from a "single-answer paper-and-pencil test"?

"Reports of investigations" – What exactly is a high school student qualified to "investigate"? Certainly, the occasional research project may be helpful and even desireable, but for the most part traditional techniques are a much more efficient method for imparting mathematical knowledge than student investigations. Of course, the premise of NCTM math is that this statement is not true. Fine, what evidence supports the thesis that student investigations are more efficient? I've never seen any.

"journal entries" – too stupid for words.

Most interesting of all is the last sentence. "IF calculator and computer technologies are now accepted . . . these tools should be available." They are using the very statement for which they are attempting to provide justification as their hypothesis. Nice.

In summary, what evidence supports the counter-intuitive notions that (a) high school students can handle complex, multi-step, open-ended (often ill-posed) investigations and (b) this is the best way to teach basic mathematical concepts?

Scary

2004-10-25T17:22:00.000-04:00

I had to read the following paragraph several times to make sure I was not misunderstanding what was said.

Dr. Martin Haberman, Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, in a talk entitled Can Teacher Education Close the Achievement Gap? given to AERA on April 2, 2002, in New Orleans, said:

The most efficient ways of recruiting and selecting the wrong people at the initial teacher preparation level i.e. those who will never take positions teaching diverse children in poverty or who will quit or fail if they deign to try - are the criteria most commonly used: a composition on why I want to teach, G.P.A., letters of reference, a basic skills test, etc. These irrelevant criteria are frequently used in traditional and alternative certification programs. Actually, undergraduate GPA does predict. If it is extremely high in courses outside of education it predicts quitting and failure.

I urge you to read his entire speech!

Response to Comment

2004-10-25T10:03:00.000-04:00

Superdestroyer wrote…

You may want to check the real statistics on graduate students in engineering in the US. Graduate students in engineering are more white than anything else, more native [than] foreign and most of the foreign went undergraduate in the US. However, the number have gone down a little.

Thanks for the link to this data. It was most enlightening. However, you seem to have completely missed the point of what this data is actually showing. I was talking about mathematics and physics, and you brought up engineering. If you look at the data you provided, you will see that engineering actually has a considerably LARGER percentage of temporary visa holders than either math or physics. In fact, among all the fields represented in your data, engineering is the one with the largest number as well as the largest increase in temporary visa holders, and the percentage in 2002 stood at an alarming 49%! This is exactly what I’m talking about. I’m not sure exactly what you’re debating, unless it's that 51% native - 49% foreign is not a problem.

Your claims that students are more "white than anything else" that "most of the foreign went undergraduate in the US" are absolutely NOT supported by this data.

Edit (9/16/2007): In attempting to create a new graph with more recent NSF data, I accidentally overwrote the graph that was part of this post. Note that on the new graph using data through 2005 the engineering foreign visa student percentage is above 50%. See my blog post dated 9/16/2007 for more details.

Also, probably the total number of high students taking calculus in the US is greater than it has ever been before. Why do you keep claiming that US schools are failing. How many US high students graduate in 1964 were taking calculus?

I checked; this is actually correct. The number of students taking calculus has gone up consistently since 1955 (the first year the AP Calculus exam was offered). Even more encouraging, the percent of students taking AP Calculus has increased. But these are absolutely NOT the students about whom I’m concerned. Even now, only about 2% of high school students take calculus. Anybody in this elite group is already a gifted math student who is going to do well regardless of what the school system inflicts on him or her. The students about whom I actually am concerned – and the ones whom US schools are indeed failing – are the ones who could be successful in math, science or engineering, but who are not provided with the skills they need because of the NCTM math idiocy pervading our high school mathematics curriculum.

A Non-Math Example

2004-10-24T19:07:00.000-04:00

Just to clarify what I'm talking about, I found an example from outside the realm of math and science. This should allow me to further illustrate and expand my point without any confusion.

The following are the requirements for a social studies education major at a well-known and well-respected private school (which falls into the Top National University category in the USN&WR rankings). By the way, if anyone recognizes the school, I am in no way trying to pick on this particular institution; the social studies education major is pretty much the same across the country.

Subject matter:
GEOG 101 – Global Environment: Understanding Physical Geography
ECON 101 – Economic Principles and Problems
PSYC 101 – General Psychology
SOC 101 – Introduction to Sociology OR ANTH 101 – Introduction to Anthropology
POL 101 – American Government and Politics
GEOG 130 – Introduction to Human Geography
POL 150 – Comparative Government and Politics
HIST 201, 202 – World Civilization OR HIST 211, 212 – United States History
HIST 364 – History of [State]
One sophomore-level geography course
One sophomore-level economics course
One junior-level psychology course
One junior-level history course

Education:
Educ 276 – Exploration of Teaching
Educ 286 - Instructional Technology in Teaching
Educ 350 - Adolescent Development in an Education Context
Educ 352 - Exceptional Education
Educ 353 - Multicultural Education
Educ 377 - Teaching Methods and Instruction
Educ 378 - Practicum in Secondary Education
Educ 379 - Classroom Management
Educ 476 - Internship

What exactly is a graduate of this program qualified to teach? This "major" consists of courses in a bunch of different fields, many of them 101 survey-type courses with no more than 3 courses in any single field, with the exception of history which boasts 4. But of course, history is the field with the most appalling gap of all, since it doesn't even include introductions to both U.S. History and World History, subjects that all social studies teachers end up teaching at some point! So we are told that someone is qualified to teach a subject when they've never taken even a college survey course in it.

This major is clearly in need of toughening up. It matters not if this major is populated by or avoided by "upper middle class white kids" or "Asian kids." If this major is toughened up and students who would complete it in its current state are scared away after it becomes "too tough," then them's the breaks and that can't be helped. We can not allow candidate supply & demand considerations to affect curriculum decisions.

It has been my experience in discussing this with a wide range of people that this major's deficiencies are immediately obvious to most people. Unfortunately, the same thing can not be said about the deficiencies in college math education majors. Perhaps that is because most people are more comfortable with the subjects above than they are with mathematics. Over the course of the next couple of weeks, I will attempt to make a strong case that the mathematics education major (and by extension, the high school math curriculum) is as deficient as the major described above, even if this is less obvious at first glance.

Response to Comment

2004-10-24T17:48:00.000-04:00

Superdestroyer wrote...

Your logic reminds me of the military logic of when they are short of good special ops troops, they always come up with the idea of making training harder. I do not see how making high school math harder is going to encourage more upper middle class white kids to go into it.

Your lack of logic (or lack of reading comprehension or interest in arguing for argument's sake -- I'm not really sure what's going on here) boggles my mind. You are completely missing my point; I can not believe that my words are that unclear. I will attempt to elaborate one more time, but I grow seriously weary of this.

