Posted on 07/15/2012 4:09:36 PM PDT by ConservativeStatement
It was a 1992 Barbie doll who accurately reminded us, “Math class is tough!” So hard that even a man with two Ivy League degrees, President Obama, is stumbling over the basics. The president seems to think that women can hold half the places in some fields of study — and a majority in the rest.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Welcome to mathematics re-education.
Real easy to solve:
- Student lonas for math and science degrees: 1% interest rate.
- Student lonas for non math and non science degrees: 25% interest rate.
The dumb ones (male and female) will flunk out the first semester.
I’ll bite. What are these “lonas” of which you spoke twice?
Maybe. How do we know he graduated? (Hell, he tried to pass off phony birth certs, so I imagine a college degree wouldn't be too hard either.) Even if he did, AA guaranteed he didn't have to do any hard lifting as a student. All he had to do was be "present", just like his senate career.
After years, really decades, of trying to figure out why our education system REFUSES TO TEACH MATH, but, instead resorts to gimmicks and curricula that are not only unproven, but actually proven to fail (such as calculators in grade school and new ways of doing arithmetic), I think that I finally have an answer:
The answer I’ve come up with (with some help from reading a lot on it) is that “the system” is attempting to figure out a way to achieve this ‘equity’ between white males and others, when it comes to math. They are convinced that minorities and girls can never succeed using the proven methods (i.e., math drills), so they resort to gimmicks. The teachers LOVE the gimmicks because the kids (finally, in their eyes) have fun doing math. Of course they aren’t learning jack, but that is not on the goals list of today’s teachers, so they are just happy as can be.
Unfortunately for the education establishment, lots of parents still take things into their own hands. In the Asian community, virtually EVERY kid goes to after school learning centers where calculators are never to be seen. White parents, to some extent, also help their kids get around this nightmare. But for blacks - FORGET IT - in large part, they are simply chewed up and tossed out.
For this article, I suspect that the ultimate goal is to establish systems similar to what they do for fire department exams and SAT scores, which is to simply add enough points to minority (and girl) scores to provide ‘equity of results’.
Now, having written all of this, I have no doubt that most parents reading this will conclude that I’m (still) out of my mind and that this would never happen in their precious schools...so they continue to let their kids rot in the public (and some private) schools...while others (me and Wintertime, for starters) simply DID NOT let that happen.
You do peg the problem as the result of a systemic strive toward equity.
The results have been grade inflation and actually the kids in question have learned that they can get by without doing jack.
The kids with involved parents take charge and whip a kid’s ass if he doesn’t do his work. No problems with those kids - they seem to learn for some unexplained reason.
good thing china’s not trying to pass us in these fields.......or we might lose our edge if we make it an “even” playing field...............
You must be really bored.
I do hate to admit it, but the existence of AA does bias my initial opinion of new female and/or minority engineers. I have worked with many and there are a few who ended up being spectacular engineers, but many many who ended up sucking maniacally. On the other hand, that tends to be true with all young engineers, a small handful who end up being good, and the majority end up being worthless. It is weird though, I have much more patience with the presumably AA ones because I initially don’t expect anything from them (plus I could get in trouble if I get short with them), than I do with the non-AA ones since I have a short fuse with incompetence, and I can make my dissatisfaction known to the non-AA ones without fear of lawsuits.
“The kids with involved parents take charge and whip a kid’s ass if he doesn’t do his work. No problems with those kids - they seem to learn for some unexplained reason.”
Tell me about it. When it came time for math, my middle kid would scream and scream...Warning...Another_Warning...Still_Scream...Whack...Cry...Stop_Crying. Then he would sit down and do his work. His attitude picked up and he was a little angel for the rest of the lesson. Then, often, repeat the next day.
In my angry feminist days, that Barbie doll saying ‘Math is Hard’ made me furious. So furious that I went to college and got a BSEE just to prove that women can do math. In one of my Circuits classes, in an auditorium with 300 other students, I was one of three women. I can’t imaging cutting that class down to six people just to even the numbers.
I have come to this conclusion due to my years of work with children in the scouts, and our church's Sunday School and tutoring programs.
Some twit of a government teacher is bound to claim that I am wrong, so here's a challenge for them. Prove to me that government schools work and are effective! Where are the studies that fully separate out what is ( not) learned in the classroom from that which is entirely due to the hard work of the parents and child IN THE HOME. ( These studies have never been done!) ,
Please think about this. We spend up to $30,000/year/child for 13 years and NO ONE knows if government schools actually do the job the taxpayers pay to service them.
My guess:
If every government school in this nation were to disappear tomorrow, the same children who are getting an education today would get one tomorrow. They children who are not getting one would not get an education tomorrow. Why? Answer: Because if you know an educated child that child has been significantly afterschooled by their parents, private paid or unpaid tutors, by relatives or friends, and by the child's own hard work IN THE HOME.
As John Taylor Gatto observed (I paraphrase here): What we need to do for education would cost so much less than what we are doing, that it has zero chance of getting done.
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