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MOOCs are separate from that highly desirable and precious residential degree. Online courses represent auxiliary income to support bricks and mortar and to increase brand recognition globally. New wine for an old bottle.
The high cost of a degree at M.I.T. — or most universities — is not lowered. That would be a revolution.
To build an engaging game that also supports good mathematics learning requires... understanding, at a deep level, what mathematics is, how and why people learn and do mathematics, how to get and keep them engaged in their learning, and how to represent the mathematics on the platform on which the game will be played.The same is true of language learning. Most linguistic software taps only superficial aspects of language, and, as I know from personal experience, it takes great effort to build a program that does more than that.
Many people have come to believe mathematics is the memorization of, and mastery at using, various formulas and symbolic procedures to solve encapsulated and essentially artificial problems. Such people typically have that impression of math because they have never been shown anything else......
By and large, the public identifies doing math with writing symbols, often obscure symbols. Why do they make that automatic identification? A large part of the explanation is that much of the time they spent in the school mathematics classroom was devoted to the development of correct symbolic manipulation skills, and symbol-filled books are the standard way to store and distribute mathematical knowledge. So we have gotten used to the fact that mathematics is presented to us by way of symbolic expressions.This approach to math, Devlin suggests, is at odds with the resolutions of a "blue-ribbon panel of experts" serving on the National Research Council’s Mathematics Learning Study Committee ("Adding it Up: Helping Children Learn Mathematics," National Academies Press, 2001). In Devlin's words: these resolutions hold that math proficiency consists of:
the aggregate of mathematical knowledge, skills, developed abilities, habits of mind and attitudes that are essential ingredients for life in the 21st century. They break this aggregate down to what they describe as “five tightly interwoven” threads. The first is conceptual understanding, the comprehension of mathematical concepts, operations and relations. The second is procedural fluency, defined as skill in carrying out arithmetical procedures accurately, efficiently, flexibly and appropriately. Third is strategic competence, or the ability to formulate, represent and solve mathematical problems arising in real-world situations. Fourth is adaptive reasoning—the capacity for logical thought, reflection, explanation and justification. Finally there’s productive disposition, a habitual inclination to see mathematics as sensible, useful and worthwhile, combined with a confidence in one’s own ability to master the material.Ah, "21st century skills," "habits of mind," "conceptual understanding," "real-world situations," "explanation," "disposition"...--all this makes me wonder about the ratio of mathematicians to math eduation "experts" on this blue-ribbon panel. (It should be noted that Devlin himself is not, strictly speaking, a mathematician; he holds a Ph.D. in logic from the University of Bristol, and, while affiliated with Stanford, is not a member of the Stanford math department.)
For the entire history of organized mathematics instruction, where we had no alternative to using static, symbolic expressions on flat surfaces to store and distribute mathematical knowledge, that barrier has prevented millions of people from becoming proficient in a cognitive skill set of evident major importance in today’s world, on a par with the ability to read and write.To the rescue comes... Devlin's math education software program:
With video games, we can circumvent the barrier. Because video games are dynamic, interactive and controlled by the user yet designed by the developer, they are the perfect medium for representing everyday mathematics, allowing direct access to the mathematics (bypassing the symbols) in the same direct way that a piano provides direct access to the music.Devlin's notion that a well-designed math video game can help students meet the National Academy's goals for math education rests on two assumptions. One is that students can achieve a sufficient level of mastery in mathematics without symbols. The other is that playing such video games is to math what playing the piano is to music.
Just how essential are those symbols? After all, until the invention of various kinds of recording devices, symbolic musical notation was the only way to store and distribute music, yet no one ever confuses music with a musical score.But there's an important difference between math and music--and a reason why no one confuses music with a musical score. Music has a privileged place in subjective experience. Along with sensations like color, taste, and smell, it produces in us a characteristic, irreduceable, qualitative impression--an instance of what philosophers call "qualia." Just as there's no way to capture the subjective impression of "redness" with a graph of its electromagnetic frequency, or of "chocolate" with a 3-D model of its molecular structure, so, too, with the subjective feeling of a tonic-dominant-submediant-mediant-subdominant-tonic-subdominant-dominant chord progression. Embedded in what makes music what it is to us is the qualia of its chords and melodies.
