[Phys-L] Re: student mathematical capabilities

[Jack Uretsky <jlu@HEP.ANL.GOV>]

Hi all-
        John's son has evidently received a wonderful present.  He has
been given the opportunity to do what many of my most gifted colleagues
have done, which is to take responsibility for his own learning.  If he
takes advantage of this opportunity he will not be like that lackadaisical
student who challenged me in class with "Why do you want me to read this
stuff, what are they paying you for?
        I have had an occasional self-motivated student - usually an older
adult.  They show no gain the the FCI because they ace it the first time
around.  It's been my experience that the better students (this is at the
first year community college level) generally do well on the FCI, right
from scratch, just as they do on other diagnostics that I use from time to
time.
        I wonder how John plans to "get his house in order" with students
who can't handle algebra.  That's what the shouting is about.
        Now my comment on the NCTM "Standards".

        The NCTM "Standards" are much more than precatory statements.  The
book is full of examples for different examples for use in teaching the
different topics at the various grade levels.

My principal opbjections to the standards are twofold:
1. I think that they lack a common theme.  Just as the camel is a horse
that was designed by a committee, the standards seem to reflect
compromises inserted at verious stages to please competing interests.
2. It misses the whole point of mathematics as far as I am concerned.
Mathematics was developed for the purpose of solving problems.  Problem
solving is not one category to be treated as a part of mathematics.
Problem solving is what mathematics is all about.

I keep close at hand Richard Gillings <Mathematics in the Time of the
Pharaohs> (Dover 1972).  It is full of clumsily stated algebra problems
dealing with the practical issues of dividing up beer and bread to pay off
workers.  It took another 2500, or so, years to figure out how to state
and solve such problems concisely, using symbols.  American math
educators, it appears, have figured out how to set us back a millenium or
so in the art of problem solving by forgetting the purposes for which
algebra was invented.

The question that arose, which I have tried to answer, was: are there
existing standards?  My answer is, yes, but they aren't much help to the
teachers of science.
                                Regards,
                                        Jack




___________________________________________________________________________


On Tue, 20 Sep 2005, John M Clement wrote:

> The standards basically have little effect on the quality of teaching.
>  However they do have an effect on how much "stuff" is stuffed into
> the curricula.  In reality the average physics course is about as well
> or as poorly taught as the average math course.  And we now know using
> the FCI/FMCE... that the average physics course achieves less than 25%
> normalized gain.  So the average math course is in the same boat.
>  Both need major restructuring and both math and science teachers at
> all levels need retraining.  Indeed the college teachers are probably
> the most in need of retraining if my son's experiences at college are
> any indication.  So far he has gotten two very incompetent college
> physics teachers one of them with an accent so thick that nobody could
> understand him.  His HS teacher was also very poor.
>
> My daughter OTOH had David Sokoloff in class, so I am sure she had
> some good teaching.
>
> Perhaps we should put our own house in order before trying to reform
> math.
>
> John M. Clement
> Houston, TX
>
>
> > > A question that quickly enters my mind, Are the kinds of
> > > things we would put in a standards/outcomes statement already
> > > there in current Math curricula standards/outcomes statements?
> >
> > Is anyone familiar with the standards from the National Council of
> > Teachers of Mathematics <http://standards.nctm.org/>?

--
"Trust me.  I have a lot of experience at this."
                General Custer's unremembered message to his men,
                just before leading them into the Little Big Horn Valley
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