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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Jul 24, 2014 - 04:35pm PT
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Hmm, that's an interesting way to look at it; legal "scholarship" is fair game for criticism I'm sure, but I've never heard anyone really compare it to whatever they hell do in education curriculum (or medicine or business schools for that matter, but education just stands out as an apples-to-oranges comparison). Rightly or wrongly, I can assure that you high-brow law professors would be pretty surprised to hear themselves being lumped in with D.Ed types.
it's been a regular item of discussion in the scholarship on r1s as well as a topic of conversations 'ive had with folks over the years in the professional schools. law is an especially obvious example: the prestige journals are edited by grad students in a 3-year program. no prestige journal in any serious research discipline can do that and still be taken seriously as peer review.
the shift in science funding, toward engineering and "applied sciences," like medbiotech and eecs, may change the way folks view the dynamic broadly.
disciplines also rise and fall over time-- the 20th century tradition of theoretical physics as the pinnacle of intellectual rigor is probably over-- certainly the eecs students today grew up with a world so different, that they view the old traditional pecking order as a historical curiosity.
it's not clear what things will look like in another 25 years.
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WBraun
climber
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Jul 24, 2014 - 05:31pm PT
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Americans stink period.
They spend billions and billions to mask their stench from eating decayed dead food in the form of meat, fish and eggs.
Eating only food meant for cadaver eaters their minds become ruled by stupid low mechanistic mechanical consciousness .....
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Jul 24, 2014 - 06:52pm PT
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But is there a shortage of teachers, at current salaries? I haven't heard that.
There certainly seems to be a shortage of math teachers. My daughter spent the last couple of years teaching at the middle school level, after four years teaching at the high school level. Her school district has a "job fair" for existing teachers who would like to transfer to a different school. My daughter got offers from three different high schools. Several other friends of mine, but in different disciplines (none involving math or science) got zero offers.
Admittedly, my daughter not only has her degree in math, not education, but also has a reputation already in the district as something of a star. Still, the openings for math teachers with undergraduate math degrees were rather plentiful.
And sorry to NEA fans, but I'd be wary of dealing with any of their statements. I'm not sure there's enough BS Neutralizer to deal with it all.
Teachers don't have summer off? They sure as hell aren't working. Yes, they're paid less, but intelligent people compare annual salaries and total work days. The NEA's argument is, to use Chouinard's words, "if not by, exclusively for half-wits and imbeciles."
Finally, I can't resist commenting (so to speak) on law reviews. I was invited to join the UCLA Law Review after my first year because of my grades, but my father died immediately before my finals, and I had things I needed to do in Fresno for my family that summer to deal with that, rather than spend the summer starting to write a comment. In the process of declining the invitation, I came across a quote from Learned Hand, one of the greatest 20th Century American jurists, in declining the invitation to join Harvard's Law Review: "I did not go to law school to edit a magazine."
John
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rgold
Trad climber
Poughkeepsie, NY
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Jul 24, 2014 - 07:32pm PT
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I went and had a look at the common core standard for math, and I’m truly puzzled by the responses to them, or at least to the sample I looked at. I can’t imagine any informed scientist arguing against them. They seem to me to propose basic topics for understanding which are really beyond question. I’d be interested in having a common core critic single out some particular objective (or really, to merit blanket condemnation, a large set of objectives) and explain why they are inappropriate or unnecessary for the level of basic mathematical competence our society might hope for. The entire list is at http://www.corestandards.org/Math/ .
Now that I’ve glanced at them, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that a large percentage of folks criticizing the common core don’t actually know what is in there. I saw nothing, for instance, about methods, only desirable outcomes.
My guess is that the real problems have occurred with implementation and that the critics are in the process of throwing the baby out with the bath. Implementation involves all kinds of political, commercial, and special-interest groups and pressures for immediate measurable results. For example, I can't understand why you would think it advisable to graft wholesale changes onto the the entire system at once. If you have something new, you start out with kindergartners and let the wave of change ride with them through the system. But then we have to wait twelve years for the first high-school results and I guess too many elections will have happened, too many apoplectic talk show know-nothings will have weighed in, and too many stocks will have traded for that kind of patience.
I've found Ed Hartouni's voice in this thread to be rational and authoritative. I don't want to repeat things he's already said about as well as they can be. So let me try for some other perspectives.
The first thing to understand, I think, is that elementary math isn't simple at all. The basic concept of number is something the human race has needed a long time to grasp. We do have certain routine processes for the most basic integer calculations, processes that may seem arbitrary and arcane to learners, precisely because they have been worked over and refined for thousands of years and are now in a highly evolved state.
