IS THERE A SIMPLE WAY TO TEACH MY 9TH GRADE ALGEBRA I?
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The Downward Spiral of Public Education
Thoughts posted by John T. Lowry to the discussion group PHYSHARE, during
a thread stimulated by the April 20, 1999 tragedy at the
Columbine School in Littleton, Colorado. Posted here with John's
permission.
Public Education. As Charley said, of leaches, in The African Queen: What a
thing! There are two qualifiers to the broad brush indictment below: 1)
There are plenty (well, some) positive pockets of public education; and 2)
No administrative skill, policy, or action can prevent every single sad
incident or individual failure. However...
In flying airplanes there is the well-known SPIN, a downward spiral which,
unless properly checked (throttle closed, full opposite rudder, forward
stick) will end sadly. Technically the "spin" is called "autorotation," a
rotation which keeps itself going. Something like that is going on in far
too many of the nations' school districts.
Taking say a ninth grade mathematics class as the example, What is the
proper job of education? Putting aside the side issues and frills, it is for
a student (who is willing and able to learn the subject) to get together
with a teacher (who understands the subject and knows how to teach it) in
such a way that the student comes out knowing the subject. The student knows
arithmetic and wants to learn algebra. The teacher knows algebra and how to
teach it (the second is easy if the first is there, in this mathematics
case). Voila! The student comes out the far end, in May, knowing quite a bit
about elementary algebra. That's the theory.
How does it typically go wrong? Look back at the previous paragraph. The
student can be unwilling or unable (for any one of several reasons) to
learn. The teacher can be too ignorant of the subject or even, if
knowledgeable, unable or unwilling to teach it. The student fails the
subject or, more likely these days, is processed on, to the next grade or
next course, without understanding the subject. Setting up a further cycle
of failure.
There are other aspects. The willing but perhaps less able student in that
class was unable to attract the slight extra attention she needed and didn't
learn much. Disaffected, off she goes to private school (if parents can
afford it) or she gets stultified and drops out (if parents can't afford
private school). In either case, the average level of willingness-to-learn,
in that school, drops. Autorotation has set in.
And, next go round, there will likely be more discipline problems in the
class, a greater proportion of unwilling students. If the teacher, or the
administration, is too weak to enforce reasonable discipline, disruption
grows into modified chaos, perhaps even bedlam. Now no reasonable teacher
will put up with this for long, so the teacher leaves to become a shoe
salesman, run a Dairy Queen, be a cop. The teachers who are trapped in the
education establishment want out of the classroom, want to become
administrators. Less money for able teachers. Autorotation is
exacerbated.
Even among my generally very knowledgeable and enthusiastic confreres in
PhyShare (the physics teachers mailing list on the Internet), I far too
often detect a willingness to change the educational subject away from basic
considerations. It IS nice to be the students' friend, to have occasional
purely entertaining class sessions, to take up the slack for dysfunctional
families and callous society, to be in loco parentis, to attempt to
socialize the kids, to discuss current events, to ask everyone's opinion of
various matters, to.... But, in my opinion, those laudable activities do
not constitute the basic job for which free universal public education was
established. It was established to take the child who cannot read, cannot do
his mathematics, cannot find Kosovo on the globe, does not know how daylight
savings time or latitude and longitude work, etc., and have him come out the
far end with a set of self-perpertuating intellectual skills.
"Learning never ends," as was said on a commemorative postage stamp of
octagenarian artist Josef Albers. (The framed poster version of that old
15-cent stamp is on my office wall.) Well, that's the way it is for some,
the way it should be for many. But the current truth in too many classes
nowadays is closer to "Learning never starts." Too often, what starts
instead is "autorotation" down to the sad end. Courage and conviction are
needed to end the downward spiral. Those, it seems to me, are in very short
supply in the public education establishment.
John T. Lowry, PhD
Flight Physics
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