Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
High school teachers think white girls can’t do math, concludes a University of Texas study. “Even with the same grades and the same test scores, the teachers are still ranking the girls as less good at math than the boys,” says Catherine Riegle-Crumb, co-author of the bias study. By contrast, teachers’ perceptions of minority students’ math abilities matched their achievement.
Canada’s K-8 schools are teaching a math curriculum that’s too confusing for parents to understand, reports Maclean’s.
Children are using alternative methods, such as using grids, blocks, or strips of paper to multiply. “We’re talking about adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. It shouldn’t be so overly complicated that even parents can’t understand it,” said Anna Stokke, a professor math at the University of Winnipeg. “It’s absolutely ridiculous.”
Stokke began speaking out and soon parents from all over Canada were sending her similar stories of discontent: kids who couldn’t do their homework without help, parents who couldn’t make heads or tails of the assignments so they were hiring tutors, or spending hours looking up math sites on the Internet because the textbooks are so vague. She heard from teachers who felt pressured not to teach the traditional methods. . . . “I don’t have a problem with alternate strategies,” Stokke says. “But I fear they’re learning so many, that in the end they’re not mastering any.”
Many schools now offer Math Nights to show parents how to help their children with homework. A Catholic school offered an online course — 20 minutes a night, four nights a week for eight weeks — to get parents up to speed.
Thirty percent of Canadian parents now supplement their children’s education, reports Maclean’s.
But even students with good grades are confused, says Kim Langen, who runs an after-school enrichment program called Spirit of Math. “They’re really creative—but they don’t know what to do with it,” says Langen.
. . . Grade 5 students . . . don’t know multiplication facts, have never encountered division, and just look at you blankly when you ask them what 23 + 7 is. In order to build students’ math facts, the ?rst 10 minutes of the 90-minute session is dedicated to drills—then, explains Langen, because they’re not bogged down on simple calculations, they can handle the high-level conceptual work.
Some teachers also have trouble understanding the new math, says Langen.
Florida’s alternatively certified teachers have better qualifications but vary in classroom effectiveness, concludes a study in Education Research reported by Ed Week‘s Teacher Beat.
Georgia State researcher Tim R.Sass compared the growth in test scores by students taught by teachers certified by community colleges’ Education Preparation Institute (EPI) option, by district-run alt-cert and by the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE). Then he added traditionally certified teachers.
Compared to graduates of Florida’s teacher colleges, alt-cert teachers “graduated on average from more competitive colleges, tended to pass the licensing tests on the first time, and had higher SAT scores.” They also had taken two additional science courses in college.
. . . The EPI completers tended to do worse than traditionally prepared teachers, or about 3 to 4 percent of a standard deviation lower. By contrast, the ABCTE teachers boosted math achievement on average by 6 to 11 percent of a standard deviation more than traditionally prepared teachers. They were only slightly better in reading, however.
District-certified teachers did about the same as traditionally trained teachers.
in a a 2009 study, ABCTE teachers performed worse in math, notes Teacher Beat, who adds that the sample sizes are small.
Spiraled instruction stifles learning, writes Coach G in Ed Week. “We touch on lots of topics each year,” then review the same material the next year and the year after that. In his first teaching job, “Algebra 2 was such a rehash of the district’s Algebra 1 course that some teachers called it ‘Algebra T-o-o’.”
Consider, for example, area and perimeter, which students are first exposed to in third or fourth grade, and see again in middle school. Yet when area and perimeter come up in high school, most teachers–including me at first–teach them from scratch.
The problem, of course, goes back to the disconnect between kids seeing something and actually learning–and retaining–it. But if it didn’t sink in for them the first, second, or third time a teacher presented it, why should we present it again?
Instead of spiraling touch-and-go instruction, teachers should spiral practice, Coach G writes. “Instead of limiting assignments to recent content from the current course, we should also include problems on earlier content from that course AND previous courses.”