For example, proper fractions can be considered as a representation of a number of parts selected from an equally divided whole. But they also can be represented as points on a number line. How are these two concepts related, how do these representations inform (or fail to inform) the arithmetic one does with the objects, in what ways do the different perspectives reinforce each other, and what are the pitfalls of using one perspective in the other context?
Another example: I think many kids learn that multiplication is a shorthand for repeated addition. But how does this interpretation apply to multiplication involving negative numbers and/or fractions? Is some extension of the concept of multiplication needed? What is it? Does anyone tell the kids about this or are they just presented with multiple processes called "multiplication" with no conceptual integrity to justify the common name?
One of the features of innumeracy is not the lack of facility with calculation, but rather an inability to select the appropriate operations to apply (and the correct order to apply them in). There seems to be a particular difficulty in recognizing what sorts of situations call for division, especially when fractions are involved. One might infer from this that too much time was devoted to the processes and not enough to recognizing when the processes are or are not called-for.
I think we tend to forget that the point of those processes is to free the mind to think about more complicated things. If you learn those processes by rote in way that obscures the underlying connections, and if you aren't helped in your education to confront complexity and progress in you ability to resolve difficulties, then I think it reasonable to consider your education at least a partial failure.
All this is the beginning of an argument that says that you have to know and understand a lot of mathematics to teach elementary school math. To the extent that the new standards really do promote critical thinking---whatever the hell that is---they demand a far higher level of knowledge and competence from the instructors, who have to be able themselves to deal with unexpected situations and novel ideas from their students.
An important aspect of critical thinking has to do with language skills, because without cogent explanations all you have are unsupported opinions, an environment that is fatal to anything that could possibly be defined as critical thinking. So the development of language skills is a fundamental aspect of science and math education, and some of those language skills ought to be developed in the context of math and science.
I think it is almost beyond question that our schools of education have failed to provide the kind of instruction required, but we should also recognize the tremendous resistance coming from college students who, by virtue of their own inadequate training, think they already know what the subject is "about." As institutions of higher learning model themselves more and more as consumer businesses, it will become harder and harder for anyone to tell the consumers that they will have to re-examine a host of things they "know" that just ain't true. And I might add that once tenure is eliminated, it will become increasingly difficult to do much beyond what the audience demands, a bizarre reversal in which the ignorant end up dictating what the experts teach.
One of the most exciting things about mathematics is the way in which it extends your mental capabilities, and I worry that we don't provide the kinds of experiences that would reveal this aspect. There doesn't seem to be enough of the really big and the really small. Why aren't more fifth graders calculating how many blades of grass there are in the front lawn or the number of pine needles in their christmas tree, i.e. things mathematics can do that they can't do without it. I know kids find such questions interesting. For example, when my daughter was ten or so, she was looking out a screen window and turned to me and asked how many squares there were in the screen. Of course we worked out an answer.
I have no idea whether there are any solutions to these extensive problems. You've got to have your head in the sand to believe that other countries aren't doing better, but whether we can or want to imitate their approaches (which in the article cited by the OP are our approaches, except that no one in the U.S. will listen) is a big open question. I'm positive that the Common Core is not a problem, although the way in which it is being implemented may very well be disastrous. I think that there is little hope for elementary math education until we recognize that the exceptionally daunting task of teaching all subjects is far too much to expect of any one individual. Elementary schools need specialized math/science teachers whose only job is to teach math and science.
And this brings me to my last point, which is that at least as far as I can tell, there is almost a total separation of elementary math and science, which means that two subjects that have grown up together and, in the real world, cross-fertilize each other are taught in complete isolation. Wouldn't it be better if some significant part of the math curriculum was taught as a response to issues arising from the science curriculum, which is to say in a way that recapitulates much of how the human race developed the subject?
