CPM not good for students
Publison
Posts: 12,366
Had to have a chuckle after reading this headline in a local newspaper. When reading the headline, I said what?
http://www.minutemannewscenter.com/articles/2013/02/27/fairfield/opinion/letters/doc512e4196043e2570344358.txt
But it say's something about the problems with our school systems.
I be the kids in Japan could ace these tests.
http://www.minutemannewscenter.com/articles/2013/02/27/fairfield/opinion/letters/doc512e4196043e2570344358.txt
But it say's something about the problems with our school systems.
I be the kids in Japan could ace these tests.
Comments
I think they may have to revisit *how* they teach math these days.
I hope this does not curtail the development of CPM on the Prop 2.
CP/M on P2 will be going ahead as planned when I first ever heard there might be such a device.
I knew if CPM was in the heading, you would be by soon.
What I don't understand from reading the article is why schools or school boards or whatever had "purchase CPM". I mean, haven't teachers been designing curricula and refining teaching methods for hundreds of years now?
No harm intended of course.
Bothers me too, This is the same school district I was in 50 years ago, (K-High School). We always ranked in the top 15 percent in the country. My buddy in High School went on to become the lead pilot for the Thunderbirds in the 80's: http://www.af.mil/information/bios/bio.asp?bioID=10754
Fairfield County was also in the top 5% national per capita income back then. I guess things have changed, and education has gone downhill.
I'm back after 30 years, and registered to vote. So I will vote early and often to change this.
Of course, but a Salesman with Glossy Documents and a nice sounding name like "College Preparatory Mathematics" can easily convince poorly skilled school boards that their *NEW* system is the way forward. Just sign here.....
No surprise that if the teacher is not preparing their own material, their delivery is patchy.
Maybe the material helps those with Zero teaching background in maths ?
Class of 2014??
Yes? He studied 3rd year (junior) students.
CP/M was good enough for Microsoft to relable it MS-DOS.
But this 'CPM' is just another row in the educational quagmire of educational methodology.
Those that can't survive in business, teach. And those that can't survive in the classroom write methodology for those that do.
For the past 300 or so years, the whole world has prospered on extending the applications of maths that Newton came up with in one year. What's not to like about maths? (maybe the study of ballistics.)
You mean home schooling? Not many homes with parents that offer advanced maths on a daily basis. Even graduating from Stanford doesn't require one can do Calculus.
Statistical Analysis has never been a very productive branch of math for most people... maybe a weatherman feels a need for it, but I'd take Financial Accounting over it .. anyday.
It seems this is all about Algebra. My own experience was I failed Algebra the first time as I didn't want to study it (while I did get an A in Geometry). I had to repeat Algebra and got an A the second time around.
What am I trying to say? A lot of it has to do with motivated students, not what the parents expect. Also, it doesn't help to have experienced high school educators forced into changing their methods just because a school district gets sold on something new. Even the best teachers can't always get good results with new texts that try to invent enticements to learning.
@
You can't teach Windows or even DOS as it is all closed source. Linux is open but so huge it's scary.
CP/M though, the source is now available and it's small enough for one to be able to know it all.
Oh, yeah, teaching some maths is a good idea as well.
I've often heard it said something like "this and that maths is not required for me in my life I never needed it". Well how do they know that?
Perhaps someone does not speak Chinese. Why would they, they don't need it in their life. But wait, what about all the possibilities that might open up for them if they did? Well, they will never know.
So are you really going to study Chinese? Tell me more....
I think learning CPM is excellent. It will be useful if you ever have a big project -- such as promoting a rock concert for 50,000 people; or building a 50 floor office building; or dry dock repair of the QE2.
Critical Path Monitoring, PERT charts, bar chart, GANTT charts, and punch lists.
Absolutely necessary if you ever want to be a Project Manager.
I have studied in Finnish classes for two years. Written tests were 8 out of 10. Still I can't make small talk with anyone in Finnish. I'm a hopeless case, perhaps to old to learn new tricks.
PERT and GANT and all that critical path stuff we did cover in school.