...
Just as music is created and enjoyed within the mind, so too is mathematics created and carried out (and by many of us enjoyed) in the mind. At its heart, mathematics is a mental activity—a way of thinking—one that over several millennia of human history has proved to be highly beneficial to life and society.
The kind of math important to ordinary people in their lives... is not, and it can be done in your head. Roughly speaking, everyday mathematics comprises counting, arithmetic, proportional reasoning, numerical estimation, elementary geometry and trigonometry, elementary algebra, basic probability and statistics, logical thinking, algorithm use, problem formation (modeling), problem solving, and sound calculator use. (Yes, even elementary algebra belongs in that list. The symbols are not essential.)OK, but what does this mean for education? Are we going to decide before the end of middle school which students are going to become scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, and only help those students scale the "symbol barrier"? For a barrier it certainly is, as Devlin himself notes: "people can become highly skilled at doing mental math and yet be hopeless at its symbolic representations."
It simply is not the case that ordinary people cannot do everyday math. Rather, they cannot do symbolic everyday math. In fact, for most people, it’s not accurate to say that the problems they are presented in paper-and-pencil format are “the same as” the ones they solve fluently in a real life setting. When you read the transcripts of the ways they solve the problems in the two settings, you realize that they are doing completely different things. Only someone who has mastery of symbolic mathematics can recognize the problems encountered in the two contexts as being “the same.”Instead of seeing this as a reason for exposing children to mathematical symbols early and often, Devlin sees this as reason to create computer games that somehow teach math non-symbolically.
The piano metaphor can be pursued further. There’s a widespread belief that you first have to master the basic skills to progress in mathematics. That’s total nonsense. It’s like saying you have to master musical notation and the performance of musical scales before you can start to try to play an instrument—a surefire way to put someone off music if ever there was one.No it's not; it's like saying you have to master simple scales and exercises before you move on to Rachmaninoff.
The one difference between music and math is that whereas a single piano can be used to play almost any tune, a video game designed to play, say, addition of fractions, probably won’t be able to play multiplication of fractions. This means that the task facing the game designer is not to design one instrument but an entire orchestra.Can one create a video game that functions "as an instrument on which a person can 'play' mathematics?"
Can this be done? Yes. I know this fact to be true because I spent almost five years working with talented and experienced game developers on a stealth project at a large video game company, trying to build such an orchestra.What does Devlin's software do? The last two paragraphs of this article function as an extended but not very informative infomercial. Here's the most informative excerpt:
Available in early March, Wuzzit Trouble is a game where players must free the Wuzzits from the traps they’ve inadvertently wandered into inside a castle. Players must use puzzle-solving skills to gather keys that open the gearlike combination locks on the cages, while avoiding hazards.Puzzle solving? As I argue in my last post on math games, existing games already offer some version of this, and it isn't math. This, indeed, is one of the other problems with so-called math education software.
Unlike the majority of other casual games, it is built on top of sound mathematical principles, which means that anyone who plays it will be learning and practicing good mathematical thinking—much like a person playing a musical instrument for pleasure will at the same time learn about music.If you say so. But I wonder how much it will cost schools (and society) to find out whether this latest incarnation of "math education" software helps prepare students to become mathematicians, scientists, engineers--or Brazilian street vendors.
Wuzzit Trouble might look and play like a simple arithmetic game, and indeed that is the point. But looks can be deceiving. The puzzles carry star ratings, and I have yet to achieve the maximum number of stars on some of the puzzles! (I never mastered Rachmaninov on the piano either.) The game is not designed to teach. The intention is to provide an “instrument” that, in addition to being fun to play, not only provides implicit learning but may also be used as a basis for formal learning in a scholastic setting.
Siegfried Engelmann: Then we became engaged in Project Follow Through. There were originally eighteen sponsors, about 500,000 kids, 180 communities, and pulled-comparison groups. It was supposed to be the definitive educational experiment. The idea was to work with kids in K-3 who had gone through Head Start.