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Jul 24, 2014 - 08:12pm PT
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I went and had a look at the common core standard for math, and I’m truly puzzled by the responses to them, or at least to the sample I looked at. I can’t imagine any informed scientist arguing against them. They seem to me to propose basic topics for understanding which are really beyond question. I’d be interested in having a common core critic single out some particular objective (or really, to merit blanket condemnation, a large set of objectives) and explain why they are inappropriate or unnecessary for the level of basic mathematical competence our society might hope for. The entire list is at http://www.corestandards.org/Math/ .
rich (and sully), i see common core largely as a hopeful attempt to address the problems of nclb and industrialized testing. as best i can tell, the biggest improvement comes mostly in english comp (which is also closer to my core competence),
if folks who care can use common core as a lever to make other changes, more power to them.
the basic problem with math and science ed in k-12 public schools, though, appears to me (and lots of other folks who do this for a living) less with "standards" and more with infrastructure: if we don't fund labs (and we don't) then there's no science. and if we can't hire math teaching talent, tweaking standards may well reinforce the poular american idea that any problem can be solved on the cheap by applying the proper technology. and banning teacher unions.
at k-8 math is probably the subject most readily assessed via standardized tests-- most knowledgeable folks i know see the difficulty of attracting teaching competent teaching talent as the major problem, rather than the old standards.
i'm sypmathetic to the op, who seems to have put in the years in the trenches, watching unfunded mandates come down from above while spending more and more time on spreadsheets.
i'm open to persuasion.
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Seamstress
Trad climber
Yacolt, WA
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Jul 24, 2014 - 08:25pm PT
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There are breakthrough moments in learning. Recall the Annie Sullivan/Helen Keller moment where a link was made between the sign and the object. I recall tutoring my siblings - and somehow it escaped all of them that x was a representation of a number or set of numbers. Working on algebra without first understanding the concept that variables are a representation of a quantity - useless. That is why I favor trying to make a practical link to the math being taught. It is just as important that this conceptual link be made from expressing quantities numerically - 2 and then expressing relationships with variables - x. Like most, it seems obvious what works for me, but other minds may not be able to make that leap from the same place.
It is mystifying how people can get pushed up through the grades when they clearly are missing a critical element of the foundation. Repeating a grade - doing the same thing the same way for a second time - that is probably not going to be successful. If I didn't understand you the first time, I won't do better when you repeat yourself louder. There has to be a different approach to fill in those foundational gaps before moving on to a more advanced topic. I don't take my Bunny Slope skiers onto the green or blue slopes until they have mastered stopping - and I have several different methods to teach that skill. I have seen kids make radical leaps when they have an opportunity to take a different approach to a learning objective.
Still many generalizations here - all teachers underpaid, or brilliant mathematical minds get paid more elsewhere. That makes many presumptions. As someone that works with a lot of very technical people, I can assert that brilliance is not the only factor for getting hired or being successful in Corporate America. Many brilliant people have not successfully negotiated the corporate HR hurdle or lasted through the business cycles. Not all success is measured in dollars. The most brilliant math teacher I ever had was a nun in a Catholic High School. She could find a way to help her students make a connection.
It is still fair game for us to be concerned about the best way to educate our young. The fallacy is in thinking that there is "a way" and "a solution".
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Jul 24, 2014 - 08:27pm PT
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I find this topic very interesting. I'm a lifelong scientist, and as such, I have often reflected that the significance of math is that it is the language of science.
And math is the gift given us by God to describe the natural world, particularly calculus. I'm biased toward biological systems, but I'll be the physicists feel the same.
How can we expect to teach a subject as precise, demanding, and frankly challenging as math, to a society that spends its evenings watching reality TV.???
Let's rephrase that:
How can we expect to teach people steeped in the modern world, using the skills and techniques of the 12th century?
I think that the best teachers know that they have to adjust the teaching to the student, that it is fairly difficult to try to change the student to the learning.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Jul 24, 2014 - 08:42pm PT
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The issue of teacher pay keeps coming up, and it often does.
I'm not entirely sure why, when the starting salary for teachers in Ca is approximately the same as the AVERAGE pay for all working Americans. (around 40K), and that the average teacher in Ca makes a salary of about $68,000
(2012 numbers)
http://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/sa/cefavgsalaries.asp
On top of which, there is a huge market of people who have trained to be teachers, who cannot find a job. When there is a huge oversupply of workers for any job, it tends to suppress the pay.
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clinker
Trad climber
Santa Cruz, California
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Jul 24, 2014 - 08:49pm PT
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I don't understand why educators think that everyone has to be good at math. Only a small percentage of people need to know anything more than basic arithmetic to do their jobs. Forcing everyone to learn advanced algebra, trigonometry, etc. just turns kids off to education in general.
Here is an enlightened intellect. Imagine if we tapped into education where it mattered and produced.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Jul 24, 2014 - 08:53pm PT
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I have, however, taught law and economics for over 25 years, and always got superior reviews from my students, despite having no formal training in education
This is a huge point. I am in the same boat, >25 years as a medical school professor, but never, ever required to have any formal training in education.