I am NOT saying that we are short of native students who complete mathematics courses. I AM saying that students who complete the pre-calculus curriculum in US high schools are not able to compete in college math courses with students who complete the pre-calculus curriculum in foreign high schools. Further, students who complete an undergraduate math major in US colleges are not able to compete in graduate math courses with students who complete an undergraduate math major in foreign colleges. To extend your special ops analogy, if we had plenty of special ops troops but when we put them against the special ops troops of other countries, they got slaughtered, surely the proper response absolutely would be more training. Do you disagree?
I DON'T have the slightest interest in encouraging more upper middle class white kids to go into mathematics. I DO have an interest in getting (a) more students who complete US high school mathematics to have the tools to compete in an undergraduate math major and (b) more students who complete an undergraduate math major to have the tools to compete in a graduate math program. How you continue to translate this into "upper middle class white" is something I can not even begin to comprehend. Why upper-middle class? Presumably, mathematical ability is distributed normally with respect to income? I would assume that lower-middle class, upper class and lower class students can be as successful as upper-middle class students in math, science and engineering, so I don't understand your focus on that single group.
The addition of term "white" just confuses me. I have repeatedly attempted to make clear that my point is NOT a racial or ethnic or cultural one. My point IS about U.S. versus foreign training. U.S. doesn't mean "white"; it could just as well mean black, Asian, Native American, or Latino (not that this last one is actually a race, but I will bow to the common mis-use of the word). How anything that I've said can be construed as referring to "white" only is unclear to me. When I point to a list of names as an example, my point is NOT that the names are not "white", but rather that (based on my experience - more on this below) they are not U.S. citizens. Yes, I understand that the United States are very much a melting pot, but in my fairly extensive observation of this matter, a Lu or Kim or Nguyen or Yagamuchi in a graduate mathematics program is overwhelmingly more likely to be from a foreign academic background than a U.S. academic background.

It will just encourage more of them to go into law so that they can spend their time second guessing and nitpicking people who can do math.

The difference between your special ops analogy and the mathematics situation is that there is not a well defined special ops curriculum. Regardless of how much training you've inflicted on special ops troops, you can always choose to train more. With mathematics, there is a well-defined standard to complete (geometry covers topics A, B, C and algebra covers topics X, Y, Z ) and you're done. The curriculum needs to be exactly this hard and no harder (and no easier either). If the curriculum is at this appropriate level and students are "encouraged" to bail and go into law instead, then so be it. Watering down the curriculum to keep them doesn't do anybody any good -- not the students themselves or society at large. If this is truly the situation we're in, then we can train the few who are willing and able to complete this curriculum and continue to fill in the gaps with those trained in foreign institutions. That's not ideal, but it's hardly the end of the world. And it would give those few who are interested the tools to compete against the best that other countries have to offer on an equal footing. Can you imagine if we adjusted the difficulty of the medical curriculum to adjust to the supply of medical candidates? I'd be afraid to go to the doctor! Same thing that's true in medicine is true in mathematics -- there's a specified body of knowledge that needs to be covered, and our schools aren't covering it properly. That's the only point I've ever been trying to make.

PS, in my experience at a large, state university, most of the kids with Asian names are from America. Just look at the enrollment of Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax County Virginia (one of the three best public high school in the US). The school is 40% Asian. Also, I doubt that all of the Asian at UCLA or Cal-Berkley are fresh off the boat.

Well, that's not MY experience, or the experience of any number of fellow students who did graduate work in numerous types of programs (math, physics, astronomy, engineering) and types of institutions all across the country. Since you don't actually have any facts to contradict this fairly broad experience -- TJHSST may well be a counter-example but I couldn't actually find any numbers to confirm this (not that one example would constitute disproof of my general observation in any case) and your speculation regarding UCLA and Berkley isn't actually proof of anything -- I don't see how we can productively continue this particular line of discussion.

En Francais (In French)

2004-10-23T16:44:00.000-04:00

I came across this education blog site whose content is very similar to mine. If there are any readers who read French (and I know there is at least one), you may want to take a look.

Filosofia Barata (Cheap Philosophy)

2004-10-23T16:18:00.000-04:00

The capacity to learn is a gift;
The ability to learn is a skill;
The willingness to learn is a choice.

[original source unknown; I first saw this in Dune: House Harkonnen by Herbert & Anderson]

All of us have our God-given talents, so there's isn't anything I can do about the first sentence. As superdestroyer and allen have commented, there are strong cultural reasons why many students are unwilling to tackle math, science and engineering. While this is a serious problem, it is not one which I am particularly qualified to address. My interest lies mostly (and as far as this blog is concerned, entirely) in the second sentence: the ability to learn is a skill. Our high school (and increasingly, college) math programs need serious attention if they are provide those who are willing and able to tackle these fields the skills they need to be successful.

Response to Comment

2004-10-23T15:12:00.000-04:00

Superdestroyer wrote...

How to you where the graduate students at the University of Chicago went to undergraduate let alone high school? Want to bet many of those Asian sounding names are Americans?

This is certainly possible. But my experience in graduate school would argue strongly against this. The students in graduate school with me with Asian sounding names almost universally did have foreign undergraduate preparation. And this phenomenom only becomes more pronounced when you climb up the academic food chain from the state schools I attended to the University of Chicago and other top schools.

My guess is that most of them just happen to come from social settings that emphasize hard work and do not look down at being "nerdy" but instead look down at being an "air head."

Well, then, that's an additional problem in our culture beyond what I've been discussing. But that is neither here nor there as to whether our high school and undergraduate math preparation is up to snuff. It's not. At the college level, our high school graduates can not compete with students trained in foreign high schools. To see evidence of this, all you have to do is look at the obscene number of remedial courses offered at even our "elite" colleges. And beyond that look at the courses offered which are not labelled remedial but which should be covered at the high school level.

Introductory Algebra (wth is this anyway?)
"College" Algebra (this is just a rehash of high school algebra)
Trigonometry
Pre-Calculus (I'm willing to cut a little bit of slack with this one, but really it belongs no later than the senior year of high school)

This then becomes a domino effect. At the graduate school level, our college graduates can no longer compete with students trained in foreign colleges.

My argument is that most of the upper middle class white kids who are capable of taking the math prep courses in undergraduate do not want to put in the hard work for majors in math or science because it would interfere with their social lives and their drinking.

I'm not disagreeing with you. I agree completely with this diagnosis. But I see this as a third problem (beyond my original point that U.S. math education is lacking and your earlier point that our culture looks down on "nerdy" behavior). I'm really most interested in the first problem. If as suggested by your comments (and I agree for the most part), cultural attitudes are such that math programs are not well populated by U.S. citizens, then so be it. But those programs at both the HS and undergrad levels need to have a higher level than they presently have!

As a final point, I will mention that you are very much mistaken if you think that if they wanted to, the upper middle class "white" kids (Latinos can be white too, you know) can still do well in a rigorous college math major after the sub-standard math curriculum they complete in high school. A few quick thoughts on this...

