The NYT on the phenomenon of college bound students changing their majors from STEM to “other” after the first year’s report card comes in:
Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors…
“We’re losing an alarming proportion of our nation’s science talent once the students get to college,” says Mitchell J. Chang, an education professor at U.C.L.A. who has studied the matter. “It’s not just a K-12 preparation issue.”
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The latest research also suggests that there could be more subtle problems at work, like the proliferation of grade inflation in the humanities and social sciences, which provides another incentive for students to leave STEM majors. It is no surprise that grades are lower in math and science, where the answers are clear-cut and there are no bonus points for flair. Professors also say they are strict because science and engineering courses build on one another, and a student who fails to absorb the key lessons in one class will flounder in the next.
Perhaps predictably, the educational emphasis is turning towards more collaborative first and second year science and engineering projects, in lieu of attending the harder core courses which prepare them to actually graduate, innovate and compete. Unsurprisingly, no one is recommending making English majors study higher level mathematics, physics or chemistry, courses that might better prepare them for careers other than in the food service industry, while leveling the academic playing field.
I have an alternative suggestion: According to one study, “foreign-born students received 42 percent of U.S. engineering master’s and 53 percent of U.S. engineering Ph.D.s nationwide in the 2009-2010 academic year.” These students are typically far better prepared – and potentially at least, far more motivated – than their US-born counterparts. Which would be bad enough, except that our country’s immigration laws, which effectively turn a blind eye to dishwashers, auto mechanics and farm workers slipping across the border, actively prevent nearly all foreign STEM from staying on in this country, and helping us maintain our competitive advantage in the global marketplace. The political need to do “comprehensive” immigration reform, which is unlikely to ever get off the ground in this political environment, prevents Washington from doing the smart thing, such as extending long term work visas to those fine minds whom our own finest have filled with useful knowledge.
So not only do we give away the crown jewels of our educational system to those who come here from other shores, we actively deny them the opportunity to reinvest that intellectual capital here. Not for the first time, I wonder who will be standing at the podia at MIT, Stanford and UCLA twenty years hence.
+1 on all three counts.
Engineering is a brutally hard field. My freshman year engineering class at Virginia Tech (in 1980) had 4,000 freshmen. Five years later, we graduated 1,400 engineers. A lot of these kids waltzed through high school, and had a marginal preparation because all the Government school class resources go to the average or sub-average student. What happens to gifted kids is wholesale abuse. Toss in the students who forget they are there to study math, science, and engineering instead of beer and party, and you have a recipe for heavy losses.
That being said, it would do students in the humanities a world of good to be required to study hard science and higher math courses. To make well-rounded individuals of them.
And it might be smart to start letting the top minds from around the world come here…to stay. Think of it as strategic brain drain. Even if it deprives the Left of their supply of cheap domestic help.
MikeM/
Couldn’t agree more. Although a Poli-Sci major and carrying reduced hrs every spring for tennis, I still managed to squeeze in Calc, Physics and 2 semesters of geology +LAB. I even managed to sweet-talk my way into a course in endocrinology in summer school although I didn’t have the pre-requisites only because my 2 frat. brother pre-med roommates were taking the course. I managed a “C+” w.o. even cracking a book (or barely
) other than attending class. (It was one of only 2 “Cs” on my entire transcript) I was pretty proud of that “C” all things considered (muy malo low, fast-moving Whiskey Fronts and mucho pool-time with the senoritas etc.) and found the subj matter immensely interesting..
MikeM,
“it would do students in the humanities a world of good to be required to study hard science and higher math courses. To make well-rounded individuals of them.”
The humor magazine in my alma mater had a satirical article to the effect that, since the school of science had long offered fluffy courses geared toward humanities majors, the humanities would thenceforth offer English courses on things like comic books to allow aspiring scientists to satisfy their humanities requirements without breaking a sweat.
An outraged English major commented, “I have no use for such abstract concepts as heat, light and gravity. However, everyone benefits from reading Chaucer.”
Oh, yeah. I skated through school (skipped a grade, Nat’l Merit Finalist, etc.) and when I got to college with a physics major I regretted right soon that nobody had ever taught me how to effectively study that stuff.
At the beginning of my freshman class, numbering 900, we were told during a welcoming address in Kresge Auditorium to look to our left and to our right — one of the three of us sitting beside each other would not carry through to finish out the senior year.
And there used to be the term, “brain drain”, that applied to the fact that so many bright young men and women would come to the US for education and then stay because there were no opportunities for them in their home country. This problem was so great that we enacted laws that required those who had scholarship funding by the US would be required to return to their home countries.
Now the opportunities are there in their home countries, and they do not have to be forced to return.
This way is not the way we retain our technological leadership. I do see the torch being passed.
When I sat in Kresge we were not told that, but we were told of years past when it had been. The graduation rate is higher than that these days. But, then, they get to be rather selective. The admit rate for MIT last year was 9% of the applicants. Edward, are you an EC? You get to meet some great kids!
