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.
>>>>>
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment