56 Replies to “The Children Are Our Future”

  2. However the miracle of the internet has come to the rescue of self educating in the form of the Khan Academy!
    http://www.khanacademy.org/
    At age 79 I can understand the number line or prevail over algebra if I so choose!
    University Prof Unions take note, eh?

  3. I just could not understand math ……….. that is until someone stuck a $ sign in front of the numbers. Suddenly the lights went on.

  5. With lofty goals of social engineering the next generation its understandable how many education students/faculty would find teaching math rather unimportant and boring.

  8. Soon to be seen resumes in Private sector:
    ” Hi, I gradeeated colluge an I was not too gud in spelling but I can figure stuff more gudder”
    Reply: Sory but your skill set is not suited to our work here, perhaps you should try the civil service. We have been referring domestic college grads to government placement services as we have more than enough well skilled foreign workers securing productive work with us.

  9. Reynolds said teachers would still be taught how to instruct children in math skills, but that training would be more child-focused, “taking into consideration if that child is aboriginal, taking into consideration if that child has autism, taking into consideration whether that child ate a breakfast that morning.”
    Reynolds added that the proposal is being driven by the prospective teachers themselves.
    “Repeatedly, they tell us they need more information about how to work with diverse students, how to deal with racism in the classroom, how to talk with parents,” she said.
    If it’s true that these comments are being made by the prospective teachers themselves, it sure doesn’t sound like like they are good candidates for teaching. They sound like whiners. It sounds as if they want the college to avoid the tough and useful stuff–like how to actually teach something.
    As one of the commentors pointed out, his daughter was Metis and he resented the implication that she was unable to learn math like everybody else.

  10. Sadly, I had to raid my tobacco can of cash to buy a reading program, various math games/books, science videos and, in response to my husband’s “They call this crap History?!”, a shelf full of history books.
    After saving for their post secondary education (trades or tech, I hope) and calculating the loss of investment savings, I figure we could scrape together enough to escape to The Big Muddy Badlands.
    Hey, maybe IT IS better not to understand math.

  11. So the “prospective teachers” are making the decisions? And the teachers/administrators who are supposed to be making decisions are being influenced by those who haven’t yet gotten qualified to teach? Hmmmmmmm…….seems like those who are in charge have no backbone. Sounds like a whole bunch of people need to be fired and replaced with those who actually have some leadership ability. Y’know, retired sergeants from the army would probably do well in education. They are taught to teach during their leadership training and they don’t take any $hit from those they are teaching.

  12. Kate, I’ve been around SDA long enough that I know that you know I don’t blow mush sunshine up your nether parts but I just have to say that the “Children Are Our Future” headlines make me smile.
    My humble offering?
    “Children Are Our Future”. I have a turbocharged WRC rally car with a full tank of evil gasoline, a rifle, and all the camp gear I can stuff the car with room for the navigator (sometimes she calls me her boyfriend, but only on good behavior:) )
    Yea I guess that’s more than a headline, keep up the good work. Kate. Cheers,[d]

  13. Michael Zwaagstra of the Frontier Center is dead on in his views on teaching math. I had to endure the trend towards constructivist teaching–basically students were required to re-invent the wheel instead of simply being taught how to do something. The notion was that if they discovered the concepts themselves, they would own the knowledge and understand it better. I actually found the opposite. If you give the students enough practice and break the problem down into smaller steps, understanding eventually follows. Of course you presented the bigger picture, but you didn’t expect a student–particularly the weaker student–to come up with his own solutions to complex problems. For most kids, constructivist methods were fantastical, frustrating, ineffective and totally confusing. The brighter kids sometimes enjoyed “finding another way” or “finding their own way” but for the most part, practice and repetition were required before understanding ensued. Teachers have to find techniques to present the material clearly and keep the attention of the class. They need to offer help and coach the students as they progress at a pace they can handle. One of the best techniques I found was to have a student explain a problem back to you. Where they stumbled was exactly the point that required more clarification. When they could “teach” it back to you, they generally understood it.
    If the teaching and learning were fuzzy in the early years, the problem only became compounded later on. And now this sad excuse of a Dean of Education would like to make optional the one course that might help prospective teachers teach better. On the other hand, many of the courses taught by the College of Ed were quite frankly useless. I learned to teach from observing my successful colleagues teach.

  14. If there was less focus on “social” engineering and more focus on “civil” engineering, perhaps the math grades would improve.
    But math is hard and it’s much easier to study to be a social worker than an engineer. Kind of ironic that it takes engineers to design all of the new McDonalds restaurants that employ so many liberal arts graduates…..

