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Jul. 30th, 2012 02:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccastareyesThere are days when I want to pick up, leave Ithaca and go teach high school somewhere. And they aren't days when I'm sick of my *%&#*&!@ dissertation. Well, not always.
So one thing that's making the rounds of the science blogosphere is an New York Times editorial by Andrew Hacker pretty much saying high schools shouldn't bother to teach algebra because students fail it and who really needs algebra? Needless to say most scientists are all lots of people. They note that algebra is ideally about teaching a method of problem-solving. For example, I remember back in elementary school, there were a certain set of problems where the teacher would just say 'guess and check'. For example, if I have $2.10 in nickels and dimes and there's 31 coins total, how many nickels do I have?
Ideally, an algebra student should know how to set up this so you don't have to guess and check. And that's really useful in the sciences, where you might have to do things like 'how many oxygen molecules do I need to balance this equation?', but also comes in handy for cooking ('how much milk do I need if I have to third the recipe?'), finance ('which of these loans will I have to pay more interest on?') and so on.
Now, the fact that students are sucking at math can be blamed on lots of things. Bad teachers, good but underfunded and burned out teachers, students who have stopped caring by high school, poorly designed math courses that don't actually teach students things (or why you need algebra). That doesn't mean kids can't learn algebra by 18, it means that our schools need help (and in other news, water is wet, the Pope remains Catholic and I found this video feed of bears in the wood and guess what?)
Which gives me the urge to walk out of my office door and Do Something. Even though I'm not a particularly good teacher, and I can still do things as an astronomer. (For one, every time you see a Real Live Scientist who isn't a nerdy white guy, kids who aren't nerdy white boys get the idea that that could be them. For another, I seem to be one of the experts on the solar observation port of our spacecraft.)
There's a passage from "The Mountains of Mourning" by Lois Bujold where Our Hero Miles Vorkosigan, a new officer in the military itching to get into space, has to visit a village in the poor parts of his home district, where technology hasn't penetrated. At the end, as he's thinking it over, he has the same feeling: the idea that he wants to throw himself into this and Fix It, even if it'll eat him alive and he can still serve as a solider. (The fact he's visibly congenitally disabled on a planet that has strong stigma associated with disability, especially ones caused by birth defect or poor genes means that he gets attention just for showing up.)
I read articles on the US Education system and I feel like Miles there. My education was largely paid for by the US taxholder -- public school through high school, state college on a college-level scholarship designed to keep smart students in-state, graduate school indirectly through NASA grants for all but two years*. It's easy to want to take direct action; harder to wonder if you can do more good by being a scientist who visits once or twice a year, or a scientist who talks to people on TV about how awesome science is, or a mediocre teacher who works day in and our for as long as she can stand it.
* I'm on my adviser's grant money; the other years I taught and was paid by Cornell.
So one thing that's making the rounds of the science blogosphere is an New York Times editorial by Andrew Hacker pretty much saying high schools shouldn't bother to teach algebra because students fail it and who really needs algebra? Needless to say most scientists are all lots of people. They note that algebra is ideally about teaching a method of problem-solving. For example, I remember back in elementary school, there were a certain set of problems where the teacher would just say 'guess and check'. For example, if I have $2.10 in nickels and dimes and there's 31 coins total, how many nickels do I have?
Ideally, an algebra student should know how to set up this so you don't have to guess and check. And that's really useful in the sciences, where you might have to do things like 'how many oxygen molecules do I need to balance this equation?', but also comes in handy for cooking ('how much milk do I need if I have to third the recipe?'), finance ('which of these loans will I have to pay more interest on?') and so on.
Now, the fact that students are sucking at math can be blamed on lots of things. Bad teachers, good but underfunded and burned out teachers, students who have stopped caring by high school, poorly designed math courses that don't actually teach students things (or why you need algebra). That doesn't mean kids can't learn algebra by 18, it means that our schools need help (and in other news, water is wet, the Pope remains Catholic and I found this video feed of bears in the wood and guess what?)
Which gives me the urge to walk out of my office door and Do Something. Even though I'm not a particularly good teacher, and I can still do things as an astronomer. (For one, every time you see a Real Live Scientist who isn't a nerdy white guy, kids who aren't nerdy white boys get the idea that that could be them. For another, I seem to be one of the experts on the solar observation port of our spacecraft.)
There's a passage from "The Mountains of Mourning" by Lois Bujold where Our Hero Miles Vorkosigan, a new officer in the military itching to get into space, has to visit a village in the poor parts of his home district, where technology hasn't penetrated. At the end, as he's thinking it over, he has the same feeling: the idea that he wants to throw himself into this and Fix It, even if it'll eat him alive and he can still serve as a solider. (The fact he's visibly congenitally disabled on a planet that has strong stigma associated with disability, especially ones caused by birth defect or poor genes means that he gets attention just for showing up.)
Miles watched the evening shadows flowing up along the backbone of the Dendarii range, high and massive in the distance. How small those mountains looked from space! Little wrinkles on the skin of a globe he could cover with his hand, all their crushing mass made invisible. Which was illusory, distance or nearness? Distance, Miles decided. Distance was a damned lie. Had his father known this? Miles suspected so.
He contemplated his urge to throw all his money, not just a lightflyer's worth, at those mountains; to quit it all and go teach children to read and write, to set up a free clinic, a powersat net, or all of these at once. But Silvy Vale was only one of hundreds of such communities buried in these mountains, one of thousands across the whole of Barrayar. Taxes squeezed from this very district helped maintain the very elite military school he'd just spent — how much of their resources in? How much would he have to give back just to make it even, now? He was himself a planetary resource, his training had made him so, and his feet were set on their path.
I read articles on the US Education system and I feel like Miles there. My education was largely paid for by the US taxholder -- public school through high school, state college on a college-level scholarship designed to keep smart students in-state, graduate school indirectly through NASA grants for all but two years*. It's easy to want to take direct action; harder to wonder if you can do more good by being a scientist who visits once or twice a year, or a scientist who talks to people on TV about how awesome science is, or a mediocre teacher who works day in and our for as long as she can stand it.
* I'm on my adviser's grant money; the other years I taught and was paid by Cornell.