Hi RonF,
I don’t recall the selection fraction at the ‘Stute in 1960, but it was pretty fierce competition then as well. I was fortunate in that my public high school offered 3 semesters of algebra, solid and trig, two semesters of chemistry and also physics. We had a wonderful math teacher who got us into calculus. I had stiff competition with my fellow classmates and so I had to study hard in HS. That served me well at MIT — we had exams every Friday in Walker Memorial, alternating among chemistry, physics and calculus. Armament was your choice of Post Versalog or K&E. We were not allowed to have the CRC handbook until second semester of sophomore year.
Since physics required more and more calculus, each summer was spent studying to advance place a semester of that discipline.
Summer before senior year I got really ambitious and worked to advance place thermo. Just made it and still have sorrowful memories of enthalpy and entropy.
I see many great kids at my workplace of the last 37 years, where we have explored all the planets of the solar system (now that Pluto is no longer a planet), and try to let them know how wonderful and rewarding a technical career is.
My HS (South Chicago suburbs, class of ’70) did not have a calculus class, so I had some running to do when I matriculated to the Institute. Slow start, fast finish, crossed the line at the end with everyone else. I did have algebra I and II, solid and trig, and 4 semesters of chemistry as well as two of physics. I got pretty familiar with a slipstick (K&E) and had a circular one after a while. My senior year my wife (yep, got married between my junior and senior year) surprised me with an actual calculator, which was a new thing that year. It was a Rockwell, it had exponential and log/ln functions and trig and one memory – for the princely sum of $100 in 1974 dollars. I used it, God knows, and was glad to have it.
EC’s interview HS seniors looking to get into MIT. You interview the kid for 45 minutes to an hour and then file a report with the ‘Tute on how good a fit you think he or she will be. You’re given guidelines of what questions to ask and what they’re looking for. You get graded, 1 to 5. The kids who get an interview are about 4 times more likely to get admitted as those who don’t.
Penn State 1979, my EE Engineering Adviser in the College of Engineering was a first generation Chinese American. All of his TAs were from that area and era. They were darned hard to understand. I’m afraid discussions with the lot would end in extreme frustration since they neither understood spoken English or spoke it. English as a second language was mandatory in the UC system but nobody ever thought to apply it to the professors and teaching staff at Penn State. Can’t complain. After 2 years of fun with the air force and Chinese, I went Navy ROTC and went History and Political Science. Oddly enough they all treated Chinese as a second language and were quite comprehensible in their native language here.
Remember when high schools required passing a year or two of Latin to graduate? And at least Algebra II and Trig for math? Classes were all taught in English. There were no “diversity education” classes.
And if you failed a required class for a grade level, well, you retook that year?
Joe/
You might appreciate this story. The wife of a good friend in Louisville taught HS English & Hist for 30 yrs–from Central HS (the trad “black” school) just after integration, to “traditional” curric MALE HS, to socially tony Atherton to a special school for pregnant girls–the gamut from A-Z . At a school Board meeting during a break she was discussing the Hist curric with the System “History Coordinator”–”Mr. History” about the fact that it was then almost 45 yrs since the end of WWII and that as the required 2 semesters of Amer Hist courses stopped at the end of WWII, she argued a 3rd semester of required Hist should be added to bring kids who weren’t even born at the time of the Vietnam War up to speed. Finally, after he allowed that perhaps she had a point they began to discuss where they might shoe-horn it into the existing class schedules; finally settling on the Spring semester of their senior year as the only possibility. “But then,” he mused aloud, “they’d have to pass it, wouldn’t they?” LOL! Implying as it were by such a thought that the parental pressures to pass their little darlings in the spring after many had already been accepted provisionally to college would be unbearable. What a sad, sad, commentary on our educational system!
I had two years of Latin. I fondly remember my second-year Latin teacher, Mrs. Reynolds. She once told me that she believed me to be the laziest White boy in Dade County.
Mine taught me the rhyme:
Latin is a dead language, dead as it can be
First it killed the Romans, and now its killing me
Yeah, a dead language that lives on in so many others. A solid grounding in Latin helps one attain a certain elegance in writing in English.
Absolutely correct, Joe. It has help me throughout my life.
Of course, a little German helps as well, since much of our spoken language shares influence from both Latin and German.
Change of subject. From “Savo, the Incredible Naval Debacle”:
Aug 7, 1942, off Savo island, ship gets message relayed from coast watcher re aircraft sighting. Bosun pipes to crew,
“The ship will be attacked at noon by twenty-four torpedo bombers. All hands will pipe to dinner at 11:00 o’clock.”
Later, our guys got all of the torpedo bombers.
Later still, their guys got mpst of our cruisers. Have y’all looked at the photos Bob Ballard (of whom I do not approve) has posted, of the ships at the bottom of Ironbottom Sound?
There is some discussion, still ongoing, about the possibility that the USS Bagley put a torp into her and disabled her steering. Here is some chatter from survivors: http://ahoy.tk-jk.net/Letters/RonSmithAKASmoudgesurvivo.html
There is a guy who was a midshipman aboard Canberra that night who thinks Bagley fired the fatal torpedo at her.
There is also the famous missing page from Bagley’s deck log from that night. I have read that there were rumors, that Bagley’s executive officer had to stick his 1911 up behind her captain’s ear to remind him to remember his duty.
C S Lewis, in his novel That Hideous Strength, described his protagonist (a sociologist) as follows:
“It must be remembered that in Mark’s mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging. His education had been neither scientific nor classical – merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge.”