  18. As every one knows, if you haven’t had breakfast this morning, 2+2=5, and if you’re aboriginal and transgendered to boot, then 2+2= whatever you want.
    If there is an approach better guaranteed to lock in ignorance and poverty for those children and their childrens’ children, I’m hard pressed to imagine it.

  19. TEACHING MATH IN 1940-1950:
    A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price. What is his profit?
    TEACHING MATH IN 1960-1970:
    A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price, or $80. What is his profit?
    TEACHING MATH IN 1980:
    A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. Her cost of production is $80 and her profit is $20. Your assignment: Underline the number 20.
    TEACHING MATH IN 1990:
    By cutting down beautiful forest trees, the logger makes $20. What do you think of this way of making a living? Topic for class participation after answering the question: How did the forest birds and squirrels feel as the logger cut down the trees? There are no wrong answers.

  20. Two words my friends. Home. Schooling.
    Two more words, Tax Cut.
    At some point parents in this country are going to wake up to the fact that the public schools are not just Lefty indoctrination camps, they are an assault on the fabric of the nation. This example of mathematics is just one area of assault. Mathematics is part of the FOUNDATION of Western civilization. If you can’t do basic algebra, geometry etc. you can’t function here.
    The USA is just now discovering what happens to a nation where a critical mass of people can’t function. You get WAR.

  21. I had to teach math during my student teaching days about a decade ago. I was happy to discover I could actually do algebra. (Apparently you have to do the homework questions, something I had little time for when I was supposed to be learning it.)
    The confusing elements for every student, and me, were the dumbass modern methods. Instead of just learning how to do it, they had to “discover” it. It was horrible. The exercise confused the kids beyond belief. Inevitably we’d spend days just getting that out of their heads, and just teach it the old fashioned way; memorize the formula, plug in the numbers. Done.
    Despite the loony theories, my supervising teacher never forgot there were things they had to learn. Now they seem intent on minimizing that, as if it’s not important anyway.

  22. Unfortunately I was a victim of poor math instruction in high school. My grade 10 math teacher was a new graduate and had some new fangled ideas about teaching math – namely, that he didn’t have to teach it.
    On a Monday he would walk in and tell us that by Friday we should have read chapters X and Y and comleted a random selection of problems in the textbook… and then his week was basically done. He NEVER gave lessons or lectures or notes on the blackboard, and allowed us to correct our own work on the textbook problems.
    I have absolutely no doubt that basically self-teaching ourselves grade 10 math (pretty much right when things get interesting with calculus and algebra) hurt all of us come diploma exam time in grade 12. It’s hard to get a firm grasp on advanced math when you’re not really taught the basics.
    This would have been in 1994-95… the “teacher” only lasted 1 year at our school, but I’m sure he’s still “teaching” somewhere in the system.

  23. Time to end the farce of public education. Let people use their money to fund schools they approve of. Get rid of this trash that call themselves teachers, but are in truth missionaries of social chaos. Social engineering morons who have no morals or reason left in them. Time to bust this racket. Every year standards go down & so does our civilization into imbecility. You just have to see how bad my spelling is to see the products of this joke of a system. Being held together by a few good teachers.
    Its not about learning anymore, its only function is to socially indoctrinate children.
    These traitorous school boards run by educrates care only about one thing. Money for themselves the kids be damned.
    Knowledge like morals has become fluid in what minds they have left.
    The Government won’t do anything about it so its up to parents & us!!!

  24. My first year university son, informed me last week that “Communism worked pretty well under Lenin”. WTF … I nearly spit out my dinner. we proceeded to have a good discussion about communism and later googled for more information.
    We finished by finding this poem (which he found hilarious and immediately posted to his facebook page) proving the SDA premise that mocking lies and liars is a very effective strategy to get to the truth.
    “There was an old Marxist called Lenin,
    Who did two or three million men in.
    That’s a lot to have done in,
    But where he did one in,
    A Marxist called Stalin did ten in.”

  25. I can say from personal experience that youngsters coming into university today are absolutely terrible at math.
    One reason is that the educational system over-inflates grades, so students have no idea what they really know. Two, the system has steadily ignored children who might actually have an aptitude for math, and instead has focused its efforts on students who don’t.
    So the children who could really go ahead are left to sit idle, while the kids who will never be that good at math are given easy stuff to learn.
    The moral of the story is simply this: you can no longer trust the public education system. Keep an eye on what your child is learning, give them extra material to learn, use the Internet where it makes sense, and so forth. I long ago told my kids that today’s educational system will likely only teach them half of what they really need to know to be successful.

