Arnie Duncan: "White women are angry, run for the hills" Common-Core education crap.

[Rooney]

No, they are advocating national standards, I am saying that's terrible.

I think the problem is more that we punish for not meeting the standards. There is no incentive for exceeding the standards, but there are clear punishments for not meeting them. As a result, we keep lowering the standard to avoid the punishment. And the punishment then feeds into the problem, making it harder to meet the standard.

I think having a basic standard of education is a good goal to aim for. I'm not saying the standard should be super high, like every kid should know pre-calculus. I'm thinking more along the lines of basic algebra so they're prepared to balance a checkbook/budget on their own.

I don't know what kind of incentive would work, but something like funding bonuses for exceeding the standards. If the schools aren't meeting that standard, help them to figure out why and assist them.

Kids will obviously learn at different rates, but they shouldn't be ignored because they're on one end of the spectrum. Punishment type standards push the focus to the slower learners to bring them up to the minimum while ignoring the fast learners. Incentives push the focus to the high-achievers and leave the other kids to fall by the wayside. The rewards should come into effect when all of the kids are improving and learning closer to capacity.

I'm not an educator, so I'm not sure if this is feasible in the current system or at all.

(Realized while looking over this that it didn't come across too clearly, so TL:DR - kids should know some basic life skills by the time they graduate, there should be incentives for helping all kids in a class, not just one subsection of them.)

[Xantavia]

I'm with Byrthnoth on this one. Everyone can benefit from learning math and if you don't know algebra by the time you graduate high school the education system has failed you. I don't think putting students into an algebra class when they aren't prepared for it is a good idea. I would say that I have a decent understanding of math (A's in every class all the way up to PDEs) and I have spent a fair amount of time tutoring people on math. I feel like every time I see someone struggle with math, their hardships stem from a few specific things that come from a short list common to most people. It's kind of like watching a game of chess. If you understand the game, sometimes it's easier to see what's going on when you're watching someone else play than when you're playing yourself. I feel that way when I tutor math. People approach math in ways that get them through the class but leave them with no real understanding of what they've learned. They repeat this strategy up until a point where it's impractical or impossible to continue in math because of their lack of understanding of even the most fundamental concepts. The culture we live in doesn't help either. We promote the idea that math is for nerds or that you have to be 'smart' to understand math and that success is gauranteed. It's disheartening.

I think a great place to start with learning math would be to remove calculators from the grade schools. I was shocked years ago when my youngest sister was required to have one in first grade. It seems that kids are learning how to type stuff in for the answer, instead of actually learning the how and why a problem is actually solved. The most telling example of this that ever happened to me was during calculus in high school. In order to help prepare us for the AP test, the teacher no longer allowed graphing calculators to be used on tests. Other than me and the 2-3 other kids who only had scientific calculators in the first place, test scores dropped enough for the teacher to comment on it.

In the same way, I really liked the method my physics teacher used when it came grading tests. The right answer didn't always mean you got full credit for the question. He wanted to see your work on how you arrived at the answer. If he could tell that you applied the right formula and used the correct variables but made a dumb arithmetic error, you might get 4 out of 5 points on the problem. Whenever I think back to high-school, I count myself fortunate that most of my teachers taught critical thinking when it comes to problem solving and not focusing on just the results. You would think 20 years later schools would be better, but from what I've heard lately it is much worse.

[archibaldcrane]

They use calculators for arithmetic?

...

[Galkaeater]

In the same way, I really liked the method my physics teacher used when it came grading tests. The right answer didn't always mean you got full credit for the question. He wanted to see your work on how you arrived at the answer. If he could tell that you applied the right formula and used the correct variables but made a dumb arithmetic error, you might get 4 out of 5 points on the problem. Whenever I think back to high-school, I count myself fortunate that most of my teachers taught critical thinking when it comes to problem solving and not focusing on just the results. You would think 20 years later schools would be better, but from what I've heard lately it is much worse.

Wait this isn't standard?

[Blubbartron]

Wait this isn't standard?

Depends on the class, and the math you're doing. The simple arithmetic errors in an engineering or physics context could add up to someone (or lots of someones) getting killed. For some things, the only thing that matters is whether or not you're right.

For lowly algebra classes and shit, yeah, that's relatively standard (though some teachers are douchey).

[hey]

If he could tell that you applied the right formula and used the correct variables but made a dumb arithmetic error, you might get 4 out of 5 points on the problem.

