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.

Sigh.

Office Depot here is selling tip cheat cards by the cashier -- for those who can't calculate a 15% tip. A locally-owned video store is having a clearance sale, 50% off. They have big signs next to the clearance aisles that tell you for each video price what 50% off would be.

paraprofessionals behaving badly

today, at NYC Educator

(make that paraprofessionals behaving badly)

double - oh - two

This may be a purchase. (Verizon Math, part 1)

what is .002 cents x 35,896?

Drop everything and go immediately to YouTube to listen to this protracted conversation between a customer who has been quoted a price of .002 cents per kilobyte usage and two different reps who can't tell the difference between .002 cents and .002 dollars.

Here's Instructivist's take. Credit to Katie, a commenter on his blog, for finding the link.

More fun with decimals: the guy's got a blog and a t-shirt!

I'm going to have to get that t-shirt before Verizon makes it go away.

My favorite line thus far: "[.002 cents] is very much less than .002 dollars."

Second favorite:

"How do you write 1 cent?"

".01."

"How do you write 1/2 cent?"

"Ahhh that would be .005 I think...I don't know, I'm not a mathematician!"

Third favorite:

"It's obviously a difference of opinion."

"It's not opinion!"

+++++++

I wonder whether it would have helped if the customer had dropped the approach he was taking, which was correct but wasn't working, and started focusing repetitively - make that perseveratively - on units.

Over and over again the two customer service reps do the calculation on their calculators (.002 cents x 35,896 kilobytes), come up with an answer of 71.792, and then change the unit from cents to dollars.

If he'd pointed out that they'd just switched the unit, would that have helped?

What I assume is happening in this exchange is that the reps are reading decimal figures in terms of the everyday decimal figures they're used to seeing.

When they have a figure like ".002" they attach the unit "cents" because .002 is more similar to the way we write cents than to the way we write dollars.

Then when they suddenly have a figure like 71.792 they switch to dollars, because 71.792 more closely resembles the way we write dollars than the way we write cents.

That's my guess.

Apparently this customer was originally quoted a rate of .002 cents per kilobyte, which in fact was incorrect; the correct rate was .002 dollars.

The original reps must have looked at something like .002/kilobyte and read it as .002 cents.

I say we start teaching the entire Western World unit multipliers today.

Verizon Math, the t-shirt