(I got a considerable amount on my own).
This leaves the average student to the mercy of luck. Certainly the tenured professors are hired and promoted virtually exclusively on the basis of published research. Most don't care about teaching, and it shows.
I thought that the teaching skills were better in High School than University than graduate school than professional school. I think the experience may vary due to the progression in student LEARNING skills. By the time someone gets to professional school, they are professional students, and can probably teach themselves most things they might be interested in learning.
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rgold
Trad climber
Poughkeepsie, NY
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Jul 24, 2014 - 09:01pm PT
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Try to help a 5th grader with their math homework these days, and you'll see the evidence. Many of the problems are are odd, and often they are incomprehensible. I don't have any examples on hand, but you can find them on the web. E.g: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/10/31/a-ridiculous-common-core-test-for-first-graders/ .
I read the article, and it does seem clear that the implementation of the standards in the examples is really bad. The actual standards, however, are
Question 1 on the first-grade test is based on the New York Common Core Standard, 1.OA4 Understand subtraction as an unknown-addend problem. Question 12 tests standard 1.OA6, which requires students to use the relationship between addition and subtraction to solve problems. Question 8 assesses Standard 1.OA 7 which requires students to determine whether addition or subtraction sentences are true or false.
It seems inconceivable that any curriculum would fail to address these issues. The author complains that they are "back-mapped" from skills needed for college and may be developmentally inappropriate, but these are just basic arithmetic properties that have to be addressed somehow in the curriculum. I don't know about age-appropriateness, but my intuition is that these standards could be implemented in an age-appropriate way.
By the way, the fact that parents might struggle with some of the questions may be because those questions are poorly posed, as is the case of the examples in the Post article, but it may also be because the parents are themselves victims of the kind of procedural approach the Common Core is trying to supplant.
This can happen with pretty highly-educated parents. Some of my daughter's friends used to come to me for math help. Their parents were engineers. The parents used all kinds of math, but couldn't explain any of it to their own kids, because they had little beyond (some pretty high level) procedural knowledge, and no good way of transmitting any sense-making. I can see the author of the Post article saying (she actually does say something like this), "my friends are engineers, and they can't do these problems." Maybe this is a valid condemnation of the questions, but maybe not.
...most knowledgeable folks i know see the difficulty of attracting teaching competent teaching talent as the major problem, rather than the old standards.
I tried to say that in a gentler way. As for the "old standards," were there in fact any?
i'm sypmathetic to the op, who seems to have put in the years in the trenches, watching unfunded mandates come down from above while spending more and more time on spreadsheets.
i'm open to persuasion.
No, I'm sympathetic too. I taught high-school math right after college and before grad school, and I enjoyed it, but I don't think I'd last a semester in today's atmosphere. And I think more and more students are starting to figure that out, as the hostility toward teachers (some of it on display here), the erosion of the perks that partially offset the low pay and lack of respect, and the imposition of high-stakes testing with inadequate input from the folks on the front lines and extreme consequences for personnel and institutions all make the job look less and less attractive.
As for the glut of teachers and hoardes of jobless graduates someone referred to, I don't see any of that. Every one of the math students who graduate from my little institution has found a teaching job, usually right away, and often quite a good job at that.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Jul 24, 2014 - 09:05pm PT
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From the NEA website
Myths and Facts about Educator Pay
The propaganda and mis-statements are so pervasive as to make any other post by this poster suspect to being agenda driven.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Jul 24, 2014 - 09:06pm PT
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klk, the Common Core math test that my high school piloted had an impressive math assessment that I proctored with an admin.. Not only was it all online, it had writing portions for justifying answers. Additionally, there was a group task involving designing a playground using correct measurement, proportion, etc.. Common Core includes a real world and cooperative project angle beyond its online test.
delighted to hear that you think it improves on the older standards. i don't teach math, so don't have a professional judgment about its relation to the older standards.
given the current constraints on k12, it may well be an improvement. but i have a difficult time seeing the current stands as the primary problem for math and science.
i have higher hopes for the reading & comp. the test change there is huge.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Jul 24, 2014 - 09:11pm PT
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I'm sympathetic too. I taught high-school math right after college and before grad school, and I enjoyed it, but I don't think I'd last a semester in today's atmosphere. And I think more and more students are starting to figure that out, as the hostility toward teachers (some of it on display here), the erosion of the perks that partially offset the low pay and lack of respect, and the imposition of high-stakes testing with inadequate input from the folks on the front lines and extreme consequences for personnel and institutions all make the job look less and less attractive.