Pretty much every math class i ever took did this. Some would give full credit for a correct answer no matter what, giving partial credit if the shown work (if any) was on the right track. Others supposedly required showing your work to get full credit, but when i invariably had no work to show, because i worked everything out in my head, and wasn't going to waste my time writing out steps i didn't even do, i always got full credit. I'm not sure if they ever took points away from others if they didn't show their work...

[Aksannyi]

I just want to throw in my two cents here (though I have to leave for work shortly and Ksandra basically has said what I've been thinking).

I am currently a pre-education major, basically taking all of my education program prerequisites before I can get into the full education program. I plan to teach secondary English, for what it's worth.

I am disturbed by the fact that many people think that it's totally okay to let the kids who understand what's being taught go ignored. I'm talking about the gifted children, mostly, though the average kids will fall into this category too, when there is an area of particular difficulty for the struggling learners. Unless the gifted kids go out of their way to study something on their own, they're getting absolutely nothing out of their educational experience if all the focus is on the lowest common denominator. We can't ignore the gifted kids entirely because of a few struggling learners.

Furthermore, the entire idea of a common knowledge base is flawed. You will have students who are extremely gifted in art, music, dance, theatre, etc., but who struggle in "core" subjects like math and science. Are those kids meant to believe that they are dumb? And yet, we constantly push aside things like art and music which foster creativity and can instill confidence in kids who might struggle elsewhere, because they're "not important." Americans are often uncultured, and it's not very hard to see why this is. Why can't a history course overlap with some art history/appreciation? Why can't a literature course overlap with some music? Why do we resist the urge to culture our kids?

I understand why the government and administration believe that we need to test everyone - they do feel that there should be some level of assessment and obviously don't trust teachers to assess their own kids (especially if the teachers' paychecks are tied into student performance). But the good teachers aren't going to do their kids that gross disservice of passing them just to get a better paycheck. The good teachers aren't in it for the fucking money. Like someone else already said, the school knows which teachers suck and which don't. Tenure for teachers (not professors) needs to go the hell away, and teachers should be fired if they show consistently poorly. They should be reviewed by the kids, and maybe the parents. Maybe. But not by the government and a series of numbers that only mean that kids know how to take a test.

It hurts the curriculum terribly. Further, you can't even use testing as a measure of intelligence, because some kids are terrible at testing but otherwise know the material. Some kids are freaking out over these tests, here in Florida, the FCAT is taken in 3rd grade, and kids are told from the beginning that if they don't pass, they fail the grade and don't get to go onto fourth grade. That's a lot of fucking pressure for some of these kids. I mean fuck man. And since the tests only have a few subjects on them, the kids go to high school knowing fuckall about history, geography, science, art, music, and plenty other things. And the things they do "know," they only have a basic, rudimentary knowledge of.

I could continue to bitch about this all day - sadly, though, I have to go head to work. I am not a fan of what's happening to education, and I only hope that in some way, I can have an impact on some kids, since at the end of the day, that's the entire reason I'm going into education in the first place.

[Meresgi]

^ Agree Aksannyi

Tons of students test poorly but do amazing in every other part of a subject. That doesn't mean they don't know the material to me. Fuck I get pissed when I see math tests given where students need to memorize formulas beyond basic ones (ill fucking look it up if I need it and don't know it by heart). Same shit for commands in my mind for programming/basic Linux courses and shit. There are tons of things I have to look up over and over again because if I don't use them constantly, they get lost. Doesn't mean I don't know what's going on.

Also really annoys me we dont put more effort towards the kids who are obviously gifted in something. Instead of pushing them further and giving them extra, we hold them back and show them that it doesn't matter how talented you are, in this world a fucking moron is probably going to make more then you ever will for the rest of your life...now get out there and enjoy the game slugger!

[zoobernut]

I have seen a lot more specialized schools, particularly highschools popping up and I feel like that can be the answer to the issue that Aksannyi brings up. I agree with that post. The lack of allowing kids to follow their passions and specialize is detrimental to their self esteems and overall learning experience. If a child is gifted in art or music or one of the "less desirable" subjects that should be fostered and focused on. It is important to be well rounded but not so much that it is detrimental to the kids.

[Headspace]

They should be reviewed by the kids

hahaha

and maybe the parents.