Much of our present-day education system seems designed to produce Men of Straw, in exactly this sense.
I was very much impressed, David, that Lewis also likened the English school system to a field of wheat, and all of the students who were “tall ears” would get chopped off by the schoolmasters who weren’t into seeing the gifted excel, circa the 1930s.
On a related note, have any of you seen Arnold Kling’s article, “What if Middle-Class Jobs Disappear?”
He envisions a worsening of the divide between the motivated/gifted becoming an affluent elite and the unmotivated/ungifted becoming a bottom level personal service class, while machines and software replace the middle-class production and clerical functions of society.
I do worry about many of my college’s humanities students not showing enough brilliance and creativity to escape the latter fate. Not good for future society if we head that direction.
Bill K/
The economist Vassily Leontiff called the middle class/middle managers/achievers the new draft horses who are destined to be replaced by machines/robots in the same way the farm plow horses were replaced by the tractor. Quoting Leontiff from memory: “And it did no good, if horses could talk, for them to plead that they would work twice as long for half the oats; the farmers were going to replace them anyway.”
Virgil,
There is a series of articles in Slate (sometimes interesting stuff is published in that rag):
Will Robots Steal Your Job?
http://www.slate.com/id/2304445/
and getting a bit personal…
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/robot_invasion/2011/09/robot_invasion_can_computers_replace_scientists_.html
VX – I fear you are correct. Nevertheless the sentimental part of me liked what my father did.
Despite have several tractors, he kept a team of working draft horses. Although we had modern implements, he maintained tack and several horse-drawn implements too. And we used them a little, just for their sake and tradition… even though they still ate a lot of hay. Good memories.
BillK…I did see the Kling piece, and while it was interesting I thought it suggested more of a discontinuity than is actually the case. See my comment here.
When I was chaplain at Norfolk Naval Shipyard, the city of Portsmouth (VA) dropped a requirement for HS graduation of a year of Algebra. A member of the school board was an exec at the yard and I asked him why. He said it was because too many were failing. I told him that at my HS, class of 1964, a year of Algebra was not a requirement to graduate. It was a requirement to get out of 9th grade and EVERYBODY passed. The reason? We were expected to.
I tutor Algebra II, Geometry and Pre-Calc at night to high school students and freshmen in college. I am absolutely appalled by the math curriculum in our public and some private schools. Real example: I am tutoring a brilliant kid who is dual enrolling at the JC while in her senior year of HS. Two weeks ago she swore she was going to fail and her Mom asked if I’d help since this kid has always studied and applied herself and is a straight A student. I found she was studying Matrices. I said to her, “Remember back to your Algebra II class when you learned matrices…” and she stopped me and said, “Oh, we didn’t have to learn them. She taught us how to plug the rows into our calculator so it would calculate what we needed…” There was no explanation of linear equations, how matrices are another way of solving, nothing, nada, zippo. Meanwhile, my 2nd son is in Honors Alg II in the local Catholic HS and is studying matrices. I came home, grabbed his Alg II book, my eldest boys’ Pre Calc book (HS junior) and my 2nd son’s notes… and HIS NOTES from Alg II from his teacher, were flippin’ fantastic and he said to me, “Why would I learn matrices in a calculator when it’s so easy to do by hand? I don’t want to spend the time to learn how to program my calculator when I could be studying…”
Meanwhile, my 3rd son struggles in math (he’s got some learning issues) and he’s in the ‘regular 7th grade math’ class. Although he’s doing pretty well with my spending hours with him, I’ve told my husband, there is no way on the track they have him that he’ll be in College Algebra in college. Every single kid who takes the average math will be in remedial math in college. Those kids, even if they develop the aptitude, have a HUGE hole to dig themselves out of to start taking higher math. They average math has been so dumbed down, I don’t think those kids stand a chance of going STEM.
I could go on for pages. I rant constantly at home at what I see.
Oh, we didn’t have to learn them. She taught us how to plug the rows into our calculator so it would calculate what we needed…”
That is part of the problem. By allowing calculators and computers, the basics and process aren’t learned. Going through a process lets you see and understand relationships and how things work together. Happens with math, with engineering, with electrical systems, with damned near anything. Once the process is learned, and the basics are second nature, then shortcuts like sliderules and calculators can be introduced.
I started Engineering School with a Nestler Slide Rule I bought in Naples Italy for the immense sum of $10. I can tell you from 1st hand experience, a Slide Rule is not a short cut. Engineering Education went down hill with the loss of the Slide Rule because of what it required of the student. Engineering Grads, by comparison, are almost innumerate today.
Personally, I hate the TI super calculators. I have an nSpire, but keep the 84 keyboard on it and still hardly ever use it. I’m probably going to take it down to Salvation Army in the near future and just get a TI-84 and be done with it. My HP-35 is what I use everyday.
I do need to write some programs for the 84 for field use as the 35 is not as easy to program.
I despise the schools requiring graphing calculators. They need to plot by hand and quit introducing a crutch early on.
Slide rules are short cuts in that they are usually faster and easier then paper and pencil methods.