Our students were first place in everything, but the reports were never really presented. We were first place in reading, first place in math, first in spelling, and first in language. And our kids had the most positive self image. Yet the report that APT Associates had developed, along with Stanford Research Institute, was just a summary of those reports.
David Boulton: The purpose of the study was to be able to see the effects of Head Start on education?
Siegfried Engelmann: Yeah.
David Boulton: Why was 'Follow Through' linked into Head Start in that way?
Siegfried Engelmann: Well, because it was originally an Office of Economic Opportunity project. And then it was taken over by the newly formed Federal Department of Education. It was designed to serve at-risk kids, disadvantaged kids, who had gone through Head Start. But that was just one of the requirements for the demography of the kids we were working with.
David Boulton: I see.
Siegfried Engelmann: A certain percentage of the students had to come from Head Start. Because Head Start was an obvious failure and they were concerned. It had no instructional component, and it was modeled after the middle-class preschool. While the middle-class preschool is probably okay for middle-class kids, the kids that we worked with were far behind in terms of language skills and...
David Boulton: So it was more concerned with creating parental freedom than it was in actually helping the children get ready for school.
Siegfried Engelmann: Right, yes. Anyhow, that made it a poor model for disadvantaged students. But fundamentally, Project Follow Through was designed to bail out Head Start. It was a horse race, the idea [of the APT reports] was to declare a winner or winners, those who produced the best results in K-3, to show that Head Start was not a total disaster.
David Boulton: How could it have done that unless it was also using a control group of kids that weren't in Head Start to show the advantages of Head Start?
Siegfried Engelmann: Well, they had that. They had a vast number of comparison groups. For each school that was involved, there was a comparison school. They weren't perfect, because the comparison schools tended to have higher socioeconomic ratings. They were not as disadvantaged. But, in addition to that, the data from all of the individual comparison schools were pooled. Then there was a certain non-disadvantaged mix as part of the formulated average school. So you had your non-disadvantaged population, and also (I can't remember the exact requirement) I think over 60 percent of the kids had to have gone through Head Start. But they had data on the Head Start kids and the non-Head Start kids. It was a very elaborate study. It cost, I don't know, hundreds of millions.
David Boulton: So 'Project Follow Through' was a prototype – a model that would later be followed in many ways by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Siegfried Engelmann: Right, right. The APT findings were suppressed largely for political reasons. In 1976 when Follow Through was being evaluated, Gene Glass, head of the Ford Foundation at the time, appealed to the National Institutes of Health with an incredible statement. He said something to the effect that, "The use of quantitative data is inappropriate and what we need is case studies. We need to document various aspects of the program so that informed consumers can make intelligent decisions."
And of course, it was total baloney. Wes Becker responded, with what I thought was an extremely succinct response, "As the problem with the disadvantaged is identified by data and scores; certainly the solutions to the problems would have to be manifested with data and scores.”
David Boulton: Certainly it all has to correlate somehow…
Siegfried Engelmann: [laughs] Yeah. They wanted to identify the problem qualitatively, and then solve it with methods that didn't generate any data. Becker also pointed out that if we're going to use case studies, how do we know we're using typical case studies unless we use some kind of intelligent sampling processes?
David Boulton: Yeah, and some common system of attributes that would allow you to scale through the data.
Siegfried Engelmann: Right. So, the net result was that the results of Follow Through were suppressed. The report that came out on Follow Through was that the project was a failure, which implies that all of the models were failures. And then they just rode off into the sunset with some kind of blazing saddles and that was that.
David Boulton: So buried in the dismissal of Project Follow Through as a whole, were the results it had gathered that showed the benefit of the work that you were doing, in contrast to the other systems or approaches that were compared.
Siegfried Engelmann: Yeah. I mean, it was the biggest part. But the suppression was intentional. It was contrived. It didn't just happen. The fact that the whole project failed, that the overall statements of the primary sponsors were true, did not necessarily mean that every one of them failed. That certainly was not the case.
David Boulton: And so the baby went out with the bath water there.
Siegfried Engelmann: Yes.