HAHAHAH

[Not Kuno]

Fuck common core and the obsession with testing fucking everything. This year all the middle school english teachers got brand new books, with a script of what to say, what to ask, a packet for the kids with all their homework/assignments, how long to do this and that in their lesson and etc. It's fucking mind numbingly retarded.

[Mojo]

Seems like people agree with eachother in this thread on the major points.

I think a great place to start with learning math would be to remove calculators from the grade schools. I was shocked years ago when my youngest sister was required to have one in first grade. It seems that kids are learning how to type stuff in for the answer, instead of actually learning the how and why a problem is actually solved. The most telling example of this that ever happened to me was during calculus in high school. In order to help prepare us for the AP test, the teacher no longer allowed graphing calculators to be used on tests. Other than me and the 2-3 other kids who only had scientific calculators in the first place, test scores dropped enough for the teacher to comment on it.

In the same way, I really liked the method my physics teacher used when it came grading tests. The right answer didn't always mean you got full credit for the question. He wanted to see your work on how you arrived at the answer. If he could tell that you applied the right formula and used the correct variables but made a dumb arithmetic error, you might get 4 out of 5 points on the problem. Whenever I think back to high-school, I count myself fortunate that most of my teachers taught critical thinking when it comes to problem solving and not focusing on just the results. You would think 20 years later schools would be better, but from what I've heard lately it is much worse.

Eh, I wouldn't really agree with this at all. The most important part of math is learning how it relates to the world. Setting up a calculus problem in the correct way is far more important than memorizing the sequence of instructions required to find the solution. I feel like if you asked a random group of people what the difference is between x = y and x == y, most wouldn't be able to tell you, but most would probably be able to solve x = y^3 - 1 when y = 3, which is sad to me because they've missed out on an extremelly essential and simple concept. People do this thing where they memorize how to perform math instead of understand the very basics, which is part of the problem.

[Kohan]

Furthermore, the entire idea of a common knowledge base is flawed. You will have students who are extremely gifted in art, music, dance, theatre, etc., but who struggle in "core" subjects like math and science.

I've read through this topic on and off, and after noticing that a lot of people are focusing on math and not science, I thought it was about time to step in.

Science isn't considered a "core" subject. In fact, Common Core doesn't care about it, and considering that the majority of states in the Union adhere to that, it's not even on their back burner. There are no CC standards for it presently, and by nature, it pushes for English comprehension and understanding of mathematics, but that's all.

Coincidentally, Slate shared an essay on this recently. I've copied and pasted it below for those who don't wish to click through. If you're remotely interested in the matter, I recommend setting aside some time and reading through it.

Spoiler: show

One of the most remarkable scenes in Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 work of science journalism, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, happens about halfway through the book, in a smoky Baltimore kitchen. Skloot has been pursuing the reluctant Lacks family for about a year and has finally managed an introduction to Lawrence Lacks, the oldest son of Henrietta and Day Lacks. He cooks eggs and pork chops for Skloot and begins reminiscing about his mother, a strict, pretty woman who died of cervical cancer when he was a young teenager, but soon admits that, at 64, he barely remembers her at all. Instead of memories, photographs, and family anecdotes, he and his siblings have only the ominous stories of her stolen cells: that there are enough of them now to “cover the whole earth,” that they have cured diseases, that they will soon make it possible for humans to live to be 800 years old.

After ushering Skloot into the living room with her plate of food, Lawrence asks her to tell him what his mother’s cells (now known in biomedical research as the “HeLa immortal cell line”) “really did,” and Skloot asks him if he knows what a cell is. “Kinda,” he tells her. “Not really.” Skloot writes:

I tore a piece of paper from my notebook, drew a big circle with a small black dot inside, and explained what a cell was, then told him some of the things HeLa had done for science, and how far cell culture had come since.

Although their mother’s cells—taken without her knowledge during her cancer treatment in 1951—have indeed helped cure diseases and have made millions of dollars for biomedical supply companies, pharmaceutical companies, and research laboratories, the surviving members of the Lacks family still live in poverty, without reliable access to health insurance or proper medical care. Perhaps more significantly, they lack even the basic scientific information that would allow them to understand Henrietta’s legacy or make informed decisions about their own health. At Lawrence’s house, Skloot meets 84-year-old Day Lacks, Henrietta’s husband, who wears flip-flops in cold weather because he has gangrene in his feet; after his wife’s death and the re-emergence of her mysterious cells, he is afraid to let doctors treat him. Sonny, one of Henrietta’s other sons, refuses angioplasty for the same reason.

