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Old 02-06-2013, 10:04 PM
 
Location: Earth
24,620 posts, read 28,239,057 times
Reputation: 11416

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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bideshi View Post
Many teachers today are not as well educated as a high school senior in 1959.
And many are much more educated than a high school in 1959.
I administered standardized tests for decades, the criteria for teacher certification became much more stringent over the years.
You don't pass the tests, you don't teach.
They didn't have those tests in the 50s.

 
Old 02-06-2013, 10:16 PM
 
Location: Earth
24,620 posts, read 28,239,057 times
Reputation: 11416
Quote:
Originally Posted by Spaten_Drinker View Post
There is more to math than just getting the right answer. You have to understand the meaning of the numbers and how to build the equation to be truly EDUCATED.
What leads you to believe that people aren't?
I know many fine young engineers who understand the meaning of numbers and equations.
 
Old 02-06-2013, 10:20 PM
 
Location: Earth
24,620 posts, read 28,239,057 times
Reputation: 11416
Quote:
Originally Posted by florida.bob View Post
My 1st job out of the Army in 1969 was working on development of a FORTRAN IV simulator of GM Parts distribution throughout the US. It was a great language.
I took Fun with Fortran on Saturday mornings in 1981.
We used cards. Everyone dropped a stack of cards at one time or another.

I was the system manager for a Pr1me 750; we sold CADD and FEA programs.

I can do more on my calculator these days and without the requirement for a room full of cooling.
 
Old 02-06-2013, 10:59 PM
 
Location: Southcentral Kansas
44,882 posts, read 33,212,332 times
Reputation: 4269
Quote:
Originally Posted by chielgirl View Post
And many are much more educated than a high school in 1959.
I administered standardized tests for decades, the criteria for teacher certification became much more stringent over the years.
You don't pass the tests, you don't teach.
They didn't have those tests in the 50s.
How many English Proficiency tests did you administer? I just wondered since so few of those "teachers" today can write with proficient usage. When I took it in 1952 we were allowed three errors in papers written sitting in a classroom about a subject they popped on you the day you came in. No research, just sit down and write. Many people failed to graduate for years because they couldn't pass that one. They checked English usage, spelling, punctuation and all those things. I know very few graduates these days who I think could pass that thing. It was dropped in the early 60s as a requirement for graduation.

The topics were so grand. The day I took the damned thing the topic was "What I think in spring in Kansas". Yep, there we were walking in snow at least 6 inches deep and coming down heavily. It was the day before the Easter holiday started and I had some real nasty thoughts about that topic to write. Did you ever have to take something like that?
 
Old 02-06-2013, 11:00 PM
 
Location: Southcentral Kansas
44,882 posts, read 33,212,332 times
Reputation: 4269
Quote:
Originally Posted by chielgirl View Post
What leads you to believe that people aren't?
I know many fine young engineers who understand the meaning of numbers and equations.
Chit yes, engineers. How big is the percentage of them that graduate any given year? Your reply is pure cherry picking and nothing else.
 
Old 02-06-2013, 11:41 PM
 
2,238 posts, read 1,440,316 times
Reputation: 1272
How can you say you taught government and spout off some of the down right odd stuff you do ? Tell me were you one of those teachers who would just ramble on about nothing. Were you in support of McCarthyism ?
 
Old 02-07-2013, 05:48 PM
 
Location: Maryland about 20 miles NW of DC
6,105 posts, read 5,977,918 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by roysoldboy View Post
Speaking of Sputnik, did you as a child notice that what held the US back in that race to space was nothing but pure bureaucracy? I am speaking of the fact that all the military services were given money and told to get us "up there". Since the amount of money that the Congress would give to an individual service depended on getting there first they kept all the knowledge they had secret. Finally, the bureaucrats decided to order the Air Force to put up our first satellite and we waited and waited while the Army had the rocket that put up the first satellite for about a year before the Congress decided that Sputnik had put the Soviet Union ahead of us and told the Army to go ahead.

In this case, science or the lack of it led to our being second when we could have been first. How long after this mistake became known was it before the Congress decided that we needed to pool our brains about rocketry and created NASA? It wasn't long, and after that we led in space all the time.