One of the best lessons I ever had about calculators was a question on a test that I knew I had right but the prof marked wrong. I went to discuss it and find out why it was marked as wrong. “How many decimals from (whatever reading)?” Um…two. “And how many from this other?” Ah…two.
“And how accurate is the (?) machine?” Oh, about two places. “And you ran it out to 7. Don’t pretend to be more accurate than your instruments.”
Before the Slip Stick comes out, you have to have the solution set up. If you know what you are doing, and slip stick tends to force you to head in that direction, you will already have a good idea as to the magnitude of the solution and the only thing you are going after is the final numbers. A calculator like a TI 30Xa is really just a substitute for a slide rule, but the temptation is to short cut the solution for just the final numbers.
Yes, if you compare it to putting pencil to paper for the final number, then it is a short cut, but it is no short cut to a solution which you will already have when you get the slip stick out.
We aren’t just looking for the final number. We want the whys and wherefores laid out on paper before we do the computations, and computations (multiplication, division, exponentials) is all the slip stick is good for.
We aren’t just looking for the final number. We want the whys and wherefores laid out on paper before we do the computations, and computations (multiplication, division, exponentials) is all the slip stick is good for.
Bingo! That is exactly what I meant when I posted somewhere here that the process gets lost with all the shortcuts and computers.
Yup. You’ve GOT to learn to do it manually.
My Algebra II teacher in high school would not let us even get out a slide rule, let alone a calculator (which didn’t yet exist) on a quiz or exam. She insisted that we use our heads, which presumably had what we had been taught in them, and maybe the provided log tables.
And I remember having to use the tables of logs in that class as well.
Which reminds me: Whatever happened to the Smart Wimminz, who are Good at Math? I had a bunch of them for schoolteachers years ago, but don’t see many around now. Are they all now home-schooling housewives, or what?
P.s. About a month ago, I went to the local Books-a-Million, just trying to inquire if they had a book of trig and log tables in the shop. Yikes! I had to explain what I meant in words of one syllable.
OK, let’s ask if they can order one for me, I thought. Nope. Nothin came up on their ‘puter.
Apparently, such tables are no longer in print anywhere.
What are we going to do if the electricity all goes off?
P.s. My Housemate works at Goodwill Industries, and tells me that they routinely toss all textbooks which they get immediately into the dumpster.
I said, “What about Math books? They are never out of date!” Those too, he said.
Math is hard, y’know, so it should go in the dumpster.
P.s. He was able to snag what seems to be a good calculus book for me when it seemed nobody was looking.
I still have my Post Versalog, so I can survive the Apocalypse since it requires only a slight dusting with talc to keep the cursor rocketing along that bamboo slipstick. I still have my CRC (chemical rubber company, the little red book for science students) tables as well.
As for the Smart Wimminz who are Good at Math — I am afraid that they suffered the fate of the textbooks. Same for the Smart Boyz.
We had junior high school (7-9) and then high school (10-12)
Algebra I was a 10th grade subject in my time. Algebra II, solid geometry and chemistry were 11th grade; algebra III, trigonometry, physics and chemistry II (qualitative analysis) were 12th grade.
Edward, what edition is your CRC. Mine is 24th. Got it when I was taking DiffE.
Quartermaster,
It is in my office at work, so cannot look it up now. However, it was brand spanking new in 1960, bought at the COOP (along with the three paperback volumes of Dante’s Divine Comedy for humanities class, and Plato, and Kant, and Voltaire, i.e. all those “dead white European males” that are so passe these days).
Dante Inferno was a great introduction to what we lovingly called “Stratton’s Tool or Die Works”, and IHTFP was so well known that it cannot even be used as a password these days because all the password crackers include it in their dictionaries.
JTG, just ask for CRC Math Tables. That will get you more than you ever bargained for. I’ve bought two editions at used bookstores, and have the 24th edition I bought when I was Volunteer State (we dated each other by the edition number). I bought the 27th and gave it to my son, and also got a 12th edition I keep at the office. The Schaum’s outline series used to have a Math Tables book, but I think anyone would be better off with CRC than anything else.
CRC stands for Chemical Rubber Company, and they publish under that name.
This is not a new problem. It started in the 1960′s. Short sighted government and industrial policies started the process. The current dismal education system is finishing the process. In my case even the Navy participated, understandably I must honestly admit. In the late 1960′s I began my Mechanical Engineering education. The Navy was paying me lavishly at the time with a commission in the regular Navy upon graduation at which time I would owe 5 years of active duty. Even at that time it was known the future for engineers was not certain. You would end up working for a business major or lawyer who had no idea about engineering. You would be the first one laid off when the company needed to reduce cost since engineers were expenses and not viewed as assets to preserve. The gallows humor was you had to quit engineering for management to advance in many companies. The practical example at the time were the aerospace engineers in their 50′s who were suddenly unemployed. These were the men who designed the still fastest jet ever produced, SR-71, and gone to the moon. The Apollo program ended the year I graduated in Mechanical Engineering. Not a happy sign for the future.
The Navy’s small part was refusing to permit me to proceed to medical school after engineering school before active duty. I had taken premed requirements at university during the summers before I started my official college career with the idea of going to medical school after engineering school. I offered even more active duty time on completion of medical school if I could go. If the Navy paid for medical school and training I would have have owed about 15 yrs to the Navy.