If you're not ready to take at the very least Calculus I (without preparatory "pre-calculus" courses and other such nonsense) your first semester in college, you will most likely never do particularly well in a math or physics major.
Without prior experience in difficult courses (in whatever field) requiring tons of homework, these students are often unable to handle the amount of work it takes to do even moderately well in college math courses. This is not generally a skill one develops on demand as soon as its need becomes suddenly apparent. Failure is the more common response to this situation.
Without the sharpening of the intellect that comes from an intellectually stimulating curriculum WAY before these students are even thinking about going to college, most of these students lack the necessary logical thinking abilities to be successful in such programs.

In my opinion, a sub-standard HS preparation in mathematics pretty much dooms these students to failure in undergraduate math, physics and engineering programs. Yes, the super-geniuses can always overcome this handicap and succeed. But the more average (who could have been successful in these programs if equipped with the right tools) will fail miserably.

Response to Comment

2004-10-19T09:51:00.000-04:00

Superdestroyer wrote ...

It is not that the US students are not trained to compete, it is that they choose not to compete. Most suburban white kids would rather go into law, business, or government instead of grind it out against the asian kids in graduate school. Also given the long years of low pay to get a PhD in a science and the lack of job prospects, maybe the MBA or LLB are better choices, economically) than grinding it out in engineering school.

To an extent, this is correct. MBA and JD degrees are indeed financially better options; I've always viewed this as a premium that science PhD's pay for the privilege of doing what they love. However, there are two pieces of evidence that argue against fully accepting this theory.

1. Students who do choose to compete and try to get into graduate school in math, science and engineering often can't get in. It turns out that "the Asian kids" are better prepared and taking their slots. There can be no doubt this is a reflection of an inferior undergraduate preparation (unless one accepts the dubious proposition that Asian students are smarter, which I most definitely do NOT accept).

2. The lack of math preparation is a problem even among those who choose to get an MBA or JD.
(a) As an actuary, I've worked with several ERISA attorneys who are incapable of understanding basic mathematics (a serious impediment to someone who works with employee benefits plans). To them it was almost a badge of pride to admit, "I've always been horrible of math." Well, if they were better at it, they'd be better lawyers.
(b) In the business world, as you're probably aware, one of the largest new challenges facing U.S. corporations is derivatives and the appropriate management of risk. Yet U.S. students can not compete effectively for slots in Financial Mathematics programs. I urge you to look briefly at the list of current students in the University of Chicago's program.

"Hypotheticals"

2004-10-18T22:26:00.000-04:00

As promised, I've been working on a paper addressing the NCTM Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for Geometry 9-12. However, there's a particularly appalling practice in which the NCTM engages which needs to be addressed separately. Chapter 7 of the PSSM (on Geometry) on p. 310 gives the following example of geometrical reasoning, which is presumed to follow from teaching geometry using NCTM principles.

The following proof demonstrates an ability to select and focus on important elements in the diagram, and it shows a solid understanding of the concepts involved and how they can be assembled to solve the problem.

First, I noticed that since AB and DE are parallel, angles B and E must be congruent. Also, angles ACB and DCE are congruent, since they are vertical. So now I know that the two triangles (ABC corresponds to DEC) are similar by angle-angle similarity. But that tells me that their corresponding sides are proportional. Since DE = 4(AB), I know that all the sides of triangle DEC are 4 times as large as the corresponding sides of triangle ABC, so CD = 4(15) = 60.

Now I just need to find the other side of triangle DEC to find its perimeter. But DF makes it into 2 right triangles, so I can use the Pythagorean theorem on each of those. FE^2 + 48^2 = 52^2, so FE is 20. (Actually, I just noticed that this is just 4 times a 5-12-13 triangle, but I saw that too late.) Then looking at CDF, this is 12 times a 3-4-5 triangle, so CF must be 36. (I checked using the Pythagorean theorem and got the same answer.) So the perimeter is 52 + 60 + 56 = 168.

Once I find the perimeter of ABC, I'm done. But that's easy, since the scale factor from DEC to ABC is 25%. I can just divide 168 by 4 and get 42. The reason that works is that each of the sides of ABC is 25% of its corresponding side in DEC, so the whole perimeter of ABC will be 25% of DEC. We already proved that in class anyway.

Wow! That’s the most impressive display of geometrical reasoning I’ve ever seen. I taught geometry for 6 years, and not even students who earned an A in my honors geometry/trigonometry class could have written this explanation. If this is an example of what NCTM math can accomplish, I’m sold. But wait a second… “Note particularly how the fictional student finds different connections to be sure her reasoning is sound.”

Incredible! They illustrate how their methods are supposed to work with a “fictional student”!? Has any REAL student ever written anything remotely like this? Can you imagine the outrage if doctors described how experimental cures would work on “fictional” patients?! And sadly this is hardly unique in NCTM “research.”

P. 311 – “The following hypothetical example illustrates how students might investigate relationships in a dynamic geometry environment and justify or refute conclusions.”

P. 342 – “Consider the following hypothetical classroom scenario”

I must admit I find it very difficult to take "research" like this seriously. How can I craft a logical response to a book that violates the most basic tenets of valid scholarly research so flagrantly? Maybe I should instead just concoct some "fictional" students who write dissertations in algebraic geometry after completing a traditional curriculum.

Response to Comment

2004-10-18T16:54:00.000-04:00

Unknown Variable wrote...

Seems to me that this is a fine example of how we are a melting pot of nationalities and cultures.

To some extent, but don't you find it odd that all six members of the U.S. Olympic Chess Team are from one culture (the former Soviet Union)? It used to be said that U.S. players because Soviet players were true professionals who drew a salary from the USSR Sports Committee and did nothing but train for chess events, while U.S. players either (a) had other jobs so in a sense were amateurs despite their grandmaster standing or (b) had to go chasing tournaments to earn a living and thus did not have the time to train properly. Yet now the playing field has been levelled in this regard and U.S. players still can't compete. It definitely makes me wonder what's lacking in the background of the U.S. players.

Take a look at the nationalities of the players on the US National Soccer team. Would you say that because many of the players on the US squard are foreign born that there's an "athletic gap" between the US and the rest of the world? The same comparisons can be made for baseball. Would you say that we've become a country of "anti-athletes"? No.

Point taken.

The world is getting smaller. Other countries are catching up to the US' level for many things. Continuing with the sports theme. Take a look at basketball. I would say that the level of play for US players hasnt really changed for the last two decades, yet the NBA has more foreign born players than ever. Why? Because other countries are catching up to us in a game we've previously dominated. I think the same thing is going on here in the world of sciences.

Here I disagree, though. In my mind, the examples of chess, math and physics aren't really cases of others catching up to the US level, but rather cases where the US, already not the leader, is falling further behind.

Also keep in mind that over the last century (hell since the beginning of the USA), a great many of the scientific greatest accomplishments that are claimed as "US made" are from foreign born scientists.