  26. I used to joke by telling my kids that if they learn to multiply they’ll be waaay ahead of the curve, Sadly, this ain’t a joke no more.

  27. I am not very worried about student teachers taking
    only one course on math instruction. I am worried
    about them being innumerate and math-illiterate.
    How wonderful a phrase is “child-centred”. And it
    is spreading to universities. We out here are now
    supposed to be “student-centred”. It completely
    defeats the objective of professional education –
    it’s not about the professional’s well-being, but
    about his client’s.

  28. “The wheels” began to fall off of both english and math education somewere around the 60’s and 70’s. Maybe even before that. Today’s curriculum designers are a product of that time. Today’s teachers have been taught by that generation, and we wonder why kids don’t “learn good no more”.
    At one time if a student didn’t know the work he/she failed the grade and had to repeat it. Now, it “would do irreparable damage to the self esteem” of the student. Much better to let them blunder on in the delusion that they have learned something that might be of use to them.
    I began to realize this when sometime in the 1960’s my daughter asked for help with her arithmetic, and she started talking about rods. Up to that point I thought that a rod was 5 1/2 yards.
    Just take a look at what grade eight students were expected to learn in the early 1900’s. That would totally baffle most grade 12’s now.
    Don’t blame the kids, they are only learning what they’ve been taught.

  29. Formerly, to be appointed Dean of a College, one of the brightest people around. They should revert to that standard in the College of Education.
    Inflated grades would not qualify as evidence.
    hint – answer to a math problem does not change if you have not had breakfast. If you can’t figure that out, you will never earn enough money to ever afford breakfast.
    Offering bacon and eggs and pancakes w/maple syrup to those who get the right answer to math problems would be an effective incentive for the student teachers at the College of Education.

  30. My son’s middle school (gr 6 – 8) had been teaching the “new math” learning system for 3 years when my son entered the school in grade 6. When the school did the annual Gauss math contest, they allowed a few grade 6s to write the grade 8 test also.
    I saw no signs of embarassment from the teachers, the school or the school board when a fresh faced grade 6 bested all the schools grade 8s, who had “learned” from the new math system for 3 years.

  31. They have to make it an elective at the Uni level because the students can’t do it. By the time the uni taught them the basic arithmetic and other stuff they should have learned in public and high school, they wouldn’t be taking Math 101 until 4th year in a 3 year BA program.
    @PhilM @11:06 – that’s great!

  32. “I used to joke by telling my kids that if they learn to multiply they’ll be waaay ahead of the curve, Sadly, this ain’t a joke no more. ”
    Unfortunately too many people have learned you don’t need ANY schoolin’ to learn how to multiply. Classes in that are held in and out school daily.

  33. Zwaagstra’s article is simply a recapitulation of common sense, something which appears to be sadly lacking in the current education system.
    It would appear the current highly centralized education systems controlled by the teachers unions, government bureaucrats and education professors from the ivory towers are suffering from the same problems which plague any centrally-planned, non-competitive economy, namely, poor and even declining quality of the product, very limited selection, powerful resistance to quality improvement and beneficial change, lack of accountability, and extreme hostility to competition. While a common set of standards as a yardstick for achievement is appropriate, a monolithic method of delivery is not. A voucher system would reintroduce choice to the consumers i.e. the parents on behalf of their children, as well as competition such that the next university education department hare-brain who manages to foist one of their education “theories” on an unsuspecting school would shortly have to answer for the results as measured by performance with respect to competitors.

  34. On the subject of breakfast, autism and racism–apparently topics that are of greater importance (according to the Dean of Education) than actually teaching teachers to teach… The schools are already populated by consultants of every flavor: social workers, specialists who deal with learning difficulties and in some schools, there are breakfast programs either offered by the community or paid for by your tax dollars.
    As one of the commentors on the CBC site pointed out: who is being trained to teach the kids who have NO diagnosis of autism or other ailment, who eat breakfast and are not racist?
    And since when do we let the students decide what they need to learn in order to do their job? (Here I do a Homer Simpson “doh”.)
    I must say that the complaining students (assuming the Dean has reported correctly) know what buttons to push in order to excuse their inability or lack of desire to learn how to actually do their job. After all, how can they be expected to teach math when dealing with legions of starving, racist autistics?