Skloot’s simple diagram, along with an article she shows him about a method of corneal transplantation developed through the study of his mother’s cells, has a profound effect on Lawrence. He is energized by the idea that his mother’s cells could help cure blindness, and he convinces other members of his family, including his father, his wife, and his sister, to talk to Skloot.

How is it possible that no one has ever told him how a cell works before? You could speculate that because Lawrence was educated during the time of Jim Crow segregation, he received poor instruction or that the economic and emotional pressure on his family after the death of Henrietta affected his educational attainment. You could consider the partial deafness, untreated until adulthood, that made it hard for Lawrence and his siblings to understand teachers, or the time Lawrence spent out of school, doing field labor. You could point to his environment, a low-income neighborhood in a poor city, where rumors of body snatching and unauthorized medical experimentation on African-Americans engendered suspicion of doctors and scientists. Certainly all of these details contributed to Lawrence’s abashed admission that he did not know what a cell was or how it functioned.

But it is also true that the public school system of the United States, the richest country in the world, still struggles to educate our citizens about science and to make that education relevant and present in their daily lives. How well we understand science affects almost every aspect of our personal and civic lives: our health, our reproductive choices, our understanding of the news, how and whether we vote, and our interaction with the environment. Many of the most important and contentious political issues of our time—climate change, hydraulic fracturing, offshore drilling—are also environmental and require an understanding of basic scientific principles that many of our poorest citizens lack. These same citizens will suffer from their lack of understanding: from water quality damaged by fracking, from mountaintop removal, from flooding caused by rising water levels. Poor people are disproportionately susceptible to poor health and more likely to be exposed to environmental or household pollutants. But for many of our poorest citizens, science education is largely ignored, especially in the foundational elementary and middle school years, as we favor the “basics” of reading and math through a testing and school accountability system that does not prepare our students for the significant social and environmental challenges to come.

* * *

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/sla...l-original.jpg

I was a K–12 educator for 10 years, working in rural and urban public elementary, middle, and high schools in California; New York; Washington, D.C.; and North Carolina. No Child Left Behind, signed into law by George W. Bush in 2002, was my constant professional companion, rating the schools where I taught as adequate or inadequate and allocating resources accordingly. This frequently maligned law identified the subjects I taught—English, reading, and writing—as among the most crucial (along with math), and I received additional support so that my students could be successful on the standardized tests that determined my schools’ yearly progress. My students received additional tutoring, materials, and time in class, and I was given pedagogical training and assistance from my principals with managing tough classes. Meanwhile, I observed science teachers and classrooms, particularly at the elementary and middle schools, receiving fewer materials and resources, and even less institutional support.

At the elementary school in Brooklyn where I taught first grade, science was a “special,” along with dance, art, and physical education. That meant that students were delivered by their homeroom teachers to the science teacher between one and three times a week for less than an hour each time. I remember that the science teacher, a patient but weary man from Jamaica, had little in the room to engage my 6-year-olds beyond laminated charts and posters on the wall: no microscopes, no plants, no homemade solar system models or fungus-crowded petri dishes. No fish tanks or worm bins or leaf specimens. Our principal liked a tidy classroom, and the science teacher’s was spotless. She also liked a quiet classroom, and although the kids never seemed especially rowdy to me, he bemoaned their fidgety lack of discipline: In Jamaica, he once told me, it was common for one teacher to control a class of 40 or 45 students.

What did they do in there? Worksheets, mostly, filled with labeled drawings, diagrams, and charts they could not read. Sometimes he performed an experiment, and they watched. Perhaps the best behaved were invited up to help him; most of them never left their seats.

At the time, it did not occur to me to be outraged, or to feel responsible for making up for their lost opportunities. My school was a Title I school; so many of my students qualified for free breakfast and lunch that everyone ate free, and the school day was long and often difficult. I was new to the classroom, my teaching philosophy strongly influenced by Earl Shorris’ Clemente Course in the Humanities, a program developed in the 1990s to provide university-level instruction in philosophy, art, logic, and poetry to poor adults in American cities. My students, poor children from Bedford-Stuyvesant, would achieve agency and power in their own, first-grade way: we’d read poetry, study Pablo Picasso and Jacob Lawrence, listen to jazz, write folk tales about our neighborhood.

Sometimes we planted seeds and bulbs in paper cups and left them to sprout on the windowsill, but mostly I didn’t worry about science. I was teaching them to read; I was working on their cultural literacy.