True. What to make of this? Have US institutions always been sub-par? Certainly during the first quarter of the twentieth century, absolutely all the important math and physics was done in Europe. However, I have always believed that from around 1930 to around 1970 US preparation in these areas was on a par with European institutions. Maybe not?

...

By the way, unrelated to UV's comments, but I have been working on a paper discussing the NCTM standards in geometry. I hope to be able to post that here in the next week or so.

Anti-Intellectualism?

2004-10-16T16:09:00.000-04:00

Continuing on the idea of my previous post ... This phenomenon does not appear to be limited to math, science and engineering. Take a look at my post on the "U.S." Chess Olympic team. Have we just become a country of anti-intellectuals?

More on the PhD gap

2004-10-16T13:51:00.000-04:00

To expand on my earlier post regarding the "trickle-up" effect of bad math education on U.S. technical Ph.D. programs...

In the 1979–80 school year, for example, out of the total number of Ph.D. degrees conferred in the physical sciences, U.S. students received nearly 76% and foreign students received nearly 22% percent. (Percentages do not equal 100 because some students’ citizenship status is unknown.) In the 1996–97 school year, 57.5% of doctoral degrees in physical sciences were conferred on U.S. citizens versus 36.3% on foreign citizens. Furthermore, in that same year, of those receiving Ph.D.’s in mathematics and engineering, only 46.2% and 44.3%, respectively, were U.S. citizens whereas 46.6% and 49.5% were students with visas.

And this trend has continued since 1996-7. The bottom line is that students trained in the U.S. simply can not compete (of course, I mean in the aggregate when I say this) with foreign-trained students for the slots of our graduate schools.

Voyages

2004-10-15T16:59:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Unknown Variable for bringing up the Voyages Curriculum. This curriculum provides an excellent example of NCTM math. Here's what their own website has to say about it. I seriously want someone to explain to me how a second grader can successfully master "algebraic thinking" without knowing the basic facts of arithmetic.

http://www.metrotlc.com/mtl_voyages.asp
Voyages • Grades 1-2

Metro recognizes what teachers have known all along: most students benefit from an instructional model that includes a variety of active learning strategies. Voyages’ two distinct lesson formats meet these diverse learning needs.

Excursions lessons feature teacher-led, hands-on, real-life activities. These dynamic, interactive lessons typically take two to three days to complete.
Anchors lessons develop critical mathematics skills and concepts while emphasizing the language of mathematics and algebraic thinking.

This is another website describing the Voyages curriculum. The following is the list of topics from the Grade 1 curriculum.

Topic 1 DATA COLLECTION and ANALYSIS
Topic 2 WHOLE NUMBERS and DECIMALS I
Topic 3 GEOMETRY
Topic 4 WHOLE NUMBERS and DECIMALS II
Topic 5 MEASUREMENT
Topic 6 FRACTIONS
Topic 7 PROBABILITY

Some things to note quickly:
1) Data collection and analysis (including Organizing Data and Graphing Data) before such basic ideas as Numeration to 20, Addition Basic Facts, Strategies for Addition and Building Numbers from Tens and Ones? Are they insane?
2) Of course, the idiotic obsession with probability at all levels. Teaching likelihood to first graders?
3) Sub-topics like Addition Basic Facts, Strategies for Addition, Subtraction Basic Facts, and Strategies for Subtraction sound reasonable enough. However, as with many NCTM math concepts, such phrases often conceal much silliness. Is counting on your fingers a valid "strategy" for addition? My experience with NCTM curricula tells me the answer is yes, even though I have not worked with this particular one.

If anyone reading this has experience specifically with the Voyages math curriculum (or knows someone who does), I would love to hear from you. I am sincerely interested in seeing a set of these books, but I do not wish to support their program by buying them myself.

Response to Comment

2004-10-14T15:58:00.000-04:00

UnknownVariable said...

"This book was written in 1955!" Yet we're still here. Still world leaders in technology, math, physics, etc. One might extrapolate that this book and your posts of similar vein are similar to chicken little exclaiming that the sky is falling... or one could imagine the accomplishments we could have made if real teaching reform took place back then (and now).

I think this comment warrants a response. First of all, I should clarify that I am in no way advocating a "sky is falling" scenario. Regardless of the final conclusion of this debate on NCTM math, life will go on more or less as it always had, for better or worse. I just feel very strongly that it will be better if NCTM math is wiped off the face of our school system and education colleges.

Second and more importantly, it is worth noting that we are still world leaders only to the extent that the U.S. is able to attract talent from elsewhere in the world. It has been a good many years since U.S. undergraduate education has been up to the caliber of undergraduate education elsewhere in the world. It used to be (not that long ago, 20-30 years maybe) that this statement could only be applied to high school education.

However, that sub-standard high school education eventually resulted in a sub-standard college education. It is now becoming increasingly apparent that this sub-standard college education is in turn starting to affect graduate education; it will not be long before my statement applies to graduate education as surely as it applies to high school education.

As just a quick example, look at Georgia State University's math and statistics tenured or tenure-track faculty (I chose GSU only because I knew where I could get my hands on this info quickly, but I am sure this is fairly representative of many U.S. institutions today).

Faculty members whose entire college education was at U.S. institutions...

Jean Bevis - Ph.D. Mathematics, University of Florida, 1965
Frank Hall - Ph.D. Mathematics, North Carolina State University, 1973
Joseph Walker - Ph.D. Statistics, University of North Carolina, 1976
George Davis - Ph.D. Mathematics, University of New Mexico, 1979
Valerie A. Miller - Ph.D. Mathematics, University of South Carolina, 1985
Ronald Patterson - Ph.D. Statistics, University of South Carolina, 1985

Faculty members whose college education was in part or in whole at foreign institutions (indicating highest degree earned abroad) ...

Yu-Sheng Hsu - B.S. Mathematics, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, 1968
Draga Vidakovic - B.S. Mathematics, Belgrade University, 1979
Lifeng Ding - M.S. Applied Mathematics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, 1982
Guantao Chen - M.S. Mathematics, Huazhong Normal University, Wuhan, China, 1984
Mihaly Bakonyi - M.S. Mathematics, University of Bucharest, Romania, 1985
Zhongshan Li - M.S. Mathematics, Beijing Normal University, China, 1986
Johannes Hattingh - Ph.D. Mathematics, University of Johannesburg, 1989
Andrey Shilnikov - Ph.D. Mathematics, University of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, 1990
Susmita Datta - B.S. Physics, University of Calcutta, India, 1990?
Yichuan Zhao - M.S. Applied Mathematics, Peking University, 1991
Hongyu He - B.S. Mathematics, China, 1992?
Imre Patyi - M.S. Mathematics, Eotvos University, Budapest, Hungary, 1995
Alexandra Smirnova - M.S. Mathematics, Ural State University, 1995
Florian Enescu - B.S. Mathematics, University of Bucharest, Romania, 1996
Pulak Ghosh - M.S. Statistics, University of Calcutta, 1998
Jiawei Liu - B.S. Applied Mathematics, Tsinghua University, 1998
Gengsheng Qin - Ph.D. Statistics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 1999
Marina Arav - Ph.D. Applied Mathematics, Technion, Israel, 2000

In addition to the raw numbers, I urge you to notice the dates of the degrees awarded within each group. US graduate schools are increasingly becoming institutions where the best and brightest PhD graduates of foreign universities teach the best and brightest BS graduates of foreign universities. While certainly not a Chicken Little scenario, it certainly should worry us that the US will not be able to maintain its leadership position under these conditions. We need to be able to grow our own technical talent, and increasingly this is just not the case.