Since its beginning in 1965 as a part of the War on Poverty, Head Start’s goal has been to boost the school readiness of low-income children. Based on a “whole child” model, the program provides comprehensive services that include preschool education; medical, dental, and mental health care; nutrition services; and efforts to help parents foster their child’s development. Head Start services are designed to be responsive to each child’s and family’s ethnic, cultural, and linguistic heritage.Russ Whitehurst summarizes the findings:
[snip]
The Head Start Impact Study is a comprehensive, carefully designed study of a large-scale early childhood program that has existed for more than 40 years. It is designed to address the overall average impact of the Head Start program as it existed in 2002.
There is no measurable advantage to children in elementary school of having participated in Head Start. Further, children attending Head Start remain far behind academically once they are in elementary school. Head Start does not improve the school readiness of children from low-income families.
In the summer of 1966, the Anti-Defamation League expressed interest in making a film showing the achievements of the disadvantaged black preschoolers we had been working with at the University of Illinois. Two years earlier, these kids had been selected for the project as four-year olds on the basis that they came from homes that were judged particularly disadvantaged and nearly all of them had older siblings in classes for the mentally retarded. These kids came to our school half-days as four-year-olds and as five-year-olds.I tear up every time I read this.
The school, The Bereiter-Engelmann preschool, received a lot of bad press. It was called a pressure cooker. Sociolinguists took shots at it on the grounds that we ostensibly did not understand "black English," or even know the difference between "thinking and speaking."
Despite our alleged mental deficiencies, we managed to teach these kids more and make them smarter than anyboy else had done before or after. That was our goal, particularly with this first flight of kids--to set the limits to show what could be done. We felt that this demonstration was particularly important because Headstart was looming in the wings, and it was clearly moving in a direction of being nothing more than a front for public health, not a serious educational project. We saw this as a great contradiction because disadvantaged kids were behind their middle class peers in skills and knowledge.
We taught reading, language, and math to our preschoolers. And they learned these subjects. They also learned to learn well and therefore how to be smart. A film showing what these kids could do might moderate what seemed to be the inevitable mandate of the Office of Economic Opportunity to designate Headstart as a "social experience" based on the model of the middcle-class nursery school. It seemed obvious that the model would not work.
We rounded up seven of the kids who were in our top group. (We grouped kids for instruction according to their performance.) They were in the middle of summer vacation, and we didn't have an opportunity to work with them before the film to "refresh" or rehearse them. A professor at the University of Illinois found out about the filming and asked if she could bring her class to view it. Why not?
So seven little black kids came into the classroom, sat in their chairs in front of the chalkboard with big bright lights shining on them, with two big cameras on tripods staring at them, and with a class of university students in the background. And these kids did it. There were no out takes, no cut sequences, nothing but the kids responding to problems that I presented, the types of problems I had taught them to work. These were not necessarily the problem types that one would present preschoolers as part of a 12 grade sequence, but they were good problems to show that these kids could learn at a greatly accelerated rate.
On the film, the kids worked problems of addition, subtrction, multiplication, and fractions. They worked problems in which they found the area of rectangles and problems in which they found the length of an unknown side of the rectangle (given the number of squares in the rectangle and the length of one side). They worked column-addition problems that required carrying and problems that did not require carrying. They even worked problems involving factoring expressions like 6A + 3B + 9C. And they used the appropriate wording: "Three times the quantity, 2A, plus 1B, plus 3C."
The kids told me how to work a simple algebra problem: "The man at the store tells you that 1/4 of a pie costs 5 cents. You want to buy the whole pie. How much is the whole pie?"
After telling me how to work the problem by multiplying the reciprocal of 1/4, I wrote the answer as $20. The kids jumped up to correct my sign error, one boy observed, "Wow, you have to pay that much for a pie?"
And the kids did dimensional analysis involving the equation: A + B = C. They told me how to rewrite the equation so it told what A equals (A = C - B), what B equals (B = C - A), and what C equals (C = A + B).
The last problem type I presented on the film was the simultaneous-equation problem:
A + B = 14
A - B = 0
They had worked on similar problems in which A and B were the same size (inferred from A - B = 0) and they quickly told me that the numbers were 7 and 7. There was still time left so I presented them with a brand new problem type:
A + B = 14
A - B = 2
I pointed out that when you start with A and minus B, you end up with 2. So A is bigger than B. They frowned, they thought; and finally the little girl sitting on the end of the group -- who is now an engineer -- said in a wee voice, "8 and 6." These were kids who had not yet entered first grade.