The Navy seems to be the most rigid of the services, but I do understand the Navy was planning on an Mechanical Engineer as a line officer. I still don’t feel good about resigning my commission and ending my Naval career as soon as it started. One can’t know if the Navy’s short term decision was the best one for the Navy in the long term.
I went on to medical school. My first position after completing my postgraduate training was at the old Marine Hospital in New Orleans. Thought I owed the Navy to a degree. Probably would have stayed for a while but the hospital closed after 14 months. I had a corpsman instead of a nurse. Believe he was an HM2. Went on to academic medicine and now drawing near to the end of my career as a professor at medical school and laboratory director.
Unfortunately I am seeing the same future for medicine as I witnessed in engineering. Why go through the extremely difficult training, and now also horribly expensive, to become a mere employee as an engineer, and essentially of the government if a physician.
This future has already shifted a great many of the now few indigenous students qualified for STEM paths. They are smart enough to see there is little reward in pursing a very difficult schooling for minimal rewards and respect.
This has already happen in engineering. My friend from seventh grade on, ended up at the law school where I was in medical school. He used to laugh at the amount of studying and work I had. He would spend all but the last two weeks of any semester on the tennis courts out side of my apartment window. Much easier to end up as well paid master of the universe as they view themselves. See all the lawyers in congress and the pitifully few engineers and physicians, even with the recent physician congressmen.
Life is what is is. You do the best you can but I am sometimes sad that I started with the end of the golden period in engineering and am ending with the end of the golden age of medicine.
Yes, but DrG, from one physician to another, can you imagine yourself on your deathbed having gone down your friend’s law school path instead of the path you took, and being as content with the life you lived and the service you provided? I can’t.
I grant you that if you or I started now, becoming a future government minion is a deal-breaker. But surely you don’t begrudge the lives you’ve helped?
Not at all. I am happy with my choices. I went through engineering because I truly enjoy science and math to this day and my father told me to major in Mechanical Engineering as he had. It is about the future that I worry. I must admit I went to medical school because my grandfather told me to go to medical school mostly because his older brother was one of the first radiologist in the city in the early 1900′s. Much like Thomas Becket, early in my career I started to become almost religiously devoted to medicine after not starting with the idea of saving the world.
I sometimes view things as being cloistered in a monastery in the dark ages trying to maintain the knowledge. I teach a highly sought after postgraduate specialty but one in which it is very difficult to entice young physicians into academic medicine. Some of the difficulty is the crushing debt some graduates physicians carry on finishing school. My chairman is over seventy and I am over sixty years. Our greatest long term worry is who will train the future postgraduate physicians in our specialty.
Heh. I mind a urologist who treated me once, whose undergrad degree was in aero engineering.
So, I said to him, with yer knowlege of Reynold’s Number and all, you can advise me just how close to stand to the urinal so that it will all go in non-splashingly, before the flow becomes turbulent?
He just looked at me funny and did not answer.
Must have been a bad day. I’m not a urologist but that strikes me as pretty amusing.
He probably couldn’t remember what a Reynold’s Number was.
I think it varies with the density and maybe the viscosity, so how much beer you’ve just drunk might have an effect.
When my son entered the University of Illinois’ Engineering school he had 850 fellow students. When he sat in the auditorium 5 years later to get his B.S. in Engineering he was one of 250 people to do so.
It’s a good thing we’re decomming the Enterprise. Most nuclear enlisted come out of that 40%.
The education system needs to be reworked. First off get rid of the unions and the vast majority of the administrators. Those people have crawled so far up their fundaments they can use their tonsils for earmuffs. Secondly get rid of tenure for primary and secondary teachers. Allow poor and mediocre teachers to be fired to make room for good ones. Third, fix the pay of principals to 3x that of the lowest paid teacher in the district, superintendents get 5x. That should free up resources to hire more teachers, improve classrooms, and bring back the practical skills like music and shop. Finally have every professor at the state colleges and universities write 10 questions that they expect an incoming freshman to be able to answer on their first day. Put them all together and that’s your test bank. To get a diploma you have to pass the test.
I am of the opinion that the one-room schoolhouse of “Little House on the Prairie” days needs to become the goal. Think about it.
There’s one teacher, perhaps 30 students, and one building for K-12. Oversight is via parents and the township, or for those who don’t have townships as a boundary, the neighborhood.
There’s no real need for a superintendent, a principle, a vice-principle, a director of student affairs, and on and on and on. You have parents, taxpayers, and the teacher setting the agenda, the budget, and the goals.
My, wouldn’t that be a sight — a school where the teacher is answerable to the taxpayers and parents directly, and six-figure administrative salaries could be spent on classroom needs?
Never happen, I know. Still, I can dream…
– Max
Jerry Pournelle, for one, did Ok with that.
My mom started out it a one-room schoolhouse, she moved to a “normal” school in town for high school. The problem with that system is it doesn’t scale and is terribly inefficient. In 2004 there were 0.9 children per family in the US, which means we’d need a “Little School on the Prairie” for every 33 families. it wouldn’t be a neighborhood school, it would be a block school. In many places you’d pay far more in real estate costs than you do currently in admin. Then there’s the fact that while the teacher is covering calculus for the teenagers the 6-year olds aren’t being taught, and vice versa.