Oddly, some project managers I have seen, and worked under, using such tools still seemed to have no friggin idea how their project was going. If things were running late they would just squeeze all the jobs that need doing into ever shrinking amounts of time. When the deadline comes they announce the project as "done" even with half the jobs on the chart not even started yet. That might be OK when it's the next version of Windows we are talking about but when it the test plan for aircraft fly by wire systems I start to worry.
I started with Chinese at 46, and here I am at 65 still feeling I know relatively little... though I can impress people that know nothing and navigate around Taiwan or the Chinese mainland with ease.
A sound knowledge in maths is the backbone of all the related Engineering fields. I sat for my Professional Engineer-in-Training certification and passed it on the first go because I was rigorous in learning the math skills.
But I wouldn't dare sit for a Chinese language competence exam. And I wouldn't try to learn Finnish at this point in life. Nonetheless, Americans are sadly deficient in learning foreign languages. They tend to thing the rest of the world should do as they do as they do and use English, rather poorly.
When I was in Japan, my students told me that kid in Japan learn to take tests, but not much else. Their entire lives are centered around passing the entrance exam to the next level of school. After they pass the entrance exam at the fancy university, they are done, further work is optional.
Here, if you asked 100 programmers to write the same program, you'd get 100 different programs. In Japan, you'd get "97 identical programs , and three that might work" (their words).
Of course that was 20 years ago, things might have changed.
In some areas that leads to great accomplishments, but as we have seen with the Fukshima incident.. it doesn't quite fill the bill.
The USA is excellent in many ways in education.. if you get to the right leading university.
But Germany seems to really have a better combination of academic excellence and apprenticeship in technical fields.. thus the Porche and Mercedes-Benz do so well in world-wide sales.
You can't just have a test culture, or just an excellent education. You need to have a culture that has a sincere work ethic as well. It also helps if people really love the career they pursue, many Asians are directed to study what their parents want.
I don't understand the sincere worth ethic point as well.
My father (wrongly) worked at Walmart with an amazing work ethic. It eventually psychologically destroyed him. Sensitized to it, I see a lot of americans start out with a strong work ethic, only to get disillusioned by the dysfunction of their workplace and leadership. I still think that in general people want to work towards things they value (probably been proven) instead of receive it for free.
Just my opinion however,
Frank
But if you really study Chinese culture and Confucianism's role in Chinese history, you will find that China invented the civil service exam and the role of examinations within the society was very high stakes long before western cultures were considering such things.
Sayings, such as "A boy's education is only as good as what his father expects of him." pretty much is what Asian culture is about.
I guess you would have to live here and teach here to really see what is the difference. For one, passing the entrance exams used to be the only way into a university, and for those that passed, tuition and books almost cost nothing.
And in Taiwan, it has only been in the last 5 years or less that finishing past the 9 grade was mandatory. You had to pass an entrance exam to get into high school, and the better your score, the better the high school.
Of course the best high school usually meant a better chance of getting into the best university.
That's kind of a stretch. I going to say, No, tests in this form are recent development, and have only recently been part of our culture are the definitive "give me a single number answer to any complex situation". Life is and has always been a complex interplay of skill, effort, luck, and factors outside ones control.
While I think they are certainly an ancient Chinese torture ritual that has gone global.
As far as life is concerned. I agree.
up-selling secondary education to kids and parents
, or
predetermining what their future needs might be
, or
teaching to test metrics that have not been correlated to real world experiences.
We have started to do this based on:
the assumption that secondary education leads to a career or skill set or business acumen that will deliver a life and income worth more than the very significant tuition and debt your average college student will be encumbered with
, and
a general de-emphasis on insuring we produce well rounded, capable, robust adults
, and
the assumption that it's best for society and us as people and citizens to structure education in ways that favor big corporations
, finally
no appreciation for the socio-economic changes we have seen over the last 30 years and their impact on the average family attempting to raise kids.
I am quite sure there are other factors, but those are primary in my mind.
Worse, we put educators into a position where:
they are held to standards that they do not have sufficient control over, which is a obvious failure condition
, and
said educators are constrained by a significantly higher legal, civil and "values" in general profile, which limits their ability to actually challenge and educate the kids for fear of negative reactions or over inflated safety issues (the no soldering problem)
, secondly
this is exacerbated by the class time being purposed for the educator, leaving them very little wiggle room to add value, no risk no reward
, coupled with
their overall value diluted by high class sizes, and lack of resources
, this means
we are not seeing the rewards, because we quite simply are not taking and enabling the risks necessary to get them.