But science is cultural literacy, a fact that became apparent when a friend teaching in the same school told me about getting her fifth-graders ready for their statewide science test. Preparation was hurried, last-minute, cursory: Their scores would not be held against our Adequate Yearly Progress, after all. My friend, however, did not want her students to feel blindsided by the test, so she had photocopied some handouts and sample questions. “I was trying to explain photosynthesis,” she said, “and one of my kids asked me, ‘How does a plant make their food? Do they use a microwave?’ What do you say to that?”

The uncertain student had spent little of his elementary school time outside, had not taken field trips to any science museums. He had not gardened or designed experiments about sunlight and plant growth or even diagrammed a leaf. He had never looked at a plant cell under a microscope. His frame of reference for the world, and his relationship to it, was severely limited, but teachers and school administrators had worried instead about how well he could read and multiply.

I was reminded of something another friend, teaching first grade nearby, said she told one of her former students, a girl who’d ended the year woefully unprepared for the next year: “Tell your second-grade teacher I’m sorry.”

We have a lot to be sorry for—and a lot to worry about. Start with climate change, for a particularly fearsome example. Most climate scientists agree that, unless global carbon emissions are curtailed, we are headed for irreversible climate change: an increase of 2 degrees Celsius by 2040 and 4 degrees by 2070. A rise of 2 degrees would likely mean natural, economic, and social disaster—droughts, famines, floods, storms. A rise of 4 degrees would be catastrophic for human life across the globe.

However, the average American is more skeptical of the seriousness of global warming than he was in 1997.

Forty percent of Americans believe that global warming is not caused by human activity.

Sixteen percent believe global warming is “not that much of a threat” or “not a threat at all.”

Certainly the above examples of scientific illiteracy have much to do with our political climate, in which a belief in science is often pitted against a belief in God or the free market. But it is also true that without a proper foundation in science, which ideally begins before kindergarten, individuals are vulnerable to misunderstanding, the same kind that kept Day and Sonny Lacks from seeking treatment for life-threatening medical conditions. They are also easy targets for misinformation and manipulation, the forces behind our country’s increasing climate change skepticism.

Recently, the science classroom has re-emerged as a stage for political drama. In his campaign for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, Texas Gov. Rick Perry claimed that his state taught creationism and evolution side by side, because children were “smart enough to figure out which one is right.” (Aware that requiring the teaching of creationism was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, education officials in Texas scrambled to distance themselves from Perry’s claim.) In spring 2012, the Tennessee state legislature passed a bill designed to protect teachers who allow their students to question and criticize “controversial” topics like evolution and climate change.

If American citizens are to have any chance of speaking truth to power, they will need to have a better handle on the truth part. They will need to be better educated, and the science classroom will have to be political—not in the partisan sense, but in the sense of the Greek word politikos: of, for, or relating to citizens. The science classroom will need to prepare them for engagement in our democratic society, to make choices that affect their lives and their communities.

So what does an ideal science classroom look like? You might ask Sandra Laursen, co-director of ethnography and evaluation at the University of Colorado–Boulder, a research unit devoted to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Laursen, a chemist by training, has spent years working as an outreach scientist, providing teacher-training workshops and developing materials with and for K–12 educators. “At all ages, the curriculum is built on well-scaffolded, in-depth, age-appropriate investigations, some of which take place outside,” Laursen says. “There is opportunity, increasing with age, for students to branch off to pursue their own interests, but the curriculum and the teacher continually return the intellectual discussion to a few central scientific concepts and the intellectual and social processes of science.” Laursen’s ideal classroom is equipped with supplies and materials that are maintained and replenished by the school: durable equipment like microscopes and lab glass, but also inexpensive consumables like pH strips, vinegar, toothpicks, and cotton balls. The teacher in Laursen’s ideal classroom participates frequently in collaborative, in-depth professional development that is specific to her science curriculum but also places it in the context of science education that takes place in earlier and later grades. (And she is paid for her time.)

This happens commonly at good private schools, which provide their students with highly qualified (though not necessarily certified) teachers; hands-on, inquiry-based learning; and opportunities for educational travel to places like the Galápagos Islands, where they can volunteer to help eradicate invasive plant species, monitor juvenile Galápagos tortoises, and watch the sunset from the pristine beaches of Tortuga Bay. Children from wealthy families are advantaged as science learners almost from birth: They have better nutrition, better health care, parents who take them to parks and museums and who are able to lead them through questions about their environment. They are more comfortable investigating this world, less hesitant about their place within it.

