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Old 05-01-2016, 03:07 PM
LLN
 
Location: Upstairs closet
5,265 posts, read 10,694,982 times
Reputation: 7188

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Three things are going on. None of them good.

1). There is enormous pressure on administrators to get the drop-out rate low. They, in many cases, are evaluated on this. These behavior changing evaluating objective result in fewer and fewer student being disciplined or removed from classrooms. As with most programs inspired "by government" these children, with little or no interest in education, remain in classroom and disrupt or sabotage the learning environment. Think about it, without your education blinders on.

2) Cognitive development, vis-a-vis the frontal lobe, used to be believed to occur during the early teen years. For a number of years now, you can check "the research" and see the window is much wider, 10 - 24, is frequently given. Yet, we have pushed more and more abstract math skills to younger and younger children, while we, on the other hand, know they are just not equipped to cope. Sure, some kids have always been ready for algebra early, I was, real early, actually, but the vast majority are trying to "push a rope" as they struggle with symbols as numbers and various, near incomprehensible algebraic operations. With the ever dwindling parental component, the classroom teacher can never push, cajole, or motivate the rquisite numbers, those that lack the development at a specified time, early.

3) Video games. Go ahead roll your eyes. I am all for games, especially the math involved in creating games. But, where video games have done us in is when the going gets tough, the kids just reboot. Year after year of rebooting when the going gets tough, takes a toll on the ability to work through tough problems. There is no reset button when you are trying to find the equation of a line between two points, the length of a ladder leaning against a wall, ot approximating a rational number. You have to have the academic discipline, character and practice to win!
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Old 05-01-2016, 03:10 PM
 
Location: Baker City, Oregon
5,432 posts, read 8,127,722 times
Reputation: 11533
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greymatter46 View Post
Is it possible that Singapore education works because the students are primarily middle class Chinese and Indian?

Is it possible that we are reproducing/importing more kids from dumber stock?

Is it possible that 'rotten schools' have 'rotten students' rather than 'rotten teachers'?

You may say that I'm a dreamer, but am I the only one?
You are correct on all counts.

In Singapore there is no No Child Left Behind program, trying to do the impossible job of closing “gaps.” They use Lee Kuan Yew's educational philosophy.

In case you don't know, Lee Kuan Yew ("I always tried to be correct, not politically correct.") was the Benevolent Dictator of the city-state of Singapore. Under Lee’s 50 years of formal and informal rule, Singapore went from being a disease ridden Third World backwater with no natural resources to a gleaming technopolis and the world’s third major financial hub after London and New York.

Like the United States, Singapore has multi-ethnic, multi-racial population.

Here is Lee's educational philosophy which has worked extremely well (look at international test scores) : “If I tell Singaporeans – we are all equal regardless of race, language, religion, culture, then they will say,”Look, I’m doing poorly. You are responsible.” But I can show that from British times, certain groups have always done poorly, in mathematics and in science. But I’m not God, I can’t change you. But I can encourage you, give you extra help to make you do, say maybe, 20% better.”

Of course, if Lee had been an American, he would have been hounded from office for this philosophy and placed on the Southern Poverty Law Center Hate Watch.

The United States actually does well on international tests. When broken down by the groups tracked by No Child Left Behind you will find that each group does quite well when compared to their counterparts in other countries:

[IMG]http://i182.photobucket.com/albums/x...0by%20race.jpg[/IMG]
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Old 05-01-2016, 07:26 PM
 
95 posts, read 94,254 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rugrats2001 View Post
Quote:
Originally Posted by Good at Math View Post
Many US high school students cannot solve math problems from Asian primary schools.
Because those math problems are designed to do more than showcase math skills. They are overwhelmingly what most people would call 'trick questions'. Those primary school Asians are taught about the tricks that are used in those questions, so there is no problem for them.
Real life problems could be much trickier. Solving harder problems can help better develop kids skills. In Asia, math wisdom is passing along from older teachers to younger pupils. This process is mostly missing in our schools. Many students easily give up on some slightly difficult problems. In UK, high school students protested online because the exam was "too hard".
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Old 05-01-2016, 08:24 PM
 
Location: Whoville....
25,386 posts, read 35,466,787 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth View Post
Tickler, I respect your experience and your insights, but even in private schools, where expectations were high, and there was no constant reviewing, kids struggled with math. It was the concepts they couldn't handle. Same with my older brothers. I spent hours on Algebra 1 homework daily and barely got a C. My brothers barely passed their Algebra. The daughter of one of those brothers, OTOH, breezed through all her math classes, and tutored the kids who struggled. She has a gift. No one can figure out where she got it, lol! But it wasn't because her teachers were better. Most of her class struggled.

In the post you quoted I talked about students not being ready for what they are being taught. I do think that part of our problem is that we push math down to lower and lower levels thinking if we start earlier we'll get better results but we don't.


I also think we fail to hold our students accountable for what they do learn and they have come to expect review after review after review. These are two different problems.


IME girls tend to develop math ability sooner than boys. I teach 9th and 10th graders math and the girls as a group seem to struggle less. That's not to say that I don't have girls who struggle I just have more boys that struggle.
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Old 05-01-2016, 08:26 PM
 
Location: Whoville....
25,386 posts, read 35,466,787 times
Reputation: 14692
Quote:
Originally Posted by Good at Math View Post
Real life problems could be much trickier. Solving harder problems can help better develop kids skills. In Asia, math wisdom is passing along from older teachers to younger pupils. This process is mostly missing in our schools. Many students easily give up on some slightly difficult problems. In UK, high school students protested online because the exam was "too hard".