Read that last part again. To me, that is the biggest issue out there. Risk means some bad educators get into the system and we have to deal with that, but it also means we don't get the great educators doing what they can do either. This condition is a lot like the micro-manager who expects great things yet doesn't allow those managed to freedom to actually accomplish great things.
If I were king for a day, resolving those things would be a very high priority. This disconnect is going to cost every nation that suffers it. Those costs are really high too. Not only do the people lose some ability to compete, but the opportunity costs are huge! Great things may never happen, and it's the great things that move us forward and we see a much worse chance of those things happening when we've snuffed out the greatness out there just waiting to be empowered to go off and do it.
Sure, there are lots of stories about this wonder kid and that one, but that's not holistic and I consider it a distorted view given the massive misalignment present in education generally today.
A prep course for continuing to advance in the understanding of math is great for those people who have an affinity for math and or need to follow through for career aspirations. It is not so good for the people who lack those things!
And that is the vast majority of people!
Math is a lot of fun! Understanding it opens a lot of doors in life too. Getting excited about that and learning to apply even basic math to the real world is appropriate for the vast majority of people and the bonus is we rope in those students who could get or have the potential to advance in math and feel really good about it too, which improves performance on many levels.
Running everybody on that prep track is lazy thinking. Education only works well when we do the human work to educate. That means face time and seat time interacting with others who can frame things in ways that can make sense, build context for students looking to grasp and apply new concepts and tools. My post above speaks to why we aren't doing that, and the problem is systemic. Cookie cutter type formula education doesn't yield the kind of people we need to carry our society forward and build the future.
The USA has several problems with K12 education.
1. It is mandated to be universal and leaving no one behind.
2. States-rights leave it up to the 50 states to decide what is adequate education.
3. Most states don't have the resources to do an excellent job, but they do have voters that tear apart any agenda that disagrees with their so-called commuinity values.
4. The statement that 'all men are created equal' has been converted to 'equality and justice for all' in the Pledge of Alligence, and then applied to every issue.
There really is a significant problem with teaching math in that the textbook publishers are just looking to publish new material that will increase their revenue. And to do so, some are not above getting very creative about teaching math, even inserting problems about buying a McDonald's cheeseburger as they obvious are getting cash to place McDs in the text.
On the other hand, a competent math teacher with 5 or more years of teaching experience the subject probably should just be able to teach a university prep course with
Schwamm's Outlines and avoid all this fancy-schmancy stuff.
But greey publisher that have undue influence on the voters or that provide under-the-table kick backs, force the schools to use inferior materials for subjects that have long be extremely straight-forward to teach.
It is corruption and greedy that deny a proper education. People to send their kids to private schools when they can afford to do so, just to make sure these forces are not in play.
As a simple example:
We have a definition of prime numbers "A Prime Number can be divided evenly only by 1, or itself." That's even how they put it on a site called "maths is fun" http://www.mathsisfun.com/definitions/prime-number.html
Well that's nice. Seems like one of those arbitrary and pointless definitions that mathematicians like to bombard us with. Now I have to memorize that sucker and perhaps make use of it in some pointless test or other later. Thanks. This is not fun.
However we also have a definition handed down from Euclid "A prime number is that which is measured by a unit alone." See the difference, we have "measured", you know, some kind of real thing we can measure. In those days they had no algebra so that definition would be demonstrated by drawing a line, dividing that line into equal parts, say 7, and then it is easily seen that you can't take parts 2 at a time without something left over. You can't take parts 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 at a time without having something left over. Those multiples just don't fit.
There we have it. With the modern day definition we have a very abstract statement about numbers. With Euclid we have a graphical thing that you can see. It becomes so obvious it explains itself when you see the picture. Why don't they do that on "mathsisfun" ?
This is a very simple example. But I believe it permeates most of maths taught to kids in school and even higher levels. That wall of symbols is intimidating and really not fun. The ideas behind it might be.