There are public schools, too, that demonstrate quality science learning, though the pressure to perform on state tests often edges out what we know to be the best practices. Perhaps an even greater challenge for many public schools, especially in our poorest communities, is overcoming the deficits of students who don’t get a firm grounding in science at home. The Environmental Charter Middle School (ECMS) in Inglewood, Calif., in its second year when I visited, provides rigorous, environmentally themed college-preparatory instruction to its students, a majority of whom are from minority, low-income families. In ECMS’s central courtyard, I heard the constant hum of traffic from the 405 freeway and the low, intermittent roar of planes landing at Los Angeles International Airport. But I also saw abundant evidence of student work and thinking that is tied to experiential science learning: terra-cotta container gardens planted with radishes, tomatoes, and peppers; vermicompost bins made from plastic storage containers; rain barrels catching and filtering runoff from the roof. In the seventh-grade courtyard, students were constructing an aquaponic greenhouse, measuring and cutting the wood framing with the assistance of their teachers.

Getting the students to this level has been hard work. According to Kami Cotler, principal of ECMS, many of her students arrive with what she calls “bathtub deficits. They haven’t spent enough time interacting with the physics of their environment.” Cotler and her teachers despaired after the school’s first big project—building paleolithic shelters after a unit on ancient civilizations—revealed that the students had little understanding of scale or measurement. But after almost two years of hands-on, experiential education, they are starting to improve. “When [the students] were reviewing the aquaponic greenhouse plans, they realized that there was a problem of scale, and they worked to fix it,” said Cotler. “That was major.”

ECMS has modeled many of its environmental practices after those of its sister school, Environmental Charter High School, which was founded in 2000. In both schools, the students are engaged by the process of learning about science in an environmental context, and they understand how each modification to their campus fits together. The plants are watered with rain collected in barrels and fertilized with worm casings. At the middle school, they eat the peppers and radishes in their salads at lunch; at the high school, they sell plant seedlings at the weekend farmers market. High school art students paint murals of vulnerable ocean creatures around storm drains, a reminder that even city streets are part of a watershed. Students report becoming environmental advocates at home, encouraging their families to compost or use canvas grocery bags; they understand that there is a direct connection between the things they learn in their biology or chemistry class and the quality of life in their community.

All children deserve an education that allows them to make these kinds of connections, and every community deserves to have its citizens engaged in this way. But too often, when we think about the educational challenges facing poor children and the best way to address them, we focus on the things that are easiest to measure: how well a child reads by third grade, how accurately she solves math problems. In schools with the most at-risk students (and the highest level of testing pressure), science class becomes another opportunity to teach reading fluency or to practice computation. It is cut off from its vital content—why are we studying this?—and loses its opportunity to capture students’ attention, the way Lawrence Lacks’ attention was captured by understanding the impact of his mother’s cells.

“Whenever the nation becomes interested, for whatever reason, in alleviating the suffering of the poor, the method is always the same: training,” wrote Earl Shorris in 1997. Training, as he pointed out, focuses on the simplest, least cognitively demanding tasks, and prepares the trained for lives and careers that are less remunerative, less satisfying, and less politically influential than the lives and careers of the truly educated. Shorris, who died in 2012, wanted to see the minds of the poor challenged and enriched by the humanities, and he created a rigorous curriculum that exposed poor and uneducated adults to Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Tolstoy. His primary goal? That students live a reflective, considered life—a life of agency.

Science—the way a cell functions, the vastness of the universe, the effect of development on water quality—can and should have the same impact. But when we replace real, connected science learning with worksheets and test booklets, we are robbing students of the chance to understand what is truly at stake in their lives.

Most recently, I worked at the Hawbridge School, an environmentally focused charter middle and high school in a rural, economically disadvantaged county in North Carolina. Hawbridge’s students, who are selected by lottery, come from five different counties to the school, which is housed in a converted textile mill on the banks of the Haw River. Some come for the small class size and individualized attention, others for the program of interdisciplinary study, still others for the promise of canoeing instruction (part of the physical education program) or the chance to grow their own food in school gardens. But not all of Hawbridge’s students arrive eager for an ecological or even science-rich education; they come because, like students in charter schools everywhere, they had bad experiences in their assigned public schools: Their needs were ignored, they were bullied, or they fell in with the wrong crowd. It is our responsibility, as teachers, to turn them on to the opportunities the school offers—camping, rock climbing, gardening, monitoring water quality in the Haw River, or listening to presentations by university professors.

