There's a fascinating article titled "The Incredibles" in yesterday's NYTimes EducationLife section. This article focusses on students who are superachievers in high school and may even be bored in college. It was clear from the article that there definitely are such students.
For example, the former mathematics department chairman of George Mason University now teaches at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, which is a public magnet school in Virginia. Some students are taking "Complex Analysis" which has A.P. calculus plus a second year of advanced math as pre-requisite. [Yikes! That's my field and I'm not sure I understand it all even yet.]
However, of more relevance to our discussions was this interesting comment by the president of Pomona College. "High schools are trying to imitate college and teach college-type material instead of the high school material they used to teach ... They are now learning the advanced stuff, but not the basic stuff. We are finding students who have learned about s-, p- and d-orbitals -- a theoretical concept in chemistry -- but they don't know that chlorine is a gas."
Another educator concurred. "High school-age students are not mature enough to grasp the subtleties of some material...."
Well, before I respond, I want to know what you mean by putting Complex Analysis in quotes.
ReplyDeleteDoes that mean that it's not really a college level course but simply one of those promotional courses as in "Hey, parents look what fancy stuff we cover!"
This sounds like one of those things like teaching fractals to third graders.
At any rate, if this is all the case, it doesn't really make sense to say that this is college level work. Unless they are walking out of this Complex Analysis class proving the Cauchy Residue Theorem then this is all pretend anyway.
I put the name of the course in quotes because it had been in quotes in the original article, presumably because it was the name of the course and that is NYTimes style.
ReplyDeleteI have absolutely no doubt that it is a genuine Complex Analysis course. The teacher uses the same text as for a college class and "covers the same material a college junior or senior would take."
I was interested in the paradoxical aspects of this article which suggests that some high school students can understand the equivalent of upper-level courses at MIT whereas others taking advanced courses apparently have gaps in their knowledge.
My guess is that gaps are less likely to occur in mathematics because of the cumulative nature of mathematical understanding.
I also found the article interesting because of the contrast with the typically very poor mathematics education that is one of the main subjects of this blog.
"My guess is that gaps are less likely to occur in mathematics because of the cumulative nature of mathematical understanding."
ReplyDeleteThat was what went through my mind as well.
The article is interesting, thanks for posting it. I am very interested in these kinds of topics.
I think all the schools in the article were either elite private schools or public magnet schools.
ReplyDeleteSounds like there's a big gap opening up between those schools and ordinary public schools.
Ed's been telling me about this all week.
ReplyDeleteI'm finally printing it out.
Thomas Jefferson is an interesting school. I'll dig up the post on the old ktm...I took the Thomas Jefferson placement test & aced it thanks to Saxon Math.