At the other extreme you have things like the LA school district, where 700,000 students, 45,000 teachers, and 38,000(!) other employees are governed by…7 board members. There’s no way parents and employees can provide any oversight in that situation.
Obviously a single room and one teacher for 30 kids of all grades isn’t going to be the most efficient. However, I submit that having two high schools in a town of 100K people and busing students for an hour each day isn’t working all that well either.
I’ve noticed that smaller towns with a single school become much more heavily involved, and the school is a focal point of the community. Take a town of 1500 people and I bet there are 500 of them at a basketball game, or 1000 of them at a football game, and 300 when the choir does a recital or there’s a school play. Parent-teacher night is a social function, and if a teacher utters an opinion unpopular with the parents there will be consequences. A principal typically oversees the show, and has direct responsibility — the superintendent or state educational organization may not ever make an appearance.
What I’m proposing is of that nature — for a given geographic area build one school for all grade levels so that the entire community or neighborhood or that side of town is invested in it. You want class size in the 15 to 25 range, I suspect, but the more important point is that the area identifies with one school and it is answerable to the parents as well as the school board. Given how suburban our cities have become the school this is workable.
The real estate costs are fair, but I think the costs will be very similar if you have two large high schools, two large middle schools and two large grade schools versus six schools teaching K-12. For that matter, real estate costs are generally much less than salaries, utilities, and ongoing expenses unless you’re trying to open a school in Beverly Hills.
That said, a school does need a proper tax base for adequate funding and I find myself in that quandary right now. The school district I’m in now has a student/teacher ratio of 8. I’m considering selling the farm and moving to a larger city for the increased educational opportunities for my kids. They will have less time with the teacher, the school will be answerable to the school district rather than the parents, but they’d have advanced classes that will better prepare them for college.
And they’ll be warehoused by a school system that doesn’t give a whit what I think.
– Max
Maybe if we give them better grades for effort alone and don’t worry about correctness.
Anybody who doesn’t think education is a serious business should posit the fact that parents sell their homes, their largest asset and possibly the greatest factor to their retirement, in order to move and place their kids in a better school, or to finance private school.
Which, you know I can’t think of anything other than public schools where your residence forces you to buy their goods and theirs alone. If a state law were passed that said I could only shop at one market, and *had* to shop at that market or grow my own food under state supervision, we’d have a state referendum on that law before the week ended.
The other thing to remember is that college costs money, and we should expect a return on our investment. Likewise, when in college your job is to study and learn. It’s your vocation. I don’t know if it’s possible to work your way through college like I did 30 years ago, but I do know this: of the 1/2 or so of my engineering class who started my freshman year and had dropped out by my senior year, roughly half of those didn’t have the chops at math and chemistry due to inadequate high school prep and they’d waited until it was most expensive to try catching up. They punted to other majors they could pass more quickly as the debts rang up and the GPA dropped.
The other half thought it would be fun, that somehow magically they’d become that guy in “The Right Stuff” who consults a slide-rule for a few seconds and calculates the re-entry angle and speed of a lunar module that’s minus a couple hundred pounds, or the one who looks at a pile of parts and comes up with an oxygen scrubber like in “Apollo 13″. They’d been told they were smarter than average, that they had great math and scientific skills, all through high school. Then they discovered being the top 1% of Hoboken isn’t much when you compete on the curve with the top 1% of the World. They’d coasted a third of their lives, and they met the people who were never off the gas.
Engineering and medicine have one thing in common — if you don’t have the chops, if you aren’t paying attention and cannot master the material, you *will* kill somebody. Having fewer engineers is not a problem if the ones we’re losing are the ones who cannot hack it. It’s the ones who can hack it that we’re losing because of inadequate high school preparation, outrageous tuition and mandatory fees, and above all else because of silly policies about immigration that are going to kill us as a country. There is no use in kicking out those we need under the guise of stopping those we don’t, any more than we should outlaw aspirin because it shares anaesthetic properties with cocaine.
We need engineers, chemists, and physicists. I suppose we sort of need artists and marketing folks and even those people who claim to arrange my furniture so my home has the proper vibe and reacts positively with my magic crystal. Thing is, I only need the latter *after* the former have provided those things like food, clothing, shelter, medical miracles and firearms.
Art and literature and school administrators are what we get when we’ve enough wealth and freedom to have our basic needs covered. This realization of priorities seems lost on our current population.
– Max
Dammit, I had to take Diffy Q. twice to get a C, so I know my limits, but that was after passing five quarters of of differential and integral calculus, of which I remember hardly anything at all. I wish I still had my math books, when I need to figure something out.
I never had much of a problem with the concepts, but I had not been taught how to study math, at all, and it showed in my eventual bad grades.
Sometimes I describe my self as an educator, in the sense that there is nothing quite so educational as an horrible bad example.
One time when I was asked to fill out a brag sheet I put “Is an example to junior sailors. Maybe not a good example, but an example nonetheless.”
For some reason I had a reputation as a smartass.
For some reason I had a reputation as a smartass.
You can sit on an ice cream cone and tell the flavor?
Well once I sit on it I know it’s going to taste like ass.