Retreat from Learning

2004-10-14T10:36:00.000-04:00

I have just received a used copy of Retreat from Learning by Joan Dunn. From the flap of the book, "Retreat from Learning is a dramatic inside report on the failure of our public high schools ... shocking picture of lowered academic standards ... Joan Dunn's account of her teaching career is a story of four years of frustration and defeat in the face of the appalling waste of America's most precious resources - the minds and hearts of our youths."

This book was written in 1955!

Unsure how to proceed

2004-10-06T22:12:00.000-04:00

After the initial elation at seeing my words on math education on the web and the subsequent flurry of activity of setting up this blog, posting material I've written elsewhere and trying to generate some buzz for this site, I now find myself unsure as to the best way to continue.

Analysis of the NCTM Standards requires long painstaking dissection and analysis. Writing up this analysis is not something that lends itself well to the blog format. I could concentrate on shorter observations that requre a less thorough comment on my part, but this is already done (and done well) by Joanne Jacobs. I see this blog as adding value to this discussion only if it does something different that is not done elsewhere. A couple of papers which illustrate exactly what I would like to do with this site are Some Thoughts On Constructivism and Some Disagreements With The Standards by Brian Rude.

These papers, at about 4000 words, are probably on the high range of the length that's possible in this medium. At this point, the only thing I can think to do is take some small aspect of the standards and write an analysis/criticism of it. (I've dusted off my copies of the Standards books and hope to be able to do this in the near future.) Then we can see if that style of writing could constitute a sustainable model for this blog.

Stay tuned!

NCTM Standards

2004-10-05T10:21:00.000-04:00

NCTM non-members can gain 90-day free access to the full Principles & Standards for School Mathematics documents at http://standards.nctm.org/. I encourage everyone to do so and browse through these.

Two Examples

2004-10-04T21:42:00.000-04:00

I wanted to zero in on two examples from the UPI article cited below that indicate exactly what is wrong with some of the instructional techniques of NCTM math. I liked these two examples because I think they illustrate what is wrong with NCTM math on both ends of the ability spectrum.

Cheney used an example from what she called an NCTM-inspired program called Mathland. Students were asked to solve this problem: "I just checked out a library book that is 1,344 pages long. The book is due in three weeks. How many pages will I need to read a day to finish the book in time?" The traditional method would be to divide the number of days (21) into the number of pages, getting 64. But, Cheney said, students today are often not taught long division. She held up a huge poster board covered with numbers, displaying the work of the student that Mathland featured as exemplary. "This particular student added up 21s until reaching 1,344," she said. Later in the program, NCTM President Lee Stiff said that he would never recommend such a method with numbers that large. But Stiff, a professor of mathematics education at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, said the technique is useful in teaching math concepts with much smaller numbers.

This is an excellent example of the problem at the low end of the spectrum. Yes, this will give you the right answer, but (a) understanding of what’s actually happen is nil and (b) if the assigned reading were 10541 pages and you had 83 days to get it done, the “technique” the student has learned is useless and he hasn’t learned an alternative technique that works in all cases. Prof. Stiff’s last comment in my mind completely misses the point – you want to teach the correct idea (division!) with small numbers, so that the student can confirm his understanding of what’s going on by doing something like this repetitive addition with small numbers. Then when presented the more complicated problem, he can just apply division (and UNDERSTAND why he's doing it). I don’t think this intellectual construct is beyond the ability of even below-average students, yet they are denied this true learning in lieu of mechanical meaningless manipulation. No wonder so many kids are growing up math-phobic.

[Edited to add: The mathematician in me couldn't let this go. It's worth pointing out that even conceptually adding 21 a bunch of times is meaningless. What's physically meaningful here is chunks of 64 (pages per day). Adding in increments of 21, while arriving at the correct answer, doesn't actually mean anything.]

In the 7th grade, he and his classmates were asked to find the area of a circle. Four weeks were devoted to the task. Traditionally, children were given the formula, but apparently these junior Archimedes were supposed to rediscover the uses of pi.

This is an excellent example of the problem at the high end of the spectrum. How many students among even our highest ability students are capable of deriving A = πr² on their own, even given all the time in the world? I took a course in topology and was able to understand and eventually replicate proofs of such famous theorems as the Urysohn Lemma, the Tychonoff Theorem and the Jordan Curve Theorem. According to NCTM math, I would be expected to construct this understanding on my own without a teacher lecturing to me. Not being a mathematician of the caliber of Urysohn, Tychonoff or Jordan, I would of course have failed miserably. Yet this is the same flawed idea that is used to justify asking 7th graders to derive A = πr². Absurd!

How the “experts” inflict NCTM math on us

2004-10-04T17:57:00.000-04:00

NYC has inflicted an NCTM math program that goes by the name of “Everyday Math” into its K-12 curriculum. The research that justifies this program consists of papers such as the following two ...

On the other hand, Kamii and others demonstrated that students are capable of inventing their own effective and meaningful methods for computation (Kamii, 1985; Madell, 1985; Kamii & Joseph, 1988; Cobb & Merkel, 1989; Resnick, Lesgold, & Bill, 1990; Carpenter, Fennema, & Franke, 1992). Furthermore, these experiences were found to improve understanding of place value and enhance estimation and mental computation skills.

Well, that certainly sounds reasonable. Until we remember that “inventing their own effective and meaningful methods for computation” means adding 21 up sixty-four times.

It is also clear that the time saved by reducing attention to such computations [“complicated” paper-and-pencil computations] in school can be put to better use on such topics as problem solving, estimation, mental arithmetic, geometry, and data analysis (NCTM, 1989).

Again, that sounds reasonable for about two seconds. Until you ask yourself how someone who is unable to perform “complicated” (and the NCTM uses this term loosely) paper-and-pencil computations can perform mental arithmetic or data analysis.

Now, instead of reading all this eduspeak, I urge you to read one teacher’s experience with this curriculum.

No comment

2004-10-04T17:16:00.000-04:00

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,134288,00.html

"Kids learn how to cook and they learn how to garden. They learn how to sit at the table and communicate with each other. To me, it is like an elementary education," she [Chez Panisse chef and owner Alice Waters] said. "It's more important that reading, writing and arithmetic."

