Remedial math for college freshmen & freshwomen should be a national disgrace!
Regardless, we need to push more advanced math at high school, IMHO. They shouldn't be seeing calculus for the first time in their first year of college.
I think that reflects society placing too much of a value on a high GPA than on learning something useful.
I’m sure the OWS guy who is all over the news today had a perfect 4.0 when he got his degree in Puppetry.
Give me an engineer with a solid 2.5 anyday.
In other countries, if you flunk a class... you flunk a class.
However, flunking has been made illegal in America.
You see, it hurts the feelings of the people who flunk.
What the guns of the world could not do to America in two hundred years, the rancid hypocrisy, drooling stupidity and savage arrogance of liberals have, indeed, accomplished.
I don’t think the answer is to encourage the masses to flood into science departments. Nor is it, necessarily, to condition them for the lab from the crib, like the do in China. That leaves you with not a population of Newtons, but some geniuses (per usual) and lots and lots of people who are pretty good at math. Same as how a national Push for Literary Greatness wouldn’t produce a nation of Shakespeares, rather reams of mediocre doggerel.
No, the solution is to locate, pluck out, and encourage those with natural aptitude and desire. Prepare the ground for geniuses to rise. Mass factory education never could manage that; at best they raise the average a bit.
“Regardless, we need to push more advanced math at high school, IMHO. They shouldn’t be seeing calculus for the first time in their first year of college.”
I was in the humanities, so maybe this doesn’t apply. But I got to calculus and trigonometry in high school and passed the basic minimum requirements to get into normal college math classes. But once I was there, all they required of me was algebra. Which was weird, since that kicked me back to, like, the 8th grade.
In the Winter Semester of 1958, I took my Freshman Chemistry class. At the first class meeting our instructor noted the rather large enrollment and then remarked, “That’s OK. About half of you will be gone by midterm!”
THAT put the fear of God in me, and I began studying my assignments that night and every day after that for all my classes.
It must have worked. I finally got my PhD in Biochemistry after several years of hard work and study.
Oh by the way, my chem teacher was right. About half the class remained at midterm.
That is interesting. I took calculus in high school in 1966, and it was a nice boost going into engineering school. Despite all the talk of advancement, I'm not sure that students today learn as much as we did in the 60s.
Remedial math for college freshmen & freshwomen should be is a national disgrace, but nobody is willing to call it that.
Much of our dearth of science students is caused by teachers’ unions’ work rules; they often prohibit paying a science teacher more than a gym teacher, so the people who could teach science leave for the private sector leaving gym teachers in their place as science teachers.
My science in grammar school was atrocious; any questions from students were answered with, “I’ll get back to you on that” (and the teacher never did). It was better in high school (a private one - no union), and great in college.
I saw calculus for the first time as a freshman, and that was in 1980. My HS had a lousy math program and I was utterly unprepared. I was intending on a degree in oceanography. For lots of reasons (and not really the math— I caught up on that eventually) I finally ended up in the school of business and got a degree in accounting.
Funny thing... I barely ever used my accounting degree. I went from college to a stint in the Coast Guard, and then a brief accounting job that quickly over a couple of years morphed into a long career in I.T.
Sometimes I wish I’d stuck with the science career... But alas, science remains just a hobby.
It would be much easier to start with faculty that can actually speak and understand the English language.
Benefits of nut consumption for people with abdominal obesity, high blood sugar, high blood pressure
Signs of ageing halted in the lab The story links the abstract.
Decoding the Brain’s Cacophony
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
Or, just bring back Mr Wizard!
[I had a friend in HS who loved Chemistry and worked on it at home with one heck of a chemistry set. His goal was to make TNT. And I am not kidding. Oh and his hands were all nasty from chemical burns (didn't use gloves). Kinda hurt him in getting chicks]
“Look to the student to your left and to your right, when you graduate, they will not be there. They will have dropped out.” Address to new Freshmen by the Chancellor of NC State in 1961
This is all generalized - first the overseas comparison isn’t apples to apples while we require 100 percent to attend high school overseas does not (Japan for instance youneed to test into high school and your family pays more or less depending on which one you get into and not all go so your already comparing the top tier to our complete body when it comes to test scores). Second the level of math is dependent on a number of factors including: family district and teacher. My daughter is a freshman and will start calculus next year - they kicked her into algebra in fifth grade to which my jaw dropped since I first saw it in eighth (back in the day). Now are all her peers in the advanced class no, but they have all seen algebra by 7th grade in the district before the advanced kids did when I attended. Anecdotes exist of failures in certain areas sure but you don’t set national policy off anecdotes.
“Politicians and educators have been wringing their hands for years over test scores showing American students falling behind their counterparts in Slovenia and Singapore. How will the United States stack up against global rivals in innovation?”
Then let’s import millions of tomato pickers and functional illiterates. Let’s also spend valuable class time with our own students on global warming, diversity training, and sex ed.
No doubt with those programs we’ll continue our freefall to the bottom, but at least we can “feel good” about it.
Decades later returning to college I had to sit through another remedial math class. Honestly I didn't know if I would get through it this time either.
About 3 weeks in the teacher discussed a concept so simple he had me solving quadratic equations in one class. What was the one concept that I somehow missed in all those decades of struggle? What teacher and tutor neglected to note I had not learned? Please Remember My Dear Aunt Sally.
I tend to blame the whole ‘new math’ concept of teaching math. I now understand it was not because I was dumb about math, heck I aced Physics, but could not pass an algebra class! It was about how they muddied what should have been the logical expression of mathematics. I got through physics...because it was logical, visual, and hands-on. I didn't need their new math theory of teaching, I could reason out the answer ...often in my head.
I did that once in the remedial math class with a story problem. Within seconds blurted out the answer...the teacher knew I didn't complete any written work. He is the same one that told me about my dear aunt sally.
That way students would be prepared for calculus sometime in high school and no make-up would be needed for that particular deficiency.
But that's just me ~ and probably Herman Cain as well. I doubt Romney and those other folks got past ACCOUNTING ~ which can be replaced by a spreadsheet program.
Anyway, the real difficulty in the math programs is that the university systems shifted to a First Year program that combined "How to Use a Computer" course with "Refresh your Algebra and Your geometry" course ~ so a student short on computer smarts had to take that course.
Some schools make it a "combined requirement" so you have to pass a test for both, but if you are deficient in one you take just that part. Other schools make it a "combined course" so if you don't pass the test you have to take the whole enchilada.
Lots of pretty bright kids still don't understand how computers work because THEY DON'T CARE until they have to take a make-up course!
The situation is more one of definitions than of causes.
Regardless, we need to push more advanced math at high school, IMHO. They shouldn't be seeing calculus for the first time in their first year of college.
I did; I was a freshman in Drexel Institute of Technology (as it then was) when Sputnik was launched. The local high school reacted quickly, and started teaching math in hs that I wasn't seeing yet in engineering school.Be that as it may, technology provides the answer to the problem of laggard schools; IMHO khanacademy.org pretty much takes care of a math curriculum. Free, and IMHO excellent. From 1+1 to advanced college level calculus and statistics.But let's not give the "liberals" a pass on the thing that is throttling the economy: socialism.
The fundamental objective of socialists is to hog the credit for whatever any engineer accomplishes. That is what it means to "spread the wealth."