Interesting stats on this subject here:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/11/college-has-been-oversold.html
Most telling one is that we graduated more CS majors than we did twenty five years ago.
That said, allow the literature major here to cast a few pearls among his technological betters, though swine they are.
. We need each other, and your certaintude is a little off putting. I work surrounded by you guys. Yes, you are brilliant. Yes you craft elegant solutions. The problem comes when your solution was crafted in the absence of a need. It requires someone to actually listen to the user and not look at them as though bolts held their skull to their body. Not like I have never seen one of you look at a customer that way. I’m not saying that all of us lit majors could hack whatever kind of advanced math classes you guys took – being fully ignorant of such course descriptions as I buried myself in Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor. I’m saying that most enterprises are like orchestras, and that we need both a brass section AND a string section to make the beautiful music. The stats in that linked article point out that we are very well out of balance between the strings and the brass, and that we as a nation suffer. But, to this veteran of Betty Crocker physics and no higher math than stats, and only because the USN made me take it, you guys come off as a little full of yourselves.
Standing by for heavy rolls.
Oh, I agree, Scott. As a Poli-Sci “liberal arts” major who has dabbled in the inscrutable arts of the “hard sciences” I can see both points of view. Following on your point I quote from memory a corporate consultant “trainer” in HR in the 70s of whom I inquired as to who exactly utilized her services and why. “Well,” she said, “What we hear from the corporations is that ‘we hire the best engineers available, but when we put ‘em in a lab they can’t even talk to each other, let alone explain themselves to corporate management.’ ” Summing it up, she said: (para from memory) “So I guess we try to polish the verbal and interpersonal/, psychological aspect of people skills.”
Lord knows there must be a need, (or at least a felt need–I’m not sure how much of it is real and how much is self-serving consultant’s hype) Corporate consulting/training in this area is a multi-million dollar/yr business..
Scott, I don’t think you need to worry much about nuked here (as my finger hovers over the big red button). It’s not so much that we are full of ourselves, it is, however, that we live in a technological world where few understand what we do and what it took to get there.
It is true that many Engineers have problems expressing themselves to the non-techie out there. It’s not so much that we want it that way, it’s just we have to spend so much time educating our audience so that they have even a glimmer of hope of understanding what we are doing.
I’ve never seen a situation where you could put Engineers in a lab and they can’t talk to each other. That’s a smear propagated by marketing guys that can’t understand a lick of what anyone else does. They’re important, but they also make life harder for everyone else as well. There was a very good reason that Scott Adams had a character described as the “Sales Weasel.”
HR is among the worst of departments. If they kept themselves within the realm of what they are able to do, their companies would be far better off. I interviewed with Ashland Oil in ’92 and ended up blowing them off because they sent an HR type to recruit Engineers. I’m sure they had an Engineer o two they could have sent, but instead they sent a moron unable to answer any questions.
Just because HR types can’t understand Engineers, doesn’t mean anyone else is in the same boat. I wouldn’t expect the HR types to understand us.
Scott, the problem is that STEM graduates are far better versed in the humanities than humanities students are in the hard sciences. I’m a good example – B.S. in Aerospace and Ocean Engineering, graduate of the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School. But that B.S. came with a minor in History, and TPS was followed up with Naval War College.
You don’t often see that sort of blend working the other way.
For every Jerry Pournelle, there are 100,000 Engineers, at a minimum.
Like I said, we have to educate before we can even start explaining.
As an old bandsman, I say we don’ need no steenking strings.
Awaiting moderation? Again? I was being good, I thought.
See, that is your problem, you thought. Thinking is dangerous.
Happy Guy Fawkes Day.
Yeah. At Fort Hood, we should remember, remember the fifth of November, for gunpowder treason shall never be forgot.
Have they hanged that guy yet?
Off topic. A bit early, but this way you have a week to spread them:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyigBonaAQ4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te-cKxsBapM
And to up it a notch… I was at a HS football game a few weeks ago. I met a Mom who has kids still at my sons’ old school, K-8, where there was hands down the WORST Science curriculum ever. Catholic K-8 complete crap science from 6-8. I told his woman that she needed to find a place for her kids for middle school as they were about to receive the worst science foundation known to man. She is some sort of learning strategist in the Catholic School system. She said to me, “We’re fine. Science isn’t that important in middle school. You can learn it in high school. It doesn’t require a building block like math…” I was so stunned by her attitude, I wanted to scream in her face… because she’s wrong. Turn a kid onto Science when they’re young and it will be perpetuated with the assist of good teachers through HS.
Our HS has a terrible Science curriculum as well. I’m puzzled by the HIGH END Super fantastic math department and the bottom feeding science department… how does that jive in the same school.
And this is common, this middle school crap science curriculum in the Catholic Schools in our area. I was at an Open house last week with my freshman’s Bio teacher. I told her he was struggling to figure out what to study, having had such a horrible science back ground. She replied to me, “Oh, I know what school he went to. He’s wrong. That’s not the worst. There are worse schools than his…’ That blew us all away because we know for a fact the Science at their old school was non-existent.
I blame K-12 for our problems. It’s not just the high schools. We aren’t getting them turned onto STEM in K-8 and then keeping them to it in 9-12.
Lack of science being taught K-8 is not an isolated problem. It is pervasive. There are a number of reasons for this.
