What he said.
Yes, there are some not-so-great teachers, and some really great ones, but most fall in the middle, as in any profession. But the number of bad teachers is not enough to account for the problems in education today. It would help if the pay scale were shifted up; it would help even more if teachers were paid and given sufficient time for on-going professional development so that they could really understand the mandated changes in curriculum (eg, Common Core). But the factor that has the biggest impact on student âperformanceâ (ie, learning), as shown over and over by research, is poverty/wealth. Poor students do poorly at school. If we want to improve schools, work to decrease poverty and poor neighborhoods where kids have much more urgent priorities than learning math. (And I am a math educator, so I believe in teaching math no matter what the situation - I just donât think kids and teachers should be blamed when learning doesnât happen because kids are hungry, afraid, traumatized, threatened, abused, and poor).
That last bit about calculatorsâŚa year after I graduated high school, they started requiring kids to bring graphing calculators to math class. I was shocked. I hadnât been allowed so much as a cheap solar job that could do no more than take a square root. In fact, I wasnât allowed a calculator in any math class until differential equations at university, and even then it was pretty much just for quickly solving half-life problems.
Iâm not sure weâre actually disagreeing. Iâm not trying to claim this is the entirety of the problem with American education, however, in my own experience (to clarify: I have attended public school in three different states, as well as in Europe), I have seen very few good teachers. The system itself is at fault, so itâs miraculous they even exist.
I am glad that you have had good experiences, however, that doesnât change the fact that teaching is a low-paying, low-prestige occupation, with few benefits. I know multiple people in my graduate program who came from teaching high school, and they quit teaching because of this kind of thing. Even more alarming, I know of nobody in five years of graduating Masterâs/PhD students who wanted to teach below college level.
If this situation is even close to typical, then it does not bode well for the future. Mathematics, especially, requires qualified instructors because most people seem to graduate knowing almost nothing about what it entails as a discipline. To that end, I highly recommend reading Paul Lockhartâs â[A Mathematicianâs Lament][1]â. Itâs kind of old, but judging by the students I get in my university classes, still relevant.
[1]: https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf[quote=âtubacat, post:21, topic:37781â]
But the factor that has the biggest impact on student âperformanceâ (ie, learning), as shown over and over by research, is poverty/wealth.
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I agree with this too. However, as I understand it, school districts are divided in a such a way as to defund poor neighborhoods, so the odds are already stacked by the system.
Our NY school has a âpush-in/push-outâ classroom model where kids get extra time with a specialist depending on their needs, either in the classroom, or pulled out with a small group for a short time. This starts at grade 2 with extra challenges for the kids who are already mastering the grade requirements, and starting in kindergarten for kids who need support in the basics. Not sure how widespread this is, and it isnât perfect, but it does introduce a path for more specialized teachers at younger grades, so I think itâs a pretty interesting concept.
[quote=âCryptic, post:17, topic:37781â][quote]
Itâs infuriating because what theyâre complaining about is a completely sensible approach to certain problems (subtract 175 from 210 by splitting the difference and getting 25 + 10 == 35 instead of doing long subtraction) and the people are treating it like the teachers are forcing the kids to learn witchcraft in order to pass the class.[/quote]
The problem is that the parents donât understand that method. If all you have been taught is the long subtraction way or to use a calculator, using a method that has more steps but is easier to do in your head is going to seem weird and convoluted.
We are taught that math is hard, and have been taught in a way that makes it hard. Thatâs the real problem.[/quote]
This should be an opportunity for the parents. âCheck out this technique! It saves time and brainpower! Isnât it great?â But instead theyâre freaking out that their kid isnât learning the exact same technique they were taught that made them hate math and be afraid of numbers.
Once you get to Algebra and beyond the Calculator isnât going to help you that much anyway, not unless itâs one of those fancy ones that can do symbolic reasoning. My experiance was that teachers allowed calculators right about the point calculators became obsolete for most of the coursework. It was kind of a cruel joke.
Is it possible weâre seeing the very same teachers, but in a different light?
[quote=âjandrese, post:26, topic:37781, full:trueâ]My experiance was that teachers allowed calculators right about the point calculators became obsolete for most of the coursework. It was kind of a cruel joke.
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That was exactly my experience. At some point in 7th or 8th grade we got calculators and spent about three weeks doing stuff with calculators. Then they became completely useless and were only ever used for statistics years later.
Maybe? I can remember two good teachers in high school (European History and German), and a couple more decent ones (Math, US History). Unfortunately, in teaching, as in medicine, there is very little room for mediocrity. Lives are determined by how good you are at what you do. All of my English teachers were uniformly bad, consequently I wasnât interested in improving my writing or broadening my reading interests until college. By that point, however, I was already focused on a STEM career.
Indeed, but I be oldz. I didnât have a calculator on my person at all times until the 00âs. High school was late 80âs, uni was early 90âs.
Indeed - youâre only a few years older than I (university started in 96 for me)⌠But the point is that I (and probably you) grew up with teachers giving me the olâ âYou need to learn how to do this without a calculator because you wonât have one on you at all times when you grow upâ routine, AND THEY WERE LIARS. Or, at least, were not smart enough to predict the rise of the smartphone.
Thatâs the point, though: scientists, engineers, accountants, economists, even mathematicians use aids to symbolic reasoning. It isnât that learning the symbolic reasoning is superfluous, itâs that it should be learned in the context of something thatâs useful. It is not useful to grind through a half hour of integration on paper during an exam when the real fluency comes from using more advanced tools. Itâs the tools that are important, and those tools are only valuable if they are open and ubiquitous. Otherwise, math is just a grind, so the only people who can grind through an engineering curriculum are those who are predisposed to grind.
We need to do better than that. Itâs possible for people to understand calculus and modeling without having the patience to grind, or the ability to derive any pleasure whatsoever in the task of the symbolic grind.
And even before smartphones, you could easily carry around a small calculator with you if you wanted.
Zoltan Dienes a mathematician and math educator taught his experimental program at the University of Cherbourg in Canada to children of professors. Math was âtaughtâ with play materials without interference from teachers as to what to do with the materials. By 10 years the children scored 800âs in SATâs. The model is there. The success is there. But it is not being replicated. Why? Teachers of math would be out of a job. Dienes said his difficulty in working with teachers was to get them to not interfere. AT ALL. When it was seen that a child had attained a universal - hypotenuse shortest distance etc - then and only then was the child given the verbal definition for what s/he had learned. If children did not grow up to be math illiterate, then the banks could not flourish and fleece us. And we donât want to rock those institutions, do we.
What abbreviation do you use for statistics?
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