My students get upset with me because I'll include extraneous information in science test questions. IRL no one gives you just the data you need. You have to decide which data to take. That means you need to be able to decide what is and isn't important so yes I give them more data than they need.
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Old 05-01-2016, 08:30 PM
 
Location: Foot of the Rockies
90,316 posts, read 120,475,124 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ivorytickler View Post
My students get upset with me because I'll include extraneous information in science test questions. IRL no one gives you just the data you need. You have to decide which data to take. That means you need to be able to decide what is and isn't important so yes I give them more data than they need.
Good preparation for college. IIRC, math "word problems" have extraneous info in them, too sometimes.
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Old 05-01-2016, 08:38 PM
 
Location: New Mexico
4,793 posts, read 2,783,911 times
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Default The report says otherwise

Quote:
Originally Posted by Troyfan View Post
...and show no improvement in reading" Washington Post

...


"Scores on the 2015 reading test have dropped five points since 1992, the earliest year with comparable scores, and are unchanged in math during the past decade."

It is obvious we have long passed the point of diminishing returns in education. The next additional $ we spend on will not produce any better outcomes than the last $200 billion or whatever. That dollar could be better spent on road and bridges, on new cell phones, on ice cream.

...

No, that's not it. The report is @ pains to note that the most proficient students are doing better than before. Those students are improving, as we would expect. The average scores may have dropped, but it's because the worst students outnumber the best (I imagine.) & therefore, we have not passed the point of diminishing returns in education.


It's the worst students whose math & reading scores are slipping. Whatever we're doing in education is working for the top performers. What we need to figure out is how to get @ least the basics into the worst-performing students. If they fall too far behind, they'll likely become discouraged & drop out of school altogether - which is the worst outcome for them, our society & our politics. The US works best if all participants can understand policy & argue for their position, & vote their particular benefit & that of the larger society.


We need to do a better job on educating the worst students. We need to try other approaches, we can't afford people voting who don't know what their interest is.
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Old 05-01-2016, 09:02 PM
 
Location: New Mexico
4,793 posts, read 2,783,911 times
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Default I'd expect a national assessment to cover both

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth View Post
Do those national assessments include private school test results? I wonder if the private schools are doing a better job at teaching math. I doubt it. There's a problem with how the US teaches math, and I don't know what it is, but throwing money at it isn't going to solve it.
This one says it does - the results are for US public & private high schools, para 2, lines 1-3 of the article @ the URL. & the report indicates that the best students are doing better @ both math & reading - it's the poorer-performing students whose scores are declining, which means that the performance gap between the top & bottom performers is getting worse, not gradually closing as we would hope.
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Old 05-01-2016, 09:10 PM
 
Location: New Mexico
4,793 posts, read 2,783,911 times
Reputation: 4920
Default @ least the basics for everyone

Quote:
Originally Posted by King Harold View Post
There is no hope for math education in America's public or private schools. The exception being schools with 50% or more Asian students such as Stuy in Manhattan.

Teaching kids math is largely a solved problem. Americans just have a few fundamental beliefs that make it impossible to teach math properly. Practicing math problems is dismissed as "rote learning", the worst thing in the world. Americans are very much against abstract thinking, but the whole point of math is abstraction.
That is not true, & certainly not supported by this report. As the report notes, the best-performing students in US public & private high schools continue to progress, & their test scores continue to improve. It is the worst-performing reading & math students whose scores in both are not only failing to keep pace, they are declining.


This is a serious problem, in terms of making sure that everyone comes out of high school with an adequate grasp of math & reading. But whatever we're doing with the best-performing students, it's working for them. Now we need to address the math/reading needs of the worst-performing students.


We need students graduating from high school to be ready to enter work, technical training or continue on to college. We also need them to be able to understand a newspaper or TV news, take part in politics, & understand & defend their own interests in government, in the workplace, & so on.
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Old 05-01-2016, 09:28 PM
 
31,754 posts, read 26,706,619 times
Reputation: 24631
Quote:
Originally Posted by pkbab5 View Post
I think it depends on where you throw the money. The problem with how the US teaches math is that *most* everyone who is good at teaching math does NOT teach math because they can make 3 times the money doing something else that requires someone to be good at math. If you start throwing money at the math teachers, then the good math teachers will start coming out of the woodwork and quitting their STEM jobs to go teach the kids. As it is, the only really good math teachers out there are the altruists or the folks with well-paid spouses.


Really good math education starts in Preschool and Kindergarten. That's where you lay your foundation for number sense. Do you know of any public preschool or public kindergarten teachers in the US who hold math degrees? Or who feel confident in algebra and beyond? Yeah, me neither. The closest you can get here is Montessori.

Years ago before female "equality" and whatever workplace laws you had tons of math and science teachers for primary and secondary education. Women with four year and even post grad degrees in those degrees were often shut out of the big money posts (higher education, research, pharma, etc....).


Even then you often had females teaching primary school while men were in high schools (where often again the big money was) and colleges.


As things stood until equality laws covered education many times girls had a difficult time even getting into the high school or college math classes needed for a not only a degree in that or science, but the foundation for say pre-med. Girls were shunted into becoming nurses, medicine was a man's world; or so the thought went.


Fast forward to modern times both men and women who are good in math *and* have STEM degrees can often do much better elsewhere than education; especially primary and secondary in public schools. In fact look around; bet at all levels of education you find more and more Asian, Indian and other "foreign" teachers for those subjects.
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