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November 17, 2009
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Quotations side by side
From the New York Daily News:
More city kids are graduating from high school, but that doesn't mean they can do college math.[...]
During their first math class at one of CUNY's four-year colleges, 90% of 200 students tested couldn't solve a simple algebra problem, the report by the CUNY Council of Math Chairs found. Only a third could convert a fraction into a decimal.
The lack of math skills means the CUNY students - nearly 70% of which come from city schools - could struggle to keep up with peers, fail classes or even drop out, the professors charged.
From University of Arkansas education professor Sandra Stotsky:
As part of his education-reform plan, President Obama wants to "make math and science education a top priority" and ensure that children have access to strong math and science curricula "at all grade levels." But the president's worthy aims won't be reached so long as assessment experts, technology salesmen, and math educators--the professors, usually with education degrees, who teach prospective teachers of math from K-12--dominate the development of the content of school curricula and determine the pedagogy used, into which they've brought theories lacking any evidence of success and that emphasize political and social ends, not mastery of mathematics.
Stotsky explains in detail how this has happened, and concludes by noting that "the math wars, which started in debates about pedagogy, may end in questions about the long-term prospects for American prosperity."
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Comments:
It is even worse. The students who do know how to convert fractions to decimals do not when they should and should not do so. Many a college graduate thinks 2/3 equals 0.67, and it does not.
I don't understand Mr. Sjostrom's point. Yes, it's true that 2/3 doesn't equal .67. But it doesn't equal .66666666666666666666666, either.
So I don't think that the problem he has is with the rounding. .67 would be perfectly fine almost all of the time.
So some examples of what he means would be extremely helpful. I'm trying to imagine a situation where kids are converting to decimal and it's causing all sorts of havoc, but the closes I can think of is something like "Let's cut the pie into 100 parts, and then 67 parts is two thirds" -- but no one is going to bother cutting a pie into 100 parts... or are they?
It matters a lot if, for example, you are a machinist translating the designer's "2/3" into a machine setting or an instruction for a CNC (computer numerical control) program...in metalworking, the difference between .66 and point .666 can be pretty huge.
But the public schools in question aren't going to graduate very many future precision machinists or mechanical engineers..sounds like being able to calculate a % discount without a calculator would be a major improvement.
Just put up a post on this at my blog and at Chicago Boyz.
I think they need to go back to drill-and-kill. Worked for me.
And lose the cottonpickin graphing calculators.