Among the winning badge ideas at the Digital Media and Learning Competition is My Girl Scout Sash is an App:
My Girl Scout Sash on MentorMob brings the Girl Scout Leadership Experience and career development badge program to a digital media learning platform for girls, ages 5-17, with a focus on middle school and high school. Through collaboration with Motorola Mobility Foundation and MentorMob, teams of girls will create apps, demonstrating and sharing the knowledge gained and badge proficiencies.
Digital badges”can be used to help people learn; demonstrate their skills and knowledge; unlock job, educational and civic opportunities; and open new pipelines to talent,” says the MacArthur Foundation, which is working with Mozilla and HASTAC on the idea.
Other winners include BuzzMath which will award badges for mastery of Common Core math concepts, BadgesWork for Vets, which will help veterans show the skills they’ve learned in the military, and Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science Student Network, “an online learning environment where students, teachers, and hobbyists can earn badges and certifications as they play with, compete in, and learn about computer science and STEM-related topics.”
My Favorite No features the warm-up routine of an eighth-grade math teacher whose school couldn’t afford clickers. Student analyze what’s right and wrong about a classmate’s wrong answer.
Alexander Russo calls it “my kind of flipped classroom.”
Milwaukee’s school voucher program increased the chances of students graduating from high school and going on to college, according to five years of research by the School Choice Demonstration Project at the University of Arkansas. Low-income students can use vouchers to attend private schools.
“The Choice Program boosts the rates at which students graduate from high school, enroll in a four-year college, and persist in college,” said John Witte, professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Voucher students’ achievement growth was higher in reading but similar in math to comparable public school students, the analysis concluded. In the upper grades, voucher students performed better in reading and science but worse in math.
From 7.5 to 14.6 percent of voucher students have disabilities, the study calculates. That’s much higher than the state’s estimate, which was based only on students receiving test accommodations. Compared to private schools, public schools are 60 percent more likely to identify a student as needing special education. Many students who switched from public to private schools no longer are considered disabled.
Aaron Clarey’s Worthless: The Young Person’s Indispensable Guide to Choosing the Right Major is a ”hilarious primer for college students who would like to work as something other than nannies and theater interns after graduation,” writes Charlotte Allen on Minding the Campus.
Don’t waste time, money and your parents’ credit rating on a bachelor of arts degree, Clarey advises. Only a bachelor of sciences will enable graduates to earn a living. Yes, that takes math.
Assuming a student might pay $30,000 in tuition (presumably at a state university) for a foreign language degree, Clarey explains how to save $29,721: Buy language software. How to save the full $30,000 on a women’s studies degree: Watch daytime TV.
With everyone going to college, regardless of talents or interests, “today’s college degree is the equivalent of the 1950′s high school diploma,” Clarey writes.
The humanities have destroyed their value by politicizing their fields, argues Allen. When English majors can skip Shakespeare for “post-colonial feminist film,” employers will “write off English majors as airheads.”
President Obama is a “snob” for pushing the college-for-all message, said Rick Santorum. (Remember “egghead?”) Not everyone wants or needs college, said Santorum, who holds a law degree.
While Obama identifies with professors, Santorum identifies with students oppressed by liberal academics, writes Ann Althouse, herself a law professor.
. . . every young person in America — regardless of their cultural and economic background — needs to see clearly that they can get a higher education. . . They should to go to college for a good reason, and one particularly good reason is to study science and engineering. If they are going to study in some softer, less career-oriented area, the mushy notion that everybody ought to go to college is not enough, even if the President of the United States tells them it is.
Actually, Obama is pushing college as workforce training and science ‘n math education very hard these days.
Be afraid — be very afraid — of your child’s math book warns Annie Keeghan, who worked in educational publishing for 20 years, in Open Salon.
There may be a reason you can’t figure out some of those math problems in your son or daughter’s math text and it might have nothing at all to do with you. That math homework you’re trying to help your child muddle through might include problems with no possible solution. It could be that key information or steps are missing, that the problem involves a concept your child hasn’t yet been introduced to, or that the math problem is structurally unsound for a host of other reasons.
After a series of mergers and buyouts, few educational publishers are left, she writes. Many are skimping on quality control to rush new books (especially math books) to market to beat the competition.
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