Saturday, June 11, 2005
In Defense of Dumbed Down Curricula
It should probably go without saying that I have a lot of policy disagreements with William McBeath. He's a (very) partisan Conservative and (incongruously, given his professed love of small government) an admirer of President Bush. As such, in an effort not to turn my blog into Steve against the Right-Wing (which would be really boring, to say nothing of troublesome to me on account of my being outnumbered), I don't generally respond to what he has to say.
Recently, however, Mr. McBeath has made a post that allows me to disagree with him on a basis that cannot be easily categorized as right-wing vs. left-wing. Moreover, if provides me with the opportunity to fulfill an earlier pledge to rebut Mr. Tam's comment in response to this post and to reference yet another of my Gazette columns of yore.
At issue is the question of how much math should be taught in Alberta's schools. Mr. McBeath believes (and is supported in this belief by Mssrs. Hirji and Tam) that, if anything, the math curriculum should be made *more* rigourous. I happen to disagree.
Mr. McBeath suggests that since many countries have math curricula more difficult than Alberta's, doors are somehow being left closed to Albertans who wish to compete in a global environment. First, I see no reason to believe that the ability to compete generally is closely tied to one's ability to rotate rhomboids in n dimensions, or to integrate conic sections, or whatever else it is that Mr. McBeath feels should be covered in high school math. However, I readily concede that there are fields in which competition is closely tied to these, and I will give him the benefit of assuming that his remarks were intended to be confined to this field.
If this is the case, however, I'm afraid that Mr. McBeath is sadly mistaken in his view of the purpose of high school. The purpose of high school is not to prepare students to compete in a given field - that's why we have post-secondary education. Rather, the point of high school is twofold: to prepare students to function as adults in society by providing them with the knowledge base deemed necessary of every responsible citizen, and to allow those students interested and able to pursue the post-secondary objectives of their choosing. For the latter objective, it would be nice to increase the *range* of math available to high school students, but absent the funding required to do so, requiring greater mathematical proficiency from *every* high school student would be silly.
Mr. Tam takes this silliness one step further by suggesting that "he solution is to teach at a faster pace, raise requirements and expectations, and establish a willingness to flunk students who don't meet the standards." To him, I ask what we hope to accomplish by flunking the students who don't meet our newly-increased standards? Absent elaboration on his part, it appears to me that he is seeking to apply the philosophy of post-secondary education - that it exists only to serve qualified students - to secondary education, which ought to exist to serve all Albertans.
Returning to Mr. McBeath's international dick-measuring contest, he also neglects to consider the consequences of the education systems imposed by other countries, notably Japan (where the teen suicide rate is extremely high, a fact that is attributable partly to the country's unduly rigourous school curriculum). I am reminded of the astonishment of a Japanese woman visiting my mother's grade one classroom as she noted how often students smiled here.
Mr. Hirji, at least, offers some substantive and defensible arguments, in asserting that math is useful in teaching logical thinking. With this I can agree. I do not agree, however, that it is the *only* means of teaching logical thinking nor, for most students, among the more useful means. Increasingly, educators are learning to harness different forms of intelligence - to suggest, as Mr. Hirji appears to be, that all students should be required to take basic calculus that they might acquire logical thinking is both intelligence type-centric and likely to be extremely ineffective for many students.
I tutor a lot of students in math. A lot of them do just fine with my help, but some of them don't - not because I'm a bad tutor (I'm fucking awesome), not because the kid's lazy (okay, sometimes it's because the kid's lazy), but because the kid simply does not have the kind of intelligence required to succeed at math. And next time a kid who wants to be a grade one teacher is asking me why, exactly, he's learning basic logarithmic functions, I shall be sure to refer him to these three gentlemen.
In other news, a lot of these are hilarious. Some of them are pretty bad too, though, especially on the first page, so keep reading for a while before giving up on them.
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It should probably go without saying that I have a lot of policy disagreements with William McBeath. He's a (very) partisan Conservative and (incongruously, given his professed love of small government) an admirer of President Bush. As such, in an effort not to turn my blog into Steve against the Right-Wing (which would be really boring, to say nothing of troublesome to me on account of my being outnumbered), I don't generally respond to what he has to say.
Recently, however, Mr. McBeath has made a post that allows me to disagree with him on a basis that cannot be easily categorized as right-wing vs. left-wing. Moreover, if provides me with the opportunity to fulfill an earlier pledge to rebut Mr. Tam's comment in response to this post and to reference yet another of my Gazette columns of yore.
At issue is the question of how much math should be taught in Alberta's schools. Mr. McBeath believes (and is supported in this belief by Mssrs. Hirji and Tam) that, if anything, the math curriculum should be made *more* rigourous. I happen to disagree.
Mr. McBeath suggests that since many countries have math curricula more difficult than Alberta's, doors are somehow being left closed to Albertans who wish to compete in a global environment. First, I see no reason to believe that the ability to compete generally is closely tied to one's ability to rotate rhomboids in n dimensions, or to integrate conic sections, or whatever else it is that Mr. McBeath feels should be covered in high school math. However, I readily concede that there are fields in which competition is closely tied to these, and I will give him the benefit of assuming that his remarks were intended to be confined to this field.
If this is the case, however, I'm afraid that Mr. McBeath is sadly mistaken in his view of the purpose of high school. The purpose of high school is not to prepare students to compete in a given field - that's why we have post-secondary education. Rather, the point of high school is twofold: to prepare students to function as adults in society by providing them with the knowledge base deemed necessary of every responsible citizen, and to allow those students interested and able to pursue the post-secondary objectives of their choosing. For the latter objective, it would be nice to increase the *range* of math available to high school students, but absent the funding required to do so, requiring greater mathematical proficiency from *every* high school student would be silly.
Mr. Tam takes this silliness one step further by suggesting that "he solution is to teach at a faster pace, raise requirements and expectations, and establish a willingness to flunk students who don't meet the standards." To him, I ask what we hope to accomplish by flunking the students who don't meet our newly-increased standards? Absent elaboration on his part, it appears to me that he is seeking to apply the philosophy of post-secondary education - that it exists only to serve qualified students - to secondary education, which ought to exist to serve all Albertans.
Returning to Mr. McBeath's international dick-measuring contest, he also neglects to consider the consequences of the education systems imposed by other countries, notably Japan (where the teen suicide rate is extremely high, a fact that is attributable partly to the country's unduly rigourous school curriculum). I am reminded of the astonishment of a Japanese woman visiting my mother's grade one classroom as she noted how often students smiled here.
Mr. Hirji, at least, offers some substantive and defensible arguments, in asserting that math is useful in teaching logical thinking. With this I can agree. I do not agree, however, that it is the *only* means of teaching logical thinking nor, for most students, among the more useful means. Increasingly, educators are learning to harness different forms of intelligence - to suggest, as Mr. Hirji appears to be, that all students should be required to take basic calculus that they might acquire logical thinking is both intelligence type-centric and likely to be extremely ineffective for many students.
I tutor a lot of students in math. A lot of them do just fine with my help, but some of them don't - not because I'm a bad tutor (I'm fucking awesome), not because the kid's lazy (okay, sometimes it's because the kid's lazy), but because the kid simply does not have the kind of intelligence required to succeed at math. And next time a kid who wants to be a grade one teacher is asking me why, exactly, he's learning basic logarithmic functions, I shall be sure to refer him to these three gentlemen.
In other news, a lot of these are hilarious. Some of them are pretty bad too, though, especially on the first page, so keep reading for a while before giving up on them.
