Feb 8, 2018

Mathematics Education Professors are a Collective Bane on K-12 Education

Note to My Readers:

 

This is another interposed article, placed between articles ten and eleven in the ongoing series focused on programs of the Minneapolis Public Schools that purportedly have prospects for raising student achievement levels.  Article number eleven will be published soon.

 

The following article is written in response to a piece in today’s (Thursday, 8 February) edition of the Star Tribune.

 

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During the first two decades of the 20th century, the normal schools that had been established in the latter part of the previous century metamorphosed into teachers colleges that soon became attached to universities.  Education professors were then faced with the need to justify themselves amidst true academicians whose specialties in psychology, philosophy, and the key subject areas of mathematics, natural science, history, political science, economics, literature, and the fine arts made them better purveyors of knowledge for academic training of teachers.  Thus did education professors become advocates of process over content, pedagogy over subject matter;  more insidiously, they became opponents of the systematic impartation of specified knowledge and skill sets.

 

Although this key anti-knowledge message took different forms as pedagogical fads came and went, the essential core of the message never changed.  That message is entirely consistent with the contemporary education professor’s insistence on the ability to think critically and to become an enthusiast of lifelong learning as the key components for students in K-12 schools.  The education professor maintains that the acquisition of specific knowledge and skill sets is not important, for those can always be looked up or learned as necessary.

 

So never think that such pap is new or “progressive,” although education professors appropriate the latter appellation.  Such harmful jargon has been the consistent usage of education professors for a century.

 

Professors of cognitive psychology demonstrate through research published in professionally refereed journals that knowledge builds on knowledge, freeing up limited short-term memory for quick retrieval in the pursuit of knowledge sought in the moment.  Adept and informed critical thinking depends on knowledge.  Love of learning most often happens when students pursue knowledge systematically as a matter of acquired habit, a labor of love.  Critical thinking and lifelong learning are functions of knowledge purposely pursued;  they are not efficiently or effectively demonstrated in the absence of systematically acquired knowledge.

 

Education professors have done much harm in seeking to make a place for themselves at colleges and universities, where they occupy the lowest rung with regard to professorial status.  They send forth ill-trained teachers, particularly at the K-5 level, who know very little about mathematics, natural science, history, economics, psychology, literature, English usage, or the fine arts.  Middle school teachers are little better, and most high school teachers are not capable of serving as instructors in advanced courses such as those for Advanced Placement.

 

Thus do we get abominable performance by students in the United States on the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment);  and by students in Minnesota on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments.

 

Education professors are objectionable generally.  Mathematics education professors are objectionable particularly.  A mathematics education professor is someone without the intellectual mettle to pursue a degree in mathematics, thus retreating to a similar-sounding credential.  Many mathematics education professors lack the intellectual discipline to master the intricacies even of algebra and geometry, much less calculus, differential equations, linear and advanced algebra, topography, and the ever-ascending challenges in a legitimate mathematics masters or doctoral program.  

 

So mathematics education professors conger up various iterations of the purportedly deep-think, multiple answer, learn via manipulative approach as reported by Faiza Muhammad in “Several Districts Are in the Midst of Overhauling Their Curriculum” (Star Tribune, Section B, Page 1, February 8, 2018).  This approach is akin to the “New Math” that produced such deleterious results in the 1960s and early 1970s and has made unfortunate comebacks at various intervals ever since.  As with previous students upon whom such an approach was inflicted, the students of the Brooklyn Park, Anoka-Hennepin, Osseo, and Columbia Heights school districts will be academically poorer for the infliction.

 

Because mathematics professors are themselves mathematically challenged, they are forever contriving ways to make what is simple seem difficult, so as to avoid what is truly difficult.  Notice that their gimmicks are never applied to mathematics at the higher levels;  their ruses would never be applicable to Advanced Placement courses at the high school level.  The schemes of mathematics professors always come with a pretension of philosophical depth, always focused on relatively simple mathematics at the K-5 level.

 

But simple does not mean trivial.  The operations and concepts pertinent to addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, percentages, fundamental probability, ratios, proportions, graphs and tables are vitally important.  But student inevitably come to me for academic assistance because they have not been taught these skills in their classroom.  This is especially true for K-5 students, but the point is that until I teach them these skills, most high school students have never acquired the requisite ability in the fundamental operations and basic skills to succeed at higher mathematics.  I teach them skills, then we ascend to college preparatory mathematics.

 

Students of the Minneapolis Public Schools and other school districts perform so wretchedly in mathematics because mathematics education professors have been playing with their lives, in order to survive pseudo-professionally.

 

They must stop.  

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