[A nod to DVD for bringing this to my attention.]

Additional Evidence

2004-10-04T16:46:00.000-04:00

One charge often levelled against me is that all this is purely anecdotal. Well, duh! I'm one person and I'm not a researcher in educational techniques; all I can do is discuss what happened to me personally.

For those who want to read additional material on this, I can recommend the following fascinating book: Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America's Teachers by Rita Kramer. This book draws on the earlier The Miseducation of American Teachers by James Koerner (written in 1963!).

[edited to add author of the 1963 book - thanks to DVD]

What can we as individual citizens do?

2004-10-04T15:45:00.000-04:00

Finnian said...

What is the solution though? Perhaps a better way to serve people would be to share your thoughts on how to resolve the issue.

What's the solution? I don't know exactly. If I had the answer, I'd be able to make billions, wouldn't I? I have some ideas...

1. Traditional methods work better than all of the "progressive" methods being experimented with. Certainly there are things that could be improved with traditional instructional methods, and technology has an important role to play (NOT giving calculators to 1st graders, though).

2. We need to ensure that teachers have a solid background in what they're teaching. I think elimination of all math (or whatever) education majors and replacing them with majors in math (or whatever) is a VERY good beginning. Teaching techniques are important to teach, but they should not replace content knowledge.

What can we do as individual citizens to fix it?

I attended at various times lectures by Jaime Escalante (the teacher on whom the movie "Stand and Deliver" is based), Ernest Boyer (who at the time was on the Board of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching) and William Bennett (the former Secretary of Education). In each case, I posed exactly this question and did not get what I considered a satisfactory response from any of them. If they can't address this question satisfactorily, I'm not sure what I can say. But here goes...

1. Fight the school system. Attend school board meetings. When you hear the board members begin to accept this nonsense (and remember they are NOT educators, and generally don't know shit from shinola), speak up. I have seen public outcries stop this type of nonsense cold, most notably in 1992 in Miami, when they tried to slip constructivist nonsense into the elementary school curriculum as part of "Project Pheonix" - a rebuilding plan in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew.

2. Be informed on educational issues. We are very much (too much, in my opinion) a country of credentials. We tend to bow to the opinion of "experts" even when those "experts" are the witch doctors (a nod to Richard Feynman) who bring us all these miserable failed educational experiments. Know enough about their absurd theories to be able to hold your ground in a debate.

3. Debate these ideas. Publicly. Loudly. Often. One of my friends (DAS - where are you? are you planning to pipe in here?) when he heard about this blog thought it was an excellent idea. He assures me that the best thing I can do is bring this discussion to light, and he has confidence that discourse, over time, is how we will eventually defeat bad ideas.

I’m not as confident myself that good ideas will always drive out bad ideas when both are open to the public scrutiny of open debate (if that were the case, would we be surrounded by so many bad ideas?), but I can certainly understand that the chance of this happening is much greater if there actually is debate than if the issue is ignored.

Someone like you, with insider experience, seems far more appropriate to do some good. Have you ever considered the bigger picture?

I consider the big picture all the time. But I’m not sure what I can do about it. I’m not an educational researcher, I’m not an expert on any of these educational/psychological subjects and I certainly don’t have the time to discuss this kind of thing (much less do something about it) on anything approaching a full-time basis.

On the other hand, I have given this a lot of thought, and I definitely have strong ideas on the best ways to teach most of this stuff. Someday I hope to have the time to develop my curriculum ideas into a full-blown set of textbooks, but that day is not yet here. My wife and I will probably home school when the time comes; that will probably provide the impetus to get this project started. For now, all I can do is the same as you – debate the ideas involved and hope that I can convince people that I’m right and all the NCTM math “experts” are wrong. I think that’s plenty “big picture” for now.

Let's agree on a new term

2004-10-04T11:58:00.000-04:00

I finished going through the various links on the sites that discussed my original post, and I have found one worth reproducing here from the UPI (thanks to Jim Miller). Lynne Cheney suggests the use of the term "NCTM math." I like that. It has a couple of advantages:

it clearly identifies the topic at hand - the NCTM Standards and those instructional techniques devised in connection with (although some might argue not always in agreement with) the Standards,
it avoids this entire sidetracking argument that constructivism is a theory of learning as opposed to an instructional technique, and
"NCTM math" can now be considered (at least this is how I look at it) to include constructivism as a theory of learning specifically applied to math (which in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing), the specific instructional techniques used to implement the Standards, as well as the (sometimes dubious) overall educational philosophy nebulously connected to the Standards (such as giving first-graders calculators) which may or may not have any basis in constructivism.

What are we teaching the teachers?

2004-10-04T10:21:00.000-04:00

Rudbeckia Hirta said...

I think your other anecdotes are much more telling and well-reflect what I see in my classes of pre-service elementary teachers: their content knowledge and ability for abstract thought is so weak that the pedagogical approach becomes irrelevant. In my non-teacher course I give review sheets like the ones you mention in another post -- without them everyone would fail, and I would get yelled at (failure rate is unofficially capped at 30% for my course). When they become teachers, they can't effectively teach constructively, as they do not possess the knowledge themselves. Before we spend too much time arguing about pedagogy, we really need to take a hard look at content and think about doing something about how little many teachers know (especially at the K-8 level).

I urge anybody who thinks that these comments are unduly harsh to look at the following books:
A Problem Solving Approach to Mathematics for Elementary School Teachers, Eighth Edition
Mathematics for Elementary School Teachers, Third Edition
Mathematical Reasoning for Elementary Teachers, Third Edition

Spend just a few minutes browsing through the pages of these books, and you will be genuinely shocked. Why are they teaching elementary school mathematics to people who are in college? Didn’t these people go to elementary school? Shouldn’t they have learned this stuff back then?

Seriously, if you have the opportunity to go to the bookstore of your local university, do so. Browse around; look at the textbooks in what passes for “higher” education in our teacher college classrooms. It’s scary!

Two comments

2004-10-04T10:10:00.000-04:00

I wanted to address two related comments made to an earlier post I made.

Rudbeckia Hirta said...

The problems don't lie entirely with the NCTM Standards. Example, from the document itself (pages 5-6): "some of the pedagogical ideas from the NCTM Standards -- such as the emphases on discourse, worthwhile mathematical tasks, or learning through problem solving -- have been enacted without sufficient attention to students' understanding of mathematics content."

I agree to an extent. However, the problems with the standards is (a) they are generally so vague that they can (and do) mean anything that you want them to mean and (b) they generally end up meaning what math education professors want them to mean because nobody else has either the time or the authority to flesh out the details.

Chris C. said...

Constructivism is a theory of learning, and so it states that it's the way students learn (building on what they already know; contructing understanding) regardless of pedagogical specifics; even during a lecture or when the teacher is an authority figure.

I agree, but that brings two questions to mind.