  35. Call it mathematics, call it arithmetic, whatever; it’s simply a tool, and it’s a tool we all have to have in our toolkit to get through life.
    Not teaching kids math is saddling them with a tremendous handicap. Not teaching math to the Indian kids or autistic kids is saddling them with an even worse handicap, because it gives society further reason to marginalize them.
    But, hey! It’s a great way to create future voters for the Lefty parties that promise to shower the know-nothings with entitlements.

  36. Whilst shopping last week the grocery store clerk screwed up the amount tendered process, poor thing got out her little pencil and started doing subtraction. Took her nearly ten minutes to figure out she owed me a 1:20 in change. The sad part was I told her the total from the get go.

  37. @ Rick @ 11:48. I am glad that you set your son straight. As you can see by the second part of my name (Kulak), I have an interest in this topic. The regulars here know my story, but for you interest I will repeat some of it. My gpa escaped the Soviet Union in 1926, but his two brothers and his sisters did not. His two brothers and most of his brothers-in-law died in labour camps and are in the statistics you mention. Many of the sons of the above mentioned were also sent to labour camps, some were shot. I have family pictures sent out after Stalin died that show 15-18 women and only 2 or 3 men. You can guess why that would be.
    PhilM @ 11:06 is right except you forgot the gender and sexual orientation of the logger.

  38. “Reynolds said teachers would still be taught how to instruct children in math skills, but that training would be more child-focused, “taking into consideration if that child is aboriginal, taking into consideration if that child has autism, taking into consideration whether that child ate a breakfast that morning.”
    Reynolds added that the proposal is being driven by the prospective teachers themselves.
    “Repeatedly, they tell us they need more information about how to work with diverse students, how to deal with racism in the classroom, how to talk with parents,” she said.”
    And this part of the reason why students are falling behind. Anything and everything else is deemed far more important than helping the students learn.

  39. The problem is spelled monopoly, and it won’t change until parents control the $. Len Pryor – the self-esteem nonsense is just a stalking horse for the real issue – money. If they held back every student they miseducated, the school population would balloon. Hence the emphasis on throughput: when you’re the only game in town, and by law a mandated purchase, quality and customer satisfaction are supremely irrelevant. And, who are parents to question the education “professionals” who have reduced education of the young to a smoking ruin?

  40. I live in Richmond Hill, Ontario. Population is 162,000. We have 5 Kumon centres, 4 Oxford centres, and 2 Sylvan centres in our town. All of these teach after school programs (with LOTS of homework) in various subjects, but most often math. Both my daughters were in the program from the time the oldest was in Grade 3, when her principal told the parents’ assembly that she thought the standardized testing “was a bit of a joke”, and “we don’t pay much attention to it”. It was $100/month each, but my wife and I were happy to pay it. My girls were pretty bright regardless, but we thought it important that they get basic arithmetic skills down pat in elementary school. I was a bit surprised when they were in Grade 6 that they were doing quadratic equations, but it’s served them well.
    The fact that in one small town (heavily populated by Asian immigrants now) there are 11 centres shows just how many parents no longer trust the public school system to teach their children arithmetic, let alone math. Even though my youngest is better with words than figures (dad brags here: she came first in North America in English at the top Kumon level), no one is ever going to get her by asking for “2 tens for a five”. As I’ve mentioned here before, these classes are 90% Asian – Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Sri Lankan, Middle Eastern. Immigrant parents understand you need basic arithmetic skills to get through life; white parents, for the most part, don’t seem to care.

  42. “…I don’t blow mush sunshine up your nether parts…”
    Dwright, you owe me a new keyboard… and a fresh beer.

  43. Kevin B – unless time is at a real premium in your house, don’t wast your money. In the kids play room we have a white board on the wall and a couple days a week i do a math lesson with each of my sons( grade 1 and grade 3) My grade one son is doing math at a grade 5 level and my grade 3 son is doing math at a grade 8 level. All the exercise sheats are available on line on at various retailers. I dont want to get them too far ahead or they will tune out and be completely bored at school. We don’t have the time to home school them, but they effectivly are. They learned to read at home and every week we go to the library and get a variety of fiction and non fiction books for them to read.
    I remember reading somewhere that someone had determined that the literacy rate in the New England states was higher before they had a public education system than they do now. Don’t leave the education of your children up to the public schools.

