Interesting piece about teaching mathematics in the U.S. (K-12): http://www.city-journal.org/2009/eon1113ss.html
"But the president’s worthy aims won’t be reached so long as assessment experts, technology salesmen, and math educators—the professors, usually with education degrees, who teach prospective teachers of math from K–12—dominate the development of the content of school curricula and determine the pedagogy used, into which they’ve brought theories lacking any evidence of success and that emphasize political and social ends, not mastery of mathematics." Amen. This is not only public school, homeschool and private school too. (big market) Everyone is always looking for a shiny new idea. I have an idea, pencil and paper. Memorize your facts. If you learn 1+1, you get to learn 1+2. After several FRUSTRATING years of trying to find good math curriculum for our homeschool (basic math) I went ahead and just wrote my own. Flash cards and fact sheets. The rest is live with me (measure, money, etc) I do this for all of my kids up until roughy 5th grade and then switch them to a text. I'd challenge any parent to find a K-5 book that teaches math facts. They simply don't exist! + - * / The end result is a race to algebra without a foundation...and then they hit the wall in high school and math becomes "too hard" beyond the required 2 credits. It's quite sad.
Y'know, it really is terribly sad. My daughter went to a private school throughout her life. She had just three kids, all girls, in her geometry class. In spite of being a brilliant student, in spite of taking AP Math, among other AP courses, she refused to take the AP Math exam. Oh, she got an A in the class ..... she's just math phobic for some reason. She took five other AP courses, got As, took the exams, scored 5 on each one. I let her make the decision not to take the exam but it caught up with her in college. She learned decisions have long term consequences! I bit my tongue and never said "See, you should have .....". My hat's off to homeschooling parents. If mine had not been an "only" I would have taught her myself in a heartbeat. I recently moved from CA, where the majority of entering freshmen into the Cal State U system require remedial English and math classes to be able to do the beginning freshman's course work. That means the K-12 system in CA isn't doing their job. No surprise there.
While that might be true, I don't think you can put every bit of blame on the school system. There's plenty of research available which states that many students do not enter school (whether Pre-K or Kindergarten) with appropriate skills. Many parents simply do not take the time to work with their kids at home. Parents don't read to their kids and don't enstill the desire to learn within their kids. As a result, these kids lag behind throughout their K-12 education. Public Education is one of the greatest ideas ever thought of, but if all of the stakeholders don't emphasize it, it will fail. Just look at other countries and their attitudes toward education. In the US it's an absolute joke because people would rather worry about who their having sex with that night than who their child's teacher is. Sorry... I guess I need to step down off my soap box... -Matt
Don't be sorry, that's what the discussions are for! I agree, too many parents, especially in the economically challenged groups, can't or won't get more involved with the schools. They're shortchanging their own children's future. It's a shame but my opinion is the CA public school system needs to give control back to the local school districts. That would help a lot, providing local accountability to parents for good and poor teacher performance. CA's public school system is too large and diverse to be controlled and managed at the state level. Actually the whole state is a lost cause, which I never thought would happen. I'm glad we left in 2003.
The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives. Education is not just preparation for life; education is life itself. --------------- How intelligent are you? Find out here: IQ Test || EQ Test
This statement is excellent! It, too, is perhaps the root of the problem. Many educational programs are focused on archaic lessons. I can tell you my high school does not prepare people for life. We offer no electives whatsoever. When I was a student here, we offered computer programming (and that was in the mid 90's), agricultural sciences, and home economics. Those courses do not exist here anymore. They've been brushed aside because they are not "tested" classes under No Child Left Behind. Instead of teaching our students how to be successful and offering them some technical education, we're ignoring their needs. -Matt
Wow thats really great, this is really what we all need to know, i am also looking for some good ideas for education and i will be share them with you soon.
