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Doin’ the Math

Rexburg Geeks has a nice post on math education in schools these days.  Actually its not so nice because it’s a bit scarry if your a parent and and you’re concerned with whether your kid is going to grow up to be the head and not the tail in tomorrow’s economy.

Their post is around a video from Youtube entitled “Math Education: An Inconvient Truth”. I’ve inserted the video here, too.

ZDNet Education blogger Christopher Dawson has a related post entitled Is it too late to turn around math/science ed in the US? Dawson’s comments were precipitated upon reading The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century Doin the Math by Thomas Friedman, which calls into question the US’ ability to compete in the future against nations like China and India which emphasize engineering and technology education much more than US school systems.

Dawson goes on to consider the usual suspects: low pay for qualified math and science educators and teaching to tests that emphasize skillsets that are a mile wide and an inch deep, keeping school kids form acheiving mastery in an area of learning.

I’m inclined to think that its more the first cause than the last, and another: we don’t track students. We teach to all levels in a classroom, slowing down the swift and leaving the slow behind. I’ve never been a fan of tracking students by ability, but it seems like we need to address it as a possible solution. Perhaps we can experiment in a school district somewhere and see what happens. I’m curious what others are thinking.

Related posts:

  1. Practice Makes for Better Math Performance and Math Literacy as a Civil Right
  2. What Lies Ahead: Interesting Observations About the Future
  3. Teacher Shortage Easing Except in Key Math, Science, and Foreign Languages
  4. Lego Robots – a great way to stimulate interest in math, programming and engineering
  5. Teens Learning Science the Right Way (and for fun and profit, too)

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 3:50 pm and is filed under education, General, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Doin’ the Math”

  1. Mike Grace Says:
    March 29th, 2009 at 8:56 pm

    Thanks for your comment. It is absolutely terrifying that some schools are using these textbooks. I can’t imagine how much worse off we all would be if future generations couldn’t do basic math efficiently. One thing I also thought of as I was watching the video again with my wife was, “don’t you need to have a good foundation in multiplication and division tables to be able to ‘reason’ through those problems effectively?” My wife was floored after seeing this video and learning that some schools were using these books. We appreciate your efforts in improving the education system where ever your influences may reach.

  2. senorparrot Says:
    March 30th, 2009 at 3:31 am

    You’re right. It is scary. We’re used to being leaders in technology, but we forget how we got here. We’ve let our education system become unfocused on the skills and knowledge we need to forge ahead, and we’ve focused on putting band aids on failures.

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