the most talented folks i see here (who have both tech and communication skills) view k12, if they view it at all, as akin to the peace corps or working in a soup kitchen. lots of them do it for a year or three to pay their tithe, and then they step into triple-figures in the private sector. can't blame them.
that may change. i was just at a conference surrounded by talented science folks on their 2nd or 3rd post-doc and with little hope of academic placement. but most of them won't go into k12-- they'll prolly go write code.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Jul 24, 2014 - 09:26pm PT
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I'm biased toward biological systems, but I'll bet the physicists feel the same.
They do, Ken, and then some. In the words of Feynman's famous quip, "Math is to physics as masturbation is to sex."
I second Rich's recommendation of specific math and science teachers at the elementary school level. My main climbing partner for the last 47 years, Tim Schiller, is an MIT graduate. His daughter's third grade teacher (also a friend of mine and the wife of a friend of mine) basically told Tim that she was uncomfortable with arithmetic, and would not assign arithmetic homework. What happens to her third grade students? I just cannot accept the idea that an elementary student does not get competent instruction in age-appropriate math because the elementary school teacher is uncomfortable with the subject.
John
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ms55401
Trad climber
minneapolis, mn
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Jul 24, 2014 - 09:53pm PT
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it's well-known that the PhD in education has been among the least-respected doctorates awarded at American universities. Lack of rigor, absence of theory, and the very worst attempts at empirical analysis will do that.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 24, 2014 - 09:57pm PT
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another difficulty is tying student performance to teacher accountability. The teacher is not responsible and cannot be responsible for the range of student preparation, capability and motivation. The variability of even a graduate class at the university could be quite large, and things that worked brilliantly one year fell flat another.
in addition, increasing the size of the class makes the ability of the teacher to compensate for the variability of the students difficult to impossible.
Interestingly, there is a great deal of value of studying fiction relevant to preparing a capable workforce. Generally speaking, fictional literature explores a range of human issues that can be a springboard to discussing cultural values, ethical behavior, and a host of issues that are more clearly drawn in a work of fiction than in the description of actual events.
Debbie (my wife) teaches various biological subject classes at the local community college. One of her major goals is to get her students to write a logically argued paper, apparently most of her students are not capable of doing that. The regional high schools are considered to be quite good, yet the students would not meet even a rudimentary measure of accomplishment in writing.
Often, this ties to their ability (or lack of ability) to read critically, and to think critically, skills that are common to learning any subject.
I guess one could question where in life does one have to write a critical paper, or think critically at all... I'm not a good judge of that, I get paid to think and to communicate the results of those thoughts, so it is rather important in my career.
But I am not at all sure I would lay the students' inability at the failings of their teachers alone. It seems a more general failure of our society.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Jul 24, 2014 - 11:09pm PT
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Ed, most proposals I've seen about tying teacher pay to student performance proposed value added measurements. They can't rely on absolute level of students' test scores, precisely because of the variables you cite over which the teacher has no control.
Even value added creates measurement issues, particularly if the student is not proficient in English. Nonetheless, for all the measurement issues, it surprises me to hear opponents of "high stakes testing" contend that other options are better, without telling us how they measure outcomes.
John
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 24, 2014 - 11:22pm PT
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the whole concept of "outcomes" is a very strange one, also... as outcomes are often measured in lifetimes, or at least in careers.
I wouldn't have helped most of my teachers if doing well on standardized tests was a measure of my academic achievement, I was a horrible test taker... I doubt that I'd be any better had I taken any of the standard tests today.
But I never saw education as taking standardized tests, either... many classes that I took and did not do well in inspired me to learn the material other ways, outside of class. The "outcome" was positive, but unmeasured.
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Chaz
Trad climber
greater Boss Angeles area
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Jul 24, 2014 - 11:56pm PT
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How rotten is your product, if you can't give it away for free?
If the consumer doesn't like it, whose fault is that?
The kids and their families seem to not want the free education the taxpayers try to give them. Most public school students in L.A. won't graduate high school. Damn few public school students can pass a math and English test.
Yet families will camp out in line in an attempt to get their kids into a private school, willing to pay for the education private schools provide.
The kids don't eat the free public school food, either. They throw most of it away.
But they will stand in line to pay for In-n-Out or Rosa Maria's, and throw none of it away.
Why can't the public schools give away something the private enterprises are selling?
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