kitchen table math, the sequel: A University Professor Writes: "There Is Something Wrong In American Secondary Education

Sunday, April 6, 2008

A University Professor Writes: "There Is Something Wrong In American Secondary Education

April 8, 2008--See update--I owe an apology to the Angry Professor, who writes the blog A Gentleman's C.

The professor blogs at A Gentleman's C, and describes herself as follows:
I am a tenured faculty member at a large state university. My teaching efforts primarily consist of delivering statistics lectures to social science majors. These experiences have colored my perspective somewhat.
In the post that follows, the blogger is writing about her experiences grading essays written by high-school students for a competitive scholarship, which require high SAT/ACT scores for eligibility. This year, she was judging essays written in the history category. She found about only 2% to be thoughtful and well-written.

I should have made abundantly clear that the phrase "
Something like, say, the wheel" was the professor's replacement phrase for the actual question. The replacement phrase was used to protect the anonymity of the students' responses.

I also should have made more clear that I found the value in the post to be in the comments.
The students were asked to describe what life would be like today if something critical to modern society had never been invented. Something like, say, the wheel. Here is a little sample of what the kids had to say:
  • "History is a very valuable topic to today's society."
  • "The wheel should never have been invented in order to benefit society."
  • "Thousands of people would strew together creating uncertainty and disorder."
  • "Without the wheel, all of mankind would have been and would be vastly effected."
  • "The industrial revolution began with the invention of the wheel in 15th century Europe."
Go read the comments, as well.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

They seem concerned, once again, that kids are not being taught "to think." That's all they do at school, in groups, through projects, and on and on.

What they aren't being taught to do is how to write.

SusanS

concernedCTparent said...

... or enough content to write about.

Anonymous said...

I'm sorry, but I have a different complaint.

What a positively STUPID question.

A modern society that missed THE WHEEL??? With high probability, it wouldn't exiat. And spending irrational time thinking counterfactually is a meaningful history exercise? Couldn't they have found something, you know, FACTUAL to ask them to write about?

The comments are nearly as off topic as the students' lousy examples. It must be the fault of NCLB that students have no reading comprehension!

One reason students can't write because students can't read. But it must be the test's fault!

SteveH said...

Perhaps if the tests allows the students to draw a poster instead, they would do better ... or not.

I'm not impressed by the question, however, Wasn't it the head of IBM who said (way back when) that he thought that all the country would need are a few hundred computers in the future?

Then again, bad writing is bad writing, no matter what you write about.

Anonymous said...

"A modern society that missed THE WHEEL??? With high probability, it wouldn't exist."

That wasn't the question. The question was: "describe what life would be like today if something critical to modern society had never been invented."

So ... the student was permitted to select the critical thing. It didn't have to be the wheel. And, the question didn't assume life today would be modern if the missing thing had not been invented.

A friend and I have a reverse game that we like to play. It involves asking how much *earlier* a given technology could have been invented, and then wondering how this would have changed things. The basic rule is that the invention pretty much required insight that people back them might have had. So ... the Montgolfier balloon appears to have been technologically possible as early as the 1st or 2nd century. One can imagine how warfare might have been different if observation balloons had been standard military equipment back then. Inventing electricity back then is 'cheating' ... who would think to try generating it and how would it work?

This question seems to ask the question backward ... assume something is missing and ask how things would be different. I wouldn't pick the wheel, but (going from memory), none of the pre-Columbian American civilizations had it.

-Mark Roulo

Angry Professor said...

Mark - I hate to intrude, but the students were given the thing that was missing. They couldn't pick their own thing. It was not the wheel (names changed to protect the innocent, etc.) but it was something equally influential. In the quotes I redacted, I replaced the thing they were to have written about with "the wheel."

As you were.

Anonymous said...

Mark, your example of playing out this history question for life today is based on a pre Columbian civilization? Because they didn't exactly make it to being a modern civilization.

Here's the problem with the question: the question requires you not just to stuppose that the wheel --or whatever it was--hadn't been invented by 3000 BC, but that not Euclid, Archimedes, Aristotle, Copernicus, or Newton wouldn't have invented it, either. Nor Hooke, Bell, Marconi, Einstein, Feynman, or any other person on the planet in the last five thousand years.

Gee, let's see, you figure out the relationship between force and mass to describe how all bodies in the universe move with respect to each other, include that they sweep out equal areas in equal times in an ellipse and you wouldnt' have invented the WHEEL????

So it's madness. And it's not historical either. A real history question could ask bout the invention of the wheel changed the societies of Mesopotamia vs. the pre columbians. A real history question could ask about the value of the wheel to the romans or in modern times.

But to talk about how TODAY would be? That is asking for several trillion counterfactuals to be supposed, and we have NO ABILITY to evalue the probability of any of them relative to any other. History doesn't try to do that. It tries to work from the data it actually does have.

SteveH said...

I agree with Allison. I can't imagine that the response to the question would say much about their knowledge of history. Who, in 100 years, could predict what would have happened if there wasn't enough bandwidth to make the internet work? Historians? I don't think so.

This discussion is moot, however, since many can't seem to write their way out of a paper bag, even if they were asked when the war of 1812 took place.