[Vision2020] Foreigners in Math, Science, and Engineering

[g. crabtree]

Perhaps it would help if U.S. schools spent more time teaching math and science and less with the social indoctrination and feel good nonsense.

Courtesy of the dreaded Dale Courtney:

Holding 27 Back for the Sake of the 12 
Of course, this is a shell game. It does nothing for the self-esteem of the low-achievers to advance them. They don't feel better about themselves because they cannot perform at the level of their peers. 

Another clear failure of government education. From the Idaho Values Alliance:

  Yesterday, the Idaho Senate Education Committee approved a curriculum redesign plan that will bulk up the math and science requirements for Idaho high school students. While the intent here is laudable, the plan was approved without an adequate explanation of why Idaho needs essentially to be doing remedial math at the high school level.

  Sen. Monty Pearce, the only senator to vote against the rule change, correctly argued that requiring more math and science in high school won't fix the problem that kids are arriving in high school unprepared for advanced work in math. "We need to start with more math earlier," he said. "High school is too late."

  It seems likely that the failure to adequately teach math skills at lower levels are part of the problem. My children, for instance, were never required to learn multiplication tables in school (they got drilled with flash cards at home, you can count on that). 

  I remember a conversation with my son's 5th grade teacher over our concerns about the level of math instruction she was offering to his class. In our judgment, it was below what he should have been learning at his grade level. The teacher agreed, but told us that in her class of 27 she had 12 students who could not do math at the 5th grade level, and she therefore had to adjust the curriculum downward.

  When we asked what these students were doing in the 5th grade, if they had not mastered 4th grade math skills, she explained that the district, out of concern for student self-esteem, did not want to hold them back. We gently pointed out the obvious: because the district was not willing to hold 12 students back, it was holding all 27 back. 

  A new math initiative may come forward this year, which will seek to address some of the failures of the public system to teach math effectively at the lower grades. Improvement at the lower grades may, in time, obviate the need for expensive remediation at the secondary level.

I hope I'm not violating any protocols by posting this and that it come through OK. I thought it highly pertinent to the discussion.

g
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Nick Gier 
  To: vision2020 at moscow.com 
  Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 10:20 PM
  Subject: [Vision2020] Foreigners in Math, Science, and Engineering


  Greetings:

  It is a song of praise that I note that Chinese, Indians, and Russians, mainly because of their solid credentials, are taking positions in our universities that could be occupied by Americans, if they received enough math and science in our schools and if they worked hard enough to earn PhDs in these fields.

  Correctly for population, the Chinese graduate ten times more engineers than we do.  We cannot compete unless we transform our educational systems and our increasingly anti-intellectual culture.

  Nick Gier

  "Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to human affairs."
  --Ralph Waldo Emerson

  "Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings who represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it."
   --Mohandas Gandhi

  "Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part by itself. . . .We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on the interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts." --Max Planck

  Nicholas F. Gier
  Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho
  1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843
  http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm
  208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950
  President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO
  http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm





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