The film made no difference in deterring Headstart from becoming a program that produced no real gains. Nor did it give notice that failure with disadvantaged kids was a failure in instructional practices. We had shown , however, that all the disadvantaged black kids we worked with could learn to read and perform basic arithmetic operations in the preschool and that the average IQ gain of these kids was 24 points.
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ABSTRACTHaven't read, just passing the link along.
We marshal discoveries about human behavior and learning from social science research and show how they can be used to improve teaching and learning. The dis- coveries are easily stated as three social science generalizations: (1) social connections motivate, (2) teaching teaches the teacher, and (3) instant feedback improves learning. We show how to apply these generalizations via innovations in modern information technology inside, outside, and across university classrooms. We also give concrete examples of these ideas from innovations we have experimented with in our own teaching.
How Social Science Research Can Improve Teaching
Gary King and Maya Sen
Humans have theorized how to teach for thousands of years and update the substance of what we teach almost every year. Yet generations have passed without any major im- provements in the procedures and style of teaching in our classrooms. If your great-great- grandparents went to college, they probably sat in a classroom with all the other students facing forward, trying to look attentive, while the professor professed. If you’re professor at a university today, you probably lecture to the same sea of students, all still trying to look like they’re paying attention. To be sure, you may use some newer technologies (electricity, radio, TV, whiteboards, powerpoint slides, etc.), you may have added a few group activities, and you perhaps teach a seminar with lots of discussion. But if your ancestors were to walk into a classroom today, they’d know where to sit, what to do, and how to act. Our methods of teaching have changed very little.In fact, a large body of research on teaching, learning, and memory exists, and a precision teaching classroom does not look like an ordinary classroom. Moreover, the difference between "group activities" and lecture is quite large and should not be shrugged off.
Hell is other people. Hell is other people on a boat. What will it take before we accept this?
Passengers ill-suited for loss of cruise control
By Monica Hesse, Published: February 15 | Washington Post
Like most schools, ours uses an online system for entering and tracking grades (Aspen). I really like being able to verify and track grades. Some teachers are really slow, but with other teachers, I know my son's grade before he does. Considering the importance of grades and GPA in high school, this is much better than his middle school's mysterious rubrics and work that disappeared into black hole portfolios never to be seen unless you set up an appointment with each teacher.
The reason for this post started when I couldn't verify a quarter grade in one subject. (I know that many teachers hate the system and that you have to set up weird rules to have it do what you want.) My calculations showed that he should have gotten a 93 instead of a 92 for a grade in one quarter. Then, I found out that fixing that number would have no effect on his semester (half-year) grade or his weighted GPA. What was going on?
Our high school calculates a weighted GPA to use for class rank. Regular college prep courses have a weight of 3, honors classes have a weight of 3.4, and AP classes have a weight of 3.7. (The AP arms race this causes is a separate issue.) Course grades (by semester - half year) are multiplied by the weight and a credit score; 1 for a full year course and .5 for a half year course. The score is normalized using the sum of the credits. If you get a 100 in a full-year honors class, this would give you a weighted and normalized score of 100 * 3.4 = 340. The weighted GPA is summed for all courses and then divided by the sum of the credits. This means that weighted GPAs for students typically end up between 250 and 325.
The first problem is that the semester grade for each class is rounded to the nearest whole number before it multiplied by the course weight. OK, but the problem is that they round grades at every step of the way. First, each assignment and test is rounded to the nearest whole number (that's fine), and then they are combined together into groups called things like formative and summative. The formative might be 30 percent of your grade and the summative might be 70 percent of your grade. Some teachers have five or more categories. Each one of these categories is calculated and the grade is rounded off to the nearest whole number. Then, these whole numbers are combined to form a quarter grade, which of course is rounded to the nearest whole number. This is done again for the second quarter. After the second quarter, students are given a midterm test. To form the semester (half-year) grade, they count each quarter as 40 percent and the midterm as 20 percent. (It's common for midterm grades to be far lower than either quarter grade, but that's another issue.) This semester grade is also rounded to the nearest whole number before multiplying it by the weight for the course. When the online system displays the weighted GPA, it's displayed using four decimal digits. The roudings are supposed to balance out? No. They are throwing away significant digits and hoping that statistics will recover accuracy. Interestingly, my son's grades have far more rounding downs than ups. Each assignment might be accurate to plus or minus one point, but there is no justification for rounding numbers at every other step of the process. That's why it doesn't matter whether my son got a 92 or 93 on his quarter grade.