  44. this is what you get when your math teachers are liberal arts ‘graduates’ and your science teachers are liberal arts…and ALL of your teachers are liberal arts students because they won’t let anything else into teacher’s college…
    …Reynolds said teachers would still be taught how to instruct children in math skills, but that training would be more child-focused, “taking into consideration if that child is aboriginal, taking into consideration if that child has autism, taking into consideration whether that child ate a breakfast that morning.”…
    news flash, sparky…
    if you’re aboriginal..2+2=4
    if you’re autistic….2+2=4
    if you’re hungry……2+2=4
    if you’re ‘white’…..2+2 STILL =4
    it’s not rocket science, but without basic math there are no rocket scientists and all we’re left with are gorean acolytes and no space program…oh, wait, we’re there now.

  45. I’m going to blame global warming, if you believe in global warming……..no need for number gymnastics or logic or critical thought or balancing a cheque book or creating a business plan or budgeting, makes governing easier too. Numbers are so cold, edgy, ‘cept the zeros.

  46. Ken (Kulak), Thank you for sharing. I wish you and you family all the best. Here is one more story about education.
    Perusing the glossary section of my daughter’s grade 11 Civics text, I found that socialism was described in more positive terms than the Reform Party of Canada. I don’t have the exact wording, but Socialism was a “fair distribution”, while the Reform Party was called “angry”.
    I don’t know what to do with this information, but I am starting to believe that my kids are being indoctrinated.

  47. Ken (Kulak) – I’ve been touched and humbled when you share your experiences with us. It reduces the problems that plague me down to size and I rediscover gratitude.

  48. Your update, that links to the Policy Alternative study clearly shows a “Math Makes Sense” textbook on its title page. “Math Makes Sense” is a terrible option for teaching math. It was the “new math” from my 12:38 comment. It had my daughter in tears when it asked “give four different strategies you could use to solve this problem”.
    “Daddy, the answer is 5 2/3. I don’t need a strategy to solve it. It just is.”
    I don’t know what the point of “Math Makes Sense” is, but around our house it is known as “Math Makes No Sense.”

  49. In less than 60 years, the stature of female academics at the U of S has plummeted downward from the scholarly Hilda Neatby (“So Little For The Mind”) to Cecelia Reynolds. God help Saskatchewan and especially the children.

  50. Robert Heinlein most succinctly described the role of mathematics in advanced human societies:
    Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.
    Mathematics is one of the foundations of our civilization and there is no excuse to not learn mathematics. If I can learn how to interpret a poem and pass an English test where this linguistic operation is required, then anyone should be able to learn mathematics (what I found out about poetry interpretation is that it is not written in a BNF grammar and that syntactical operations involved are equivalent to indirect and doubly indirect addressing).
    Much of the mess we find ourselves in with the delusion of CAGW is as a result of innumeracy which is almost universal among lawyers and hence politicians who are drawn from their ranks at a fraction which is far greater than one would expect from mere chance. Feynman and other physicists of his generation had an intuitive feel for numbers and their BS detectors would be going off constantly if they were exposed to the “science” involved in CAGW.
    I must admit that many of my medical colleagues have forgotten much of their mathematics and I haven’t found one yet who is still able to solve the trivial first order differential equation:
    dy/dx = (x-1)
    This should be child’s play for anyone with a classical science education but it seems that for physicians memorization has been more important than figuring things out from first principles and they totally forget their math after they pass their obligatory first year calculus course. Again, calculus is one of the great achievements of Western civilization co-discovered by Leibnitz and Newton.
    If math education now involved teaching about fractals and numerical experiments to compute fractals and investigate chaos, then this would be acceptable as mathematics has now become an experimental science given the prodigious computing power available to anyone who cares to use it. Still, it is important to understand the fundamentals and fewer and fewer people seem to want to delve into things to find out how they work. “Hacking” seems to have become a pejorative term and is discouraged through legal sanctions. I know my explorations of hospital computer systems through basic hacking methodologies have not been well received.
    The nice thing about math is that it is universal. There are no {insert supposedly oppressed cultural group here} mathematics. Funnily enough, Chinese Japanese and Koreans have absolutely no difficulty in learning the mathematical principles discovered by dead European White males. There have been mathematical prodigies in all cultures and they all spoke the same universal language. What I would suggest is that everyone who wants to be a teacher should be able to pass a simple first year university course that involves elementary calculus (the stuff we used to be taught in Grade 12 in Alberta in the 1960’s), trigonometry and linear algebra. That would at least allow the teachers who passed to call themselves human.

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