Re: [Phys-L] educational effectiveness

[Jeff Bigler <jcb@mit.edu>]

On 5/10/2012 11:43 PM, John Denker wrote:
> On 05/10/2012 09:24 AM, Jeffrey Schnick wrote in part:
>
> >  it would be inappropriate of me to assume that the majority of the
> > incoming students can already do algebra.

> Hmmmmm.  Three years of high-school math and the majority (of this
> sub-population) can't do algebra?

> We have the results of the oh-so-fancy mandatory tests to prove that 
> high-school students are "proficient".

> Can somebody explain how such a situation could possibly arise

Because decisions about education are made by people who don't
understand the problem and don't understand the interplay between the
variables.  The people who are empowered to make the decisions and
allocate the funds fixate on one issue, make their issue a zero
tolerance, all-or-nothing issue.  They devise their own pet solution,
and legislate punishments for teachers who don't come up with a way to
implement their solution.

It's like the Hunger Games (which my eleven-year-old has just finished
reading).  The Capitol gives us an arbitrary set of rules and whichever
tools they feel like bestowing upon us.  They throw us in an arena where
we go at each other's throats while they watch and occasionally meddle,
never believing for an instant that most of us will survive, or that any
of us deserves to.

> ... or why we should tolerate it even for an instant?

Because the people who control the money and are empowered to make the
rules have decreed that we must.  Because to defy the powers that be
means withholding of funding and loss of accreditation, either of which
is a death knell for a school.  Because administrators know that their
jobs are temporary, and the more completely they subjugate their staff,
the longer they get to keep their jobs.

And for me, because by pretending to tolerate it, I get 48 minutes at a
time when I close my classroom door and do something I love.  Maybe some
of my students will never be able to successfully execute the algebra,
but I can still get them to understand the physics, to give reasonable
explanations and to make good predictions about hypothetical and real
situations relating to the topics they are studying.  Because some of my
students will come back to visit from their universities, thanking me
for giving them such solid preparation.  Because I know that I have made
over 100 lives better this year, largely by helping them develop their
understanding of how and why their world behaves the way it does, until
their minds overflow with new possibilities.

And sometimes I don't tolerate it.  Those who have followed me on
discussion lists dedicated to that other unnamed physical science will
have noticed how this occasional inability to suck it up and tolerate
the intolerable has caused in the name of the school listed in my
signature file to change every few years.

-- 
Jeff Bigler
Lynn English HS; Lynn, MA, USA
"Magic" is what we call Science before we understand it.