First, if constructivism as a theory of learning (and it is), then we can conclude that as far as introducing it into the teaching of mathematics, it applies equally to lectures and other traditional techniques as to these new student-directed activities which are all the rage. In that case, we need to investigate what value it brings to the teaching and learning of mathematics. What are the insights that constructivism sheds on the question which will allow us to develop better teaching techniques? I have never seen this addressed in any research (well, U.S. research anyway, more on that in a minute). All I have seen is the quasi-religious belief that student-directed activities are intimately tied to constructivism in some way which the uninitiated can not hope to comprehend.

This ties directly in to my second point. Constructivism, as you point out, is not an instructional technique. However, in 6 years of teaching and 2 years of graduate education, I NEVER saw constructivism applied in any manner other than "Students construct their own understanding in geometry, so stick them in front of Geometer's Sketchpad." and "Students construct their own understanding in statistics, so stick them in front of a simulator." and "Students construct their own understanding in algebra, so give them blocks to play with to solve equations."

If anyone out there can point me to any applications of constructivism which are not of this nature PLEASE pass them along.

Discussion

2004-10-03T15:56:00.000-04:00

I will be happy to discuss anything on this blog with those who comment. However, please note that implying I'm lying is not a good way to start a discussion. While no personal account can ever be 100% free from bias, I have made my best effort to present the truth in the stories below. In the interest of furthering this discussion, I will be happy to elaborate on, or clarify, anything for anybody who asks (nicely).

Constructivism

2004-10-03T15:45:00.000-04:00

Constructivism: You can think of this as the new "New Math." It’s a theory of learning (which was making the rounds in the 90s when I was teacher and grad education student) that starts from the innocuous premise that knowledge is not taught by the teacher, but rather "constructed" in the mind of the learner. This statement is correct as far as it goes, but then constructivism devolves into absurd instructional techniques that remove the teacher as authority figure and turns him into a “first among equals” kind of role. Of course, this is absurd since the teacher knows the subject matter and the students don’t, but no matter. As you could expect, from this bizarre confluence of obvious theory and dubious application, you arrive at some of the most bizarre arguments I have ever seen, arriving at conclusions such as:
* first graders should be given calculators with which to learn arithmetic (news flash: they don't learn it - DUH!)
* students should do all work on a computer starting in middle school
* high schools should not teach algebra-geometry-precalc-calculus, instead focusing on statistics
I will probably elaborate later, complete with references to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics curriculum standards, but the above is sufficient to follow the next couple of paragraphs.

I did some research on constructivist teaching of statistics. Basic statistics can be taught quite easily by explaining how to set up simple counting rules for the various possible results from an experiment, and then having students use these basic rules to solve increasingly complex problems. Statistics has been taught this way since it was invented. I learned it that way and the professor of math educ with whom I was working learned it that way, but the purpose of this research project was to inflict constructivism on some students and prove that they learned better than with traditional methods (yes, that's the way much education research is performed nowadays -- the conclusion is predetermined and then you look for evidence to support it). The student was given a computer and a (poorly-written) simulation program and asked to solve some problems by creating an appropriate simulation. (Oh, yeah, that will work! Students who do not understand basic statistics are *quite* adept at designing computer simulations.) Many problems could never be solved because the student stared at the computer, unable even to begin the simulation (and the teacher is not allowed to assist because that would put the teacher in an "expert" role -- excuse me, but that's what I want from my teachers!) Even in the few cases where the student set up a simulation, the answers meant nothing because the student did not learn any BASIC principle that could be applied in multiple situations. Each problem had to be approached from scratch. And of course, problems that could have been explained in 5 minutes (which I have done when I have taught stats) took 2 hours and the student still didn't really understand what had occurred. But the experiment was a success. Constructivism was somehow proved to be better, and the professor got a publication out of it.

My master's thesis in education. I designed the experiment. It involved four summer school geometry classes, two consisting of students who failed during the school year and two consisting of enrichment students who wanted to take it during summer so that they could take trigonometry or pre-calculus instead of geometry during the following school year. Two classes (one remedial, one enrichment) would be taught using traditional methods; the other two would be taught using constructivist methods. With my professor, I created the curriculum and learning objectives. I wrote the lesson plans for the traditional classes; my professor designed the constructivist exercises that would be used in the constructivist classes. I enlisted four teachers and two fellow students to assist me by doing the actual teaching (the constructivist classes required TWO teachers -- an indication right from the start that something was probably very wrong). For 6-7 weeks, I observed classes, I watched students performing the exercises, I interviewed students and teachers and parents, I evaluated assignments, I even eavesdropped on students once or twice. Each student in every class was evaluated twice, with a constructivist tool and with a traditional paper and pencil exam. The traditional students, from both the remedial and enrichment classes did very slightly better on the constructivist "final exam" than the constructivist students who had been exposed to this type of idiotic "critical thinking" exercise all summer, even though they had never been told anything about this type of assessment. And the constructivist students did ridiculously worse on the paper and pencil exam, with many scores very close to zero and almost nobody passing the exam, even among the enrichment group. For months after this exercise had reached a conclusion for me (as I'll relate in a moment) I felt absolutely horrible about what I had done to the constructivist groups. We gave a passing grade to every single student -- since everyone "passed" at least the constructivist exam even if not the paper and pencil exam. For the remedial groups, this probably was just fine since I'm sure they weren't really interested in learning anything, although I'm sure I intensified their math phobias (that's not just an opinion -- that conclusion follows from an analysis of my interviews with them). But what about the enrichment group? How many of them went into trig or pre-calc without the tools to be successful? Might some otherwise promising engineering or science students have been put off math forever? With the problem of grades solved, I began writing my thesis. The truth was that constructivism was proven to be a worthless pathetic failure. Of course, nobody ever gets a thesis accepted and published by bucking established theory, so I watered down my conclusion to a much weaker (but still true) statement: "No evidence was found that the constructivist methods are better than the traditional method." Professor read my first draft and turned it down outright. He told me to re-analzye my data so that I could state the constructivism was better or I would never graduate. So I walked out of his office and never graduated.

Education College Horror Stories

2004-10-03T13:52:00.000-04:00

Scene: Introduction to Education class. Before midterm and final exams, professor handed out "review list" of 100 items. Exam had exactly these 100 items (written in exactly the same way, the order was even identical) as either T-F questions or fill-in-the-blank questions. Now that I think about it, there might have been some multiple guess questions, too. Another assignment in this class (worth 10% of our grade) was to keep a journal. Too bad blogs didn’t exist back then.

Scene: Undergraduate educational psychology class. First day of class after professor's lecture. We were assigned to work on a set of essays in class in groups (group work is really, really big in education schools). The first essay presented a classroom case study and asked something along the lines of "compare and contrast what theory A and theory B have to say about this situation and how each one might be applied to the situation" (I thought it was a pretty good question.) One student in the group proceeds to open up the book, copy out verbatim the textbook's explanation of theory A (in abstract, not applying it to the situation in the question at all) and then theory B. period. end of essay. Refused to listen to my objections that we had not answered the question. Thankfully, when I explained this to the professor, he allowed me turn in separate essays after that. Which turned out to be a good thing, since I received the only A in the class.

