Recall a time when you really loved something…and you recommended it wholeheartedly to someone you really love, …and the person hated it. …That is the… state in which I’ve spent the last six years. I teach high school math.

Watching this video caused me considerable agony.

I’ve spent the last, oh, seven or eight years tutoring one of my nieces in math. She finally graduated from high school last week, and I am getting some small part of the credit.

Problem: I know for a fact that almost none of my effort ended up inside her head. I helped her pass, but I didn’t know how to help her learn.

Here, Dan Meyer explains what I did wrong, and what I could have done instead.

Too late now, and my niece will be very very lucky if she finds a way to rewire the neural pathways I helped tangle.

Gah.

Not entirely my fault; one problem I ran into consistently was that my vocabulary for talking about math, which in my experience is the one in use by people who actually use math, has been deprecated in primary and secondary education in favor of a bunch of touchy feely crap.

Along the same lines, whenever my niece learned a temporary heuristic, she clung to it fiercely, refusing to move on to a more efficient, more general technique. For instance, in school she learned to do multiplication with grids of boxes. It was years before she moved on to simply working the problem with numbers, and I think to this day she doesn’t really understand why the numbers work.

Then there were multiple choice math exams. Read that again: multiple choice math exams. My niece got very good at working the problem backwards, discarding the bad answers to get the right one.

And finally: Fucking. Graphing. Calculators. If I had my way, any teacher who allows any kind of calculator in the classroom or with homework before, oh, trigonometry, deserves to be fired with no pension, and possibly put on the child abuse registry. I am not remotely kidding. Horribly crippling. It was like watching someone with a sore ankle being confined to a wheelchair in third grade instead of being given proper exercise, and watching their legs wither over the next nine years.

In eleventh grade, the text book was teaching matrix calculations because there was a specific algorithm programmed into the preferred calculator (a TI something or other). No understanding of matrices required, none at all. Hell, I don’t understand them, not really, and although teaching her tweaked my own understanding of just about everything else, the presentation in this chapter did nothing even for me.

Unfortunately, he turns out to be a religious whacko, prepared to impose his superstitions on the children of his state.

Jindal ignored those calling for a veto and this week signed the law that will allow local school boards to approve supplemental materials for public school science classes as they discuss evolution, cloning and global warming.

The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education will have the power to prohibit materials, though the bill does not spell out how state officials should go about policing local instructional practices.… Critics call it a back-door attempt to replay old battles about including biblical creationism or intelligent design in science curricula, a point defenders reject based on a clause that the law “shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine … or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.”

No good, Bobby. No good.

No VP slot for you, ever.

Good for her; I’m looking forward to her reports.

I hope she can also get her husband to go, eventually.

[Series note]

I didn’t realize this was going to turn into a series. I’ve retitled the posts so far, but have left their URLs untouched so as not to break any existing links. Note that my numbers are not consistent with UD’s.

Posts in this series:

Prof Meets Gun 4: UD Visiting Gun Show, Range

Prof Meets Gun 3: On Scholars Visiting Gun Ranges

Prof Meets Gun 2: Gun Range Visit & Gun Answers

Prof Meets Gun 1 (This post)

The QOTD post below, “I’ve heard of that,” links to a brief introduction to the problem.

Now go over to Kevin Baker at The Smallest Minority and read the long version. I’m not even going to bother to quote from it. It is infinitely worth your time, particularly you home schoolers out there, who are facing state execution, because you are doing the job that state teachers are specifically trying to eradicate: turning your kids into functional, literate citizens. (Hi, Chanda!)

Oh, OK, fine then, fine. Here’s your quote:

I am of the carefully considered opinion that both our media and our educational system have been largely taken over by people who are acolytes of the Holy Grail that Socialism promised, and who put themselves in those positions in the belief that it is up to them to help create the New Men that Socialism cannot succeed without. Our schools, especially, have become centers for the teaching of collectivism, “identity politics,” and for want of a better term, “rage against the machine.”

And to some extent, it has worked.

To a larger extent, it has not.

What has resulted are the unintended consequences of declining standards, high dropout rates, functional illiteracy and innumeracy, almost no general knowledge of geography, history, or civics, and nearly complete ignorance of science – both general and applied.

Schools should be the foundry through which the raw material of our youth is run, coming out the other end with strong and tempered minds well prepared for the world. The ore hasn’t changed, but the ratio of dross to valuable product has grown precipitously.

OK, I gave you the quote. Now do your share and read the whole thing, where Baker backs it up with statistics, with quotes, with news articles, with cold hard logic.

Public schools aren’t simply incompetent. They’re doing an excellent job of creating a people fit for socialist tyranny, which means a people unable to govern themselves.

The teacher told me that she once had to explain to the class why her last name was the same as her father’s. She dusted off the whole ancient ritual of legitimacy for them—marriages, maiden names, and so on. When she was done, there was a short silence. Then one child piped up softly: “Yeah . . . I’ve heard of that.”

I’ve heard of that. It would break a heart of stone.

Our culture is doing a lousy job transmitting itself, because the people charged with doing so, the teachers, have by and large been trained to think that it’s not worth transmitting.