There is quite a story as to why the USA snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory in 1957. The first part is what transpired as early as 1946 when the US studied what it should pursue in future for national defense. Vanevar Bush a leading technologist was tasked by President Truman to draft a report and it concluded that long range manned strategic bombers were the surest path. One key decision was to make the new service the US AirForce the sole service for the strategic bombing mission. The US AirForce was dominated by men who were pilots either bombers or tactical planes so this decision sat well with people like Gens Curtis LeMay and Hap Arnold. The US Army was limited to tactical (short range missles) of a range of 150 miles or less. The US Navy was limited to tactical weapons that could be lauched by Carrier-based planes or by submarines using torpedos. So the DOD organized in 1947 built long range bombers culminating in the B-52 and B-58. One reason the Bush report was pesimistic on the development of the ICBM was estimates of the size of a rocket that would fly a 5 ton atomic bomb to the USSR indicated a lift of mass of 200 tons. Now designs existed for just such a rocket existed in 1947 . One deign was German and was von Braun's A9-A10 or a multistaged version of the V-2. An Ameriocan design which subsequently became the Titan when the US finally decided to build such rockets after 1953 was advanced by the Martin Co. Convair also had devlopment studies of a rocket called the Atlas. If the US had bet on the ICBM and had put the kind of effort behind it that it put behind the B-52 and learning air refueling then a US ICBM might have benn fielded in the early 1950s rather than the 1960 time frame. As Arthur C. Clarke liked to point out, when faced with the need to build a large rocket to send its nuclear weapons to us, the Russians chose to build it. Russian rocketry was advanced by a small circle of Chief Designers of which S. P. Korolev and V. Glushko were the first among equals. They quickly built a Russian version of the V-2 (called the Red Army Missle or R-1) and a series of more advanced Rockets designated from R-2 to R-6 followed. The Russians still operate a version of the R-4 known as Scud and a version of the R-6 called the SS-4 (of Cuban Missile Crisis fame). Korolev then convinced Soviet leaders (Basically Nikta Sergyvich) to fund an ICBM called R-7. R-7 has been used by the Soviet and Russian space programs for the last 50 years since it lauches Soyuz manned spacecraft and is the only Russian rocket "man-rated". This rocket first flew in 1956 and reached intercontinental range in the summer of 1957. Its next flight was Oct 4, 1957 when Korolev used it to lauch the Preliminary Satelite or PS (S stands for the word sputnik.) One could imagine the frustration in Huntsville Alabama. von braun had with the approval of the Army had built a socalled tactical missile called a Redstone named after the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville that could launch a small payload to the South Atlantic. Which von Braun did in 1956. He wanted to put a small solid fueled rocket on top of the Redstone to act as a 4th stage and to launch a small radio beacon into orbit but he was refused permission by the Pentagon and the the White House that felt it would derail its "Open Skies Proposal" A Redstone with a small 4th stage should sound familiar, von Braun being the cautious engineer that he was built more than one in 1956 and it was sitting in a Huntsville wearhouse when Korolev launched the R-7 with PS. After the Vanguard failure in Dec 1957, von braun's rocket was dusted off sent to the Cape and launched as the Jupiter-C with a payload called Explorer-1. If von Braun had been given the green light the first satelite would have orbited the Earth in 1956.
 
Old 02-08-2013, 07:13 AM
 
78,016 posts, read 60,232,230 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by HappyTexan View Post
How else do you learn and understand the concepts if you don't do math without a calculator ?
That's what teaching the kids is all about.

Order of operation in Algebra is an important fundamental concept but is totally lost when it's just plugged into a scientific calculator because the kids don't realize the calculator is doing the order of operations in the software.

You use the tools after you learn and practice and understand the concepts.
I think that kids typing things like (), x and [] etc. into calculators are learning order of operations just as well as if they had to scrawl it out with a pencil.

I do however acknowledge you have a point to the extent that say....financial problems like how you enter interest rate, term, # of payments etc. and it spits a present value or payment out definitely supports your position.

Like with most topics, it seems like it's complex and we are likely more right or wrong depending on the age, ability and other variables involved.

With a lot of things I work with, it's vastly easier to teach the concept with a computer and display the examples than it is with pencil and paper.
 
Old 02-08-2013, 07:21 AM
 
78,016 posts, read 60,232,230 times
Reputation: 49415
Quote:
Originally Posted by roysoldboy View Post
Chit yes, engineers. How big is the percentage of them that graduate any given year? Your reply is pure cherry picking and nothing else.
But most of the people decrying "public schools" are cherry picking by pointing to urban areas where public magnet and private schools are used to clear out the top students and then what's left behind tests well below average.

Like most everything around here it's hard to have a rationale conversation about a topic and discuss the complexities and *gasp* admit it's not a black and white issue. Instead we just get entrenched politcal discourse that devolves rapidly into all the grace of fans yelling "less filling" and "tastes great" back and forth.

Where I live, the public schools are excellent. I have zero complaints.
 
Old 02-08-2013, 08:29 AM
 
5,719 posts, read 6,434,977 times
Reputation: 3646
Quote:
Originally Posted by roysoldboy View Post
Put your kids' calculators and computers on a shelf and then start with the competition with kids who didn't have calculators to depend on and I bet you find out that one group can calculate in their heads while the others have to sit blankly by and wish their calculators could be in their hands.

Yes, I am old (80) but I always nearly died laughing when all those guys in a bowling league asked me how I did the math for scoring without twirling the pencil and making marks with it. Of course, I learned to do that in the late 1930s and early 1940s. We did not have crutches to depend on and had to do our figuring in our heads or on paper. I found in 1959 when I was used as an algebra teacher for one freshman class that what was called New Math, back then, just didn't calculate in the minds of my kids and had to go back to the system I learned in the middle 40s. They caught it all right away with that kind of thing.

As the Happy Texan says most people at cash registers these days have no idea how to count change and are completely flustered when you give them the change before they get to use their calculating registers.

I may even be willing to take even you or your kids on without any "cheaters" to do the figuring for me. Old is not really stupid, but people like you are very sure it is.
Did you know "New Math" was actually needlessly harder and was phased out by the early 70s?
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