Sometimes, like teachers everywhere, we let them down.

[Aksannyi]

Science isn't considered a "core" subject.

You are right, and I shouldn't have referred to it that way - however, it is generally placed at a higher importance level than the arts, because it's a more scholastic subject in most people's minds.

We are most certainly doing a disservice to our kids by pushing sciences aside. Personally, I don't really enjoy science in the way that it is taught even at university level, because it is still little more than facts and not a lot of thinking. I actually just got done taking an 8 chapter Biology test that involved more memorization than actual knowledge, and I am sure I did poorly because I know the concepts and understand how they work but can't memorize scientific terminology that well. But I digress, science is indeed very important for kids to learn. It's just another reason why the common core is doomed to fail before it's even implemented.

[Kohan]

I actually just got done taking an 8 chapter Biology test that involved more memorization than actual knowledge, and I am sure I did poorly because I know the concepts and understand how they work but can't memorize scientific terminology that well.

This would surely be my failing, too, as I grasp concepts firmly, but often forget terminology. My mind prioritizes full understanding, rather than labeling, and this created plenty of problems for me throughout my scholastic past.

[Kryssan]

Eh, I wouldn't really agree with this at all. The most important part of math is learning how it relates to the world. Setting up a calculus problem in the correct way is far more important than memorizing the sequence of instructions required to find the solution. I feel like if you asked a random group of people what the difference is between x = y and x == y, most wouldn't be able to tell you, but most would probably be able to solve x = y^3 - 1 when y = 3, which is sad to me because they've missed out on an extremelly essential and simple concept. People do this thing where they memorize how to perform math instead of understand the very basics, which is part of the problem.

I'd agree knowing how to do the math is more important than knowing the rules to solve a particular problem. Especially when you get into complex / higher maths, it is very easy to confuse / misuse rules and fuck up an entire proof if you're relying on human memory alone. IE:

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd081310s.gif

I do find myself wondering about the double equals symbol meaning. I'm not familiar with it as a specific math term, but as a specific programming term. It has been a decade since my last calculus, but I don't ever remember that coming up in use and a flip through / skim of my old text books wasn't enlightening. My knowledge of single / double / triple equals usage ( =,==,=== ) is only for programming; I can't recall ever writing something out on paper that way. What would you say it means mathematically, or is it the same meaning to you as with programming ( though it can mean different things depending on the language so still confusing )? Or did you mean one of these, ≜, ≡, := and get borked by forum formatting?

[Mojo]

Was supposed to be a triple bar. D'oh. Programming etc.

[Jaybar]

Was supposed to be a triple bar. D'oh. Programming etc.

Well what the fuck does it mean? I want to be educated in this thread dammit!

[Mojo]

x = y is an equality, x ≡ y is an identity. x = y is like a scale where there are two things on both sides and their weights need to be equal in order to find a solution. x ≡ y is like saying x is y (or x will always appear to be like y.)

brown dog ≡ dog + brown fur
red dog ≡ dog + red fur
brown dog = red dog - x * red fur + y * brown fur [True when x = 1, y = 1]

That's probably not a very good explanation. It may seem trivial but it's not. I feel like most people look at x = y (or 2x^2 - 1 = 3y, or ln(x) = y, etc.), they either see x ≡ y or 'an equation' and try to remember the steps to solve it. There is often little to no connection to the fundamental concept of what they're actually doing and how to connect things in the world to those terms. Standardized testing makes this problem so much worse. More time is on spent memorizing things like applying the quadratic equation or completing the square to some random algebra problem then actually understanding simple algebra and how it can be related to the world. I'm all about using calculators and computers for solving math problem as long people understand the fundamental concept of what they're doing. They are tools that we have and people should know how to use them. We might as well go back to using the abaqus or finger counting if we have fear of these things.

[Jaybar]

So with an identity, there is no moving variables to find alternatives? Like if x - 1 ≡ y then you can't say y + 1 ≡ x It is just stating that whenever you see x - 1 it is the same as seeing y?

(x - 1)^2 is the same as y^2 {where x - 1 ≡ y}

The explanation is sorta helpful (I mean I get the final solution) but it's not clicking yet.