Scene: Honey, I Shrunk the Kids! Required watching (during class time, at that) in my undergraduate methods of teaching math course (required to get certified as a math teacher). Other assignments in that class: Watch Stand and Deliver (again, in class), writing instructions on how to get from one spot on campus to another (to see if you could write clear instructions, again the writing and following of these instructions was during class), writing a poem about how we felt about mathematics.

Scene: Undergraduate methods of teaching high school class. Professor (not a bad one at all, and positively brilliant by education school standards) gave us a list of 40 essays that would be related to (but not identical to) our final exam, which would consist of 10 essays. Students *demanded* that he narrow the list to only twenty essays and reproduce ten of them EXACTLY on the final; one of them threw a serious hissy-fit when the professor refused.

Scene: Social Studies Education doctoral-level class. Class was supposed to meet 2.5 hrs a day twice a week for eight weeks (total contact hours 40 hrs). Textbook was "Scandinavian Welfare States", but let's not even touch that. This story has other places to go. The first day, professor puts students into groups (of course) to work on a presentation about the book. Class will meet for 1 hr a week on alternate weeks so that each group can make its presentation. Total contact hours: 4! Sidebar -- Total contact hours involving actual work by the professor: 0!! Total work to be graded: one paper and one presentation turned in by each group. Exams: none. Additional reading: none. Keep in mind this is a DOCTORAL course. Final grade distribution: 12 A's!! (I wasn't actually in this class; I just had occasion to observe it while working next door in an education lab one summer.)

Scene: Math Education doctoral-level class: Grade based on two assignments: (1) Undergo a personal health improvement program and quantify the results (2) Predict the population of the US in 2030. Final grade distribution: 10 A's!! Side note: Nobody's report for the second assignment (except mine) actually used statistically valid arguments for extrapolating the population. And apparently nobody realized this as their answers varied from U.S. Census Department figures, sometimes by tens of millions.

Scene: Doctoral-level ed stat course that all Ed.D. and Ph.D. candidates in school were required to take. Some of the sections of this class were taught by and Adjunct Professor of Educational Research. The reason this person was an adjunct and not a regular full-time faculty member: did not have doctorate. Why not? Because after three attempts, had been unable to pass the College of Arts & Sciences statistical methods for social scientists course that was required to get your Ed.D. Keep in mind this person taught statistics!

Scene: Doctoral-level curriculum course. Entire grade based on final exam. Questions provided ahead of time. You could bring your pre-written answers into the exam room. Only requirement was that you had to copy them into the professor-provided blue-book in the exam time alloted. And of course, everybody got an A.

For the record, these events happened between 1990 and 1996 in three different universities.

Teacher Horror Stories

2004-10-03T13:28:00.000-04:00

One day back in my undergraduate days, I was outside a Geometry class that had just finished waiting for the professor, who was my undergraduate advisor. Just leaving the room was a math-ed major, with whom I had taken a couple of classes, who wanted to be a high school math teacher. Actual live quote from said student while explaining that she did not like the geometry class: "When am I ever going to need this?" Well, I'm not sure, but maybe WHEN YOU HAVE TO TEACH IT?!

Picture a math exam room. You see several panicky students, attempting to memorize (rather than UNDERSTAND) basic middle school mathematics concepts like the transitive property. This is a scene we're all familiar with. The difference is that these were not middle school students; the room was filled with college seniors majoring in math education and math teachers. The cause of their concern: The dreaded mathematics subject matter expert exam. And yes, the word expert is used extremely lightly. The exam consisted of 100 questions, approximately in increasing order of difficulty. Elementary algebra made its first appearance around question 75, geometry around question 90. The last three questions consisted of basic calculus. Three hours were allocated; I took 50 minutes. When I left the room, I was able to notice that most of the candidates were still answering questions in the teens and twenties.

After I started teaching, the school where I worked had to dismiss two teachers because they could not become certified. The stumbling block: they couldn't obtain 840 on the SAT. Yes, that's 840 combined on the total exam, 40th percentile. One of them was an English teacher. Keep in mind that even if she got every question on the math section wrong (for a minimum score of 200), all she needed was 640 on the English section (80th percentile). So this ENGLISH teacher could not even perform on a standardized ENGLISH exam at a level that was higher than 80% of the students to whom she TAUGHT ENGLISH. I recently ran into a former student and in the course of conversation learned that this person (who could not break 840 on the SAT) taught the SAT prep course at the school. And sadly, just now while doing a quick Google search looking for some stats on the Florida Teacher Certification Exam, I learned that even this ridiculously low standard was dropped around 1999.

As far as graduate mathematics courses go, applied linear algebra is considered the easiest one in the curriculum. Math (as opposed to math-ed) graduate students tended to stay away from this one. It really didn’t go much deeper than undergraduate linear algebra – in fact at some schools our text (Linear Algebra by Strang) was used for introductory linear algebra. I took it because I was working at the time, and this class was offered in the evening. My friends who were math students basically made fun of me, implying I was looking for an easy A instead of trying to learn something. The class was filled with math education grad students. One of our assignments involved writing a MatLab program that took a bunch of points and determined the polynomial that went through all the provided points. A fellow student asked me to look at her solution before she turned it in. I spent 20 minutes attempting unsuccessfully to explain that her solution could not be correct because it didn't actually go through all the points. Eventually, she told me that something to the effect that she couldn't understand what I was saying and therefore I was probably wrong (how can you argue with that logic?) and turned in her homework as it was.

Reason for this blog

2004-10-03T01:23:00.001-04:00

I was surprised to learn today that something I posted at http://www.actuary.ca/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=17978 over a year ago seems to have surfaced in several places on the web in the last few days. I guess better late than never.

Some of the sites linking to and/or discussing my post are:
http://www.amritas.com/041002.htm#09282306
http://www.bundy223.net/~andyb/blog/archives/000215.html
http://lizditz.typepad.com/i_speak_of_dreams/2004/09/its_just_borken.html
http://genericconfusion.blogspot.com/2004/09/testing-education.html
http://www.seanet.com/~jimxc/Politics/ (search for constructivism)
http://www.joannejacobs.com/mtarchives/014443.html

The last one in particular has generated a fair amount of debate. I must say it felt really good to see my words generate so much discussion.

I would like to move this discussion forward, which has always been close to my heart even though I left teaching 8 years ago. The first thing I can do towards this end is to re-compile those stories and put them up here; a few of them probably require a little bit of editing before I do that, but I should be able to manage it in the next few days. Then maybe I can get some discussion going here.

New separate blog

2004-10-01T23:59:00.000-04:00

I created a new blog for this whole education discussion. I didn't want this to clutter up my personal blog.