Interesting

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

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!