hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) (04/27/91)
In article <1991Apr24.142835.26475@mccc.edu>, pjh@mccc.edu (Pete Holsberg) writes: > In article <2731@ttardis.UUCP> mjo@ttardis.UUCP (Mike O'Connor) writes: > =In article <1991Apr23.014114.3603@ms.uky.edu>, ghot@ms.uky.edu (Allan Adler) writes: > =Why do I get this picture in my head of a college math department swarming > =on a local high school, ousting the current regime of high school math > =teachers, and replacing with a brand-new, more highly educated regime > =What I'd really like to see is for "you" to teach these budding HS > =math teachers better, so "we" don't have to suffer through their > =miseducation! > I think you'll find that the majority of primary and secondary school > math teachers do not get their math education from a college's math > department in "regular" math courses but either from a regular college's > math department's special math courses for wannabes, OR from the math > departments of teachers colleges!! :-( In either case, the students > are not expected to learn much math at all. (My ex-wife is now a HS > math teacher and her education matches the "ed major" model implied above.) The situation is even far worse than this. The "regular" math courses have also declined; even in a good school, the mathematics (or physics, or chemistry, or whatever) department cannot really maintain standards. I believe it can be done, but only by refusing to recognize credits. There are remedial courses, but they are taught on the assumption that the student was unable to learn the subject when taught in high school, rather than the more appropriate assumption that the subject was so badly taught that the situation may even be worse than it it had not been. At Purdue, the mathematics department can legally maintain standards for prospective teachers, but what would happen if it did? Purdue would turn out very few HS teachers, and they would have very little, if any, advantage over those turned out by other schools which do not have standards. To the school superintendant, a C in an honest course on the foundations of analysis is bad, while an A in a course with 1% of the content is good. As long as the current grade-credit system is being used as information to others, this state will continue. I have argued for change, not merely in these groups. -- Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399 Phone: (317)494-6054 hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet) {purdue,pur-ee}!l.cc!hrubin(UUCP)