You have just tripped over the elephant in the room, and that is the (frightening) fact that the entire system is, in a perverse way, results-driven. But not in the way we want. It is an engine fueled by failure, not success.
Think about it. Student failure provides endlessly expanding opportunities for job creation, innovative "projects," interventions, pseudo-research, administrivia and on and on and on. It provides educrats of all sorts with opportunities to present themselves as caring, professional problem-solvers. If they were wearing T-shirts, the front would say, "See how hard we're trying!" and the back would say, "Don't blame us, look what we have to work with."
In contrast, what does effective curriculum and pedagogy provide? Real student learning is not nearly so full of photo-ops, catchy news stories or video segments. Kids learning well and quickly aren't newsworthy. It looks, well, natural. We almost have to have a system in place to make kids stupid. Remember that the IQ of kids who don't learn to read early on will fall steadily throughout their years in school.
And if kids were effectively taught in most areas from the beginning, huge amounts could be slashed from the budgets allocated for school districts. Not a chance any will undermine their own livelihood in such a way.
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Thursday, January 24, 2008
the elephant in the room
from palisadesk:
That's right, we subsidize failure. The more they fail, the more money they get. The more we don't agree on a pedagogy, the more industry pops up to investigate options, the more textbooks and materials are written, the more
ReplyDeletetechnology needs to be invented for the classroom. The more no one agreement on psychometric methods, the more methods we can invent. Plus the extra consultants, administrators, auditors, and other outside services to help evaluate. The industry is large, and it has no interest in putting itself out of business by actually producing a single working system.
After all this time I still find it hard to keep this inside my head all at the same time.
ReplyDeleteBut yes, it is self-sustaining and self-perpetuating....and it is results-driven!
ReplyDeleteI found this on Oak Norton's TERC flyer:
ReplyDelete6) TERC recommends a text for teachers called "Beyond
Arithmetic". In this book it says traditional elementary math
must be discarded because:
• Was "developed to meet the needs of the 19th century."
BA, Page 2
• Requires that students "memorize many facts,
procedures, definitions, and formulas." BA, Page 2
• "Focuses on learning a particular set of procedures for
addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of
whole numbers, fractions, and decimals." BA, Page 2
• Results in "overpracticed students." BA, Page 3
• Ignores the fact that "today's students have an important
tool available to them: the calculator." BA, Page 77
This leaves me too speechless to say anything, except that I can't get over TERC's worry about "overpracticed students." That's a new one to me.
Speaking of "overpracticed students", both the principal and my son's fourth grade teacher referred to me as a "slave driver" when I told them I had my son practicing math over the summer.
ReplyDeleteOur school uses TERC so we don't get a lot of over practice. I can see why they referred to me as they did.
--PaulaV
The "Beyond Arithmetic" text cannot be found on the TERC site. They have gotten more sophisticated and vague over the years. Schools now love to argue with more vague generalities. Here is the latest from the TERC site.
ReplyDelete- - -
1. Support students to make sense of mathematics and learn that they can be mathematical thinkers.
2. Focus on computational fluency with whole numbers as a major goal of the elementary grades.
3. Provide substantive work in important areas of mathematics—rational numbers, geometry, measurement, data, and early algebra—and connections among them.
4. Emphasize reasoning about mathematical ideas.
5. Communicate mathematics content and pedagogy to teachers.
6. Engage the range of learners in understanding mathematics.
- - -
Meaningless, although note the comment about whole numbers as a major goal of the elementary grades.
You have to dig deeper to find out what they really think. They have a page called
"Resources for Working with Families"
http://investigations.terc.edu/implementing/working-with-families/work_fam_resources.cfm
That gives more clues, like a link to Mathematically Sane. The tone is also about informing parents, not getting input from them. One section is called "Building a Case". They decide. You don't.
Our school is having a parent meeting about Everyday Math. This is to teach the parents, not open the discussion to change. These are nice people. They think (I hope) that they are doing the best thing for the kids. But they MUST know about the arguments against Everyday Math. What is (or is not) going on in their heads? Their presumption is that they are the experts and they get to decide. It's an academic turf issue, but it's also ignorance.
The curriculum head at my son's old private school just didn't know enough math. She was incapable of seeing the problem. Enough kids did well (I asked her what "well" meant and whether that was because of or in spite of the curriculum.) that she told me that is can't be because of the curriculum.
The TERC page also refers to Steven Leinwand'b book: "Sensible Mathematics" where one of the chapters is called:
"1. Mediating, Forestalling, and Even Winning the Math Wars"
Forestalling! Such a great attitude to take with parents and the community.
What's going on here? After all of these years I still can't figure it out. What do the teacher and administration discussions sound like when they select curricula? What do teachers say about parental input? They seem to do what they know, and what they know is NOT Saxon or Singapore Math.
"slave driver"
ReplyDeleteI guess that it comes down to the fact that they are just plain ignorant. They KNOW that many parents have different expectations of education, but they just don't care. They can barely figure out how to get kids over the pathetically low state test cutoffs.
I was able to find this TERC book on amazon:
ReplyDeleteBeyond Arithmetic: Changing Mathematics in the Elementary Classroom (Investigations in Number, Data, & Space Ser.) (Paperback)
by Jan Mokros (Author)
It is possible to read the beginning of Chapter 1 (where all these claims are made) at amazon. Copying is not possible so I can't present excerpts. One of the claims is that the "overpracticed" students of the past couldn't think and didn't know what to do when problems where presented in unfamiliar form. Consequently, they did poorly on international tests in the pre-fuzzy math era. Among other things, these "overpracticed" students supposedly lacked number sense.
This makes me laugh. Today's students raised on fuzzy math not only cannot perform basic operations but lack all number sense. Doing operations without a calculator helps to develop number sense, e.g. how many times does 13 go into 68?
One of the claims is that the "overpracticed" students of the past couldn't think and didn't know what to do when problems where presented in unfamiliar form.
ReplyDeleteI hate to tell you this, but I may have overpracticed C. going into his math midterm.
I had given him HUGE amounts of practice on factoring, not much on solving a quadratic equation.
I'm pretty sure he missed at least one question because he factored instead of noticing that he was supposed to solve an equation.
What do you think of the importance of mixed review??
Could I have avoided that problem if I'd given C. mixed review sheets?
This is the "all math looks alike" problem.
1. Mediating, Forestalling, and Even Winning the Math Wars
ReplyDeleteGood luck with that, Steve.