Actually, it gets worse. Our high school just emailed us a list of the top ten seniors for this year. (My son is still a junior.). I guess many high schools set this ranking in stone after the first half of the senior year because they have to send something out on the transcrips to colleges. So how do they calculate this final GPA? They do something different at the half-year (semester) point. They take the grade for each course, multiply it by the course weight (3, 3.4, or 3.7), but then multiply it by the full year credit for he course. This gives the semester grade a weight equal to a full year course. I raised this issue with a guidance counselor who said that this is how they've done it for all of the 25+ years she has been there.
I'm sure they use all of those decimal digits of accuracy on the printout to rank kids. They really need to define a proper matematical bound on their accuracy and not just throw away accuracy by repeated rounding.
Students master the multiplication tables by practicing until they can answer immediately. Next, students learn up to 4-digit by 1-digit multiplication with mental carryovers.What do you think?
Yeah, and this is also why people wind up using the same two or three passwords for everything. When I worked in the national lab, they assigned us passwords -- awful, un-memorizable things that met IT's standards. So of course everyone kept theirs on a post-it someplace or locked in a drawer.Hah!
At one time, a writer in this industry could write a book and receive roughly 6% royalties on sales. The salesperson who sold the product, however, earned (and still does) a commission upwards of 17% on the same product. This sort of pay structure never made sense to me; without the product, there’d be nothing to sell, after all. But this disparity serves to illustrate the thinking that has been entrenched industry-wide for decades—that sales and marketing is more valuable than product.
Now, the balance between the budgets for marketing and product development is growing farther and farther apart, and exponentially so. Today, royalties are a thing of the past for most writers and work-for-hire is the norm. Sales staffs still receive their high commissions, but with today’s outsourcing, writers and editors are consistently offered less than 20% of what they used to make. As a result, the number of qualified writers and editors is diminishing, and those being contracted by developers and publishers often don’t have the necessary skills or experience to produce a text worthy of the publisher’s marketing claims.
Here’s how it works: Many publishers solicit developers, often on the Internet and from all over the world, looking for the best bid on a project. With competition this fierce, developers are forced to drastically lower their rates just to stay in business (and publishers exploit this fact). Let’s say a publisher hires a developer for a certain low-bid fee to produce seven supplemental math books for grades 3-8. The product specs call for each student book and teacher guide to have page counts of roughly 100 pages and 80 pages, respectively. The publisher wants these seven books ready for press in five weeks—over 1,400 pages. To put this in perspective, in the not too recent past at least six months would be allotted for a project of this size. But publishers customarily shrink their deadlines to get a jump on the competition, especially in today’s math market. Unreasonable turnaround times are part of the new normal, something that almost guarantees a lack of quality right out of the gate.
Of course, the developer could say no to this ridiculous timeline, but there are plenty of others who will say yes. So, the developer accepts the work and scrambles to put together a team of writers and editors who must have immediate availability, sheepishly offering them a take-it-or-leave-it rate, a mere pittance of what they could once demand. As is the case for the developer, for each writer or editor who declines, there are scores in the wings who will say yes just to survive. Those who do accept the inferior pay and grueling schedule often do so without the ability to review the product specs to know what they’re getting into. That’s because the specs are still being hashed out by the publisher and developer even as the project begins. And when product specs are “complete”, they are often vague, contradictory, and in need of extensive reworking since they were hastily put together by people juggling far too many projects already.
[snip]
Copyediting, the work I generally do now, is the final stage of editing before the product goes to press, where only a check for grammar, punctuation and things of this nature should be required. Content editing is a whole other expertise, one that is done after the writing where the content editor reviews the writer’s work for accuracy, sense, and structure, and makes sure the material adheres to the product specs. When I’m hired to copyedit, the profound errors I see in content are often staggering enough that grammar and punctuation seem immaterial. Sometimes the content in the student materials is so poor—steps omitted, unclear directions, concepts introduced when they’re not developed till later in the text, distorted interpretations of math terms and applications —that it boggles the mind it got past a content editor. With so many errors rampant at this stage of editing, rewriting is hastily done and it’s only inevitable that some errors will show up in the final printed product. And with a different copyeditor on each book, there are those who don’t even think about, or have the experience to recognize, the content issues so they go unaddressed. For a rate of four dollars a page, most copyeditors will do only what they were hired to do—look for errors in grammar and punctuation and move on. There's a mortgage due after all.
When I point out critical errors in content to a developer’s project manager, there’s generally a pause at the other end of the phone. I’m ruining their day, handing them a problem they don’t want, can’t possibly address given their resources and time. Some do their best; they’ll ask me to make corrections and bump up my rate a bit. Some will ask me to make notes so that they can fix the errors and do the rewrites themselves on their own time. Others will simply sigh, “The publisher knows it’s bad. Just do the best you can.” The publisher knows it’s bad. And yet, it doesn’t seem to matter. That’s because the sales and marketing team is already at work developing videos, brochures, webinars, catalog copy, and whatever else their bloated budgets will allow in order to sell what doesn’t actually exist—a quality product.
And speaking of the printed product, there’s one more step before we get there—production. These are the people who typeset the books and get them ready for press. India is a favored venue for some publishers because workers are available on three shifts and work fast, but mostly because the price is far cheaper than in the U.S. As editors, we often have to compensate for language barriers by color coding our instructions to the production staff or using simple language that is still frequently misunderstood, resulting in further unintended errors that often make it into the final product because there’s no time left in the schedule, no money left to pay someone, to do a final and thorough review in the manner it should be, and used to be, done.
[snip]
One must conclude that students and their education, if this is judged against product quality, is becoming an increasingly low priority. Not only don’t some publishers care, some have no problem expressing their lack of concern. Example: I received an email from a senior math executive of a well-established publisher responding to a concern I raised about the lack of correlations in a particular math series to the Common Core State Standards, correlations that were part of the product specs. The reason they were part of the product specs is because Common Core State Standards have been officially adopted by 43 states (ascd.org) and publishers are racing to make sure their products address them. This is how the senior executive answered my query: “It doesn’t matter if there aren’t enough correlations; our marketing materials say only that we ‘expose’ students to Common Core.”
Not only did this top-level “professional” have no problem stating this, she had no problem committing it to writing. Buyer beware: Read that marketing copy very carefully.
Afraid of Your Child's Math Textbook? You Should Be.
Annie Keeghan
Indeed, one might question the very premise that, two decades from now, there will be textbooks as we know them. Today, introductory economics is taught using a textbook in which an eminent professor authoritatively bestows the conventional wisdom on his or her (typically, his) students. Knowledge, as encapsulated in the textbook and interpreted by the professor, is delivered from above.Number one: if it's textbooks not being a source of wisdom you're after, we've got that now.
This, of course, is also how newspapers traditionally delivered the news. Editors and publishers assembled and collated stories, and the newspaper that they produced was then delivered to the subscriber’s doorstep. But the last decade has seen a veritable revolution in the news business. News is now assembled and disseminated via Web sites, wikis, and the comment sections of blogs. News, in other words, is increasingly delivered from the bottom up. Rather than relying on editors, everyone is becoming their own news curator.
Something similar is likely to happen to textbooks, especially in economics,where everyone has an opinion and first-hand experience with the subject. Textbooks will be like wikis, with faculty adopters and students modifying text and contributing content. There still may be a role for the author as gatekeeper; but the textbook will know [sic] longer be the font of wisdom, and its writer will no longer control the table of contents.
The outcome will be messy. But the economics profession will also become more diverse and dynamic – and our children’s economics will be healthier as a result.
Our Children's Economics
...I decided to start an in-depth laboratory program that would investigate the role of nutrition, especially protein, in the development of cancer....I chose to do this research at a very basic science level, studying the biochemical details of cancer formation. It was important to understand not only whether but also how protein might promote cancer....
What we found was shocking. Low-protein diets inhibited the initiative of cancer by aflatoxin, regardless of how much of this carcinogen was administered to these animals. After cancer, initiation was completed, low-protein diets also dramatically blocked subsequent cancer growth. In other words, the cancer-producing effects of this highly carcinogenic chemical were rendered insignificant by a low-protein diet. In fact, dietary protein proved to be so powerful in its effect that we could turn on and turn off cancer growth simply by changing the level consumed.
Furthermore, the amounts of protein being fed were those that we humans routinely consume. We didn't use extraordinary levels, as is so often the case in carcinogen studies.
But that's not all. We found that not all proteins had this effect. What protein consistently and strongly promoted cancer? Casein, which makes up 87% of cow's milk protein, promoted all stages of the cancer process. What type of protein did not promote cancer, even at high levels of intake? The safe proteins were from plants, including wheat and soy.
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But how much protein is too much or too little? Using rats, we investigated a range of 4-24% dietary protein....Foci did not develop with up to about 10% dietary protein. Beyond 10%, foci development increased dramatically with increases in dietary protein.
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The most significant finding of this experiment was this: foci developed only when the animals met or exceeded the amount of dietary protein (12%) needed to satisfy their body growth rate. That is, when the animals met and surpassed their requirement for protein, disease onset began.
This finding may have considerable relevance for humans even though these were rat studies. I say this because the protein required for growth in young rats and humans as well as the protein required to maintain health for adult rats and humans is remarkably similar.
According to the recommended daily allowance (RDA) for protein consumption, we humans should be getting about 10% of our energy from protein. This is considerably more than the actual amount required....What do most of us routinely consume? Remarkably, it is considerably more than the recommended 10%. The average American consumes 15-16% protein....
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[D]id it make any difference what type of protein was used in these experiments? For all of these experiments, we were using casein, which makes up 87% of cow's milk protein. So the next logical question was whether plant protein, tested in the same way, has the same effect on cancer promotiona s casein. The answer is an astonishing "NO." In these experiments, plant protein did not promote cancer growth, even at the higher levels of intake....Gluten, the protein of wheat, did not produce the same result as casein, even when fed at the same 20% level.
China-Cornell-Oxford Project
“My goal is to do for these kids what I do with my own children,” the teacher, Susana Rojas, tells me. “It’s all about exposure to concepts — wide, narrow, long, short. I bring in breads from different countries. ‘Let’s do a pie chart showing which one you liked the best.’ I don’t ask them to memorize 1, 2, 3 — I could teach a monkey to count.”OK, yes, you can teach a monkey to "memorize 1,2,3":
The Secret to Fixing Bad Schools | By DAVID L. KIRP | Published: February 9, 2013
Nieder and his colleagues spent about nine months training and testing two rhesus monkeys. The monkeys looked at a computer screen, which displayed from one to five dots.Seeing as how it's a simple matter, requiring a mere 9 months, to teach a monkey to count, there is obviously no reason to teach a child to count. Not when you can spend that learning-to-count time teaching concepts like "When I put all the ingredients in [the food processor], what will happen?” or "Describe the smell of an onion, strong or light" or “Room 210 is a pie...and each of us is a slice of that pie.”
Evidence Adds Up That Monkeys Can Count
So let me state then, very clearly, on behalf of any and all physicists out there who dare not say it themselves: Many-worlds wins outright given our current state of evidence. There is no more reason to postulate a single Earth, than there is to postulate that two colliding top quarks would decay in a way that violates conservation of energy. It takes more than an unknown fundamental law; it takes magic.So there you have it. There are many Earths, and we are on the wrong one, the one where not teaching is teaching and Salman Khan is the man you call to help you spice up a presentation.
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We have embarrassed our Earth long enough by failing to see the obvious. So for the honor of my Earth, I write as if the existence of many-worlds were an established fact, because it is. The only question now is how long it will take for the people of this world to update.
Many Worlds, One Best Guess