1. State and federal pressure to meet specific accountability goals in math and English leave little time for leaining science.
2. Most elementary teachers do not have a strong background in science.
3. Teaching science requires additional resources and specialized materials that are not financially available under current funding cuts for most schools.
It may not be right, but that unfortunately is the way it is.
Flit,
There are incredible resources available to teachers on the internet. The real problem is #2 on your list.
In the time of my secondary school education (pre-Sputnik) the problem with math education beyond the four functions was that it was usually taught by teachers who hated or feared algebra and geometry themselves. I was extremely fortunate to have encountered THREE stupendous math teachers at critical points in my education. They loved the subject, were creative and issued challenges to their classes to solve problems that were true puzzles. To this day I thank my lucky stars for having them at the time I did.
But the key to all was being taught to read with comprehension and speed at the beginning of primary education. I still remember the projection of a page of text, blacked out, with a moving filter that steadily grew in size as we progressed. And we had to read aloud to each other from books. During my primary and secondary education I saw that the great majority of my classmates would stumble over reading out loud and would not say the sentences with the inflections that indicated that they really understood what they were reading. Again, I thank one teacher for that wonderful gift.
“1. State and federal pressure to meet specific accountability goals in math and English leave little time for leaining science.”
Yeah, not like when the teachers taught to the mid-terms and finals.
“2. Most elementary teachers do not have a strong background in science.”
Which is why they went into that field in the first place, so they didn’t have to hit any of the hard stuff.
“3. Teaching science requires additional resources and specialized materials that are not financially available under current funding cuts for most schools.”
Yeah, like books. And audio/video gear. Silver nitrate, spirits of ammonia, and acetylene. Oh…never mind that last bit…that is for jr. high.
Then JnC logs off computer and hears knock at the door….
Joe opens the door to find 2 men in black suits standing outside. “Are you, perhaps, Mr. Joe In Kalifornia?”
Joe: “If you’re from the IRS, write me a letter” (moves to close door).
Man in Black: “No Mr Kalifornia, we are not from the IRS. We are from the BATFE and we have a few questions we’d like to ask about a recent post on Neptunus Lex and your activities in Junior High Skool.”
Uh-oh! Owhell, Ossifer! What can I say? Boys just gotta have fun!
I am thinking about a recent post on HBDchick’s blog in which she marvels at the pyromania of the xy people. I pointed out in her comments several quite famous guys who blew parts of their bodies off when young, while playing with explosives.
I myself had a trip to the ER, but it was just a bad powder burn, and I got to gross out the girl sitting next to me in Algebra class.
I don’t think it was the powder-tattooed peeling skin which got to her, nor the greasy ointment they gave me to put on it which got to her, but rather my peeling off the greasy blackened skin from my face and eating it in front of her.
Made incipient-vomiting noises, she did. Teacher looked at me, said, “Jtg, OUT!” “But Sir” I said. “OUT!” he said, so I went to the library and enjoyed my self for a while.
P.s. On doing stupid things with explosives:
I was talking to the senior guy in the music party at our church tonight, and his being present aboard Enterprise for The Fire back in 1969 came up. Some bozo left a start cart’s exhaust blowing at a pack of Zunis, with predictable results.
At least it quite literally made a Christian out of him. He was in a head right under where the first bomb went off, but had just heard The Word in his head to pull up his pants and get outta there. The other guys present in that head were all killed. After some “fun” playing a hose on a bomb in a flaming compartment, he got slightly injured and got a helicopter ride to Hawaii.
Don’t forget the iodine and the ammonia!
But, Sir, you or your boss must have misread that – I said that the TEACHER needed those things. Purely for the demonstration of spontaneous exothermic reactions.
What…the cannon in front of my house? Oh, well, I don’t actually own it…I just store it and haul it for the guy who owns it and our reenacting group. A visual aid for education you might say.
Joe, imagine BATFE paying a visit to the Armorer with Heimdall aimed at the front gate!
He has me on that one. The one I care for is on a trailer parked on the street just outside the short chainlink fence. Never had any of the gear go missing from the trailer either.
60 percent of engineering and science majors change their majors before finishing? Doesn’t sound like much has changed since i graduated nearly two decades ago. That was about the attrition rate in my class.
Really, for the amount of work engineering isn’t so easy a career path. And even those who finish often hate it. I never liked it, but married and moved 14 times in 18 years so I never used it anyway. Got an associate’s in nursing (RN) and it’s a heck of a lot more marketable and pays almost as well.
(but I’ll admit most of the nurses are seriously afraid of simple math equations)
This has struck a bit of a nerve. After a long long time I’ve decided I might want to teach high school. Have investigated certification routes to enable that and math seems the most logical choice. I have a BS EE even if I never actually practiced as an engineer. Why that is is a long story full of regret so I won’t go into it.
Bottom line is I’m brushing the cobwebs off my math brain cells in order to take a test. Am surprised they allow graphing calculators on it and seem to almost require one. I didn’t want to spend $150 on something I had no need for so get by without one. In taking some practice tests and studying review material I was almost shocked (hard to do that these days) that no explanation existed on how to do the problems BUT to use the calculator.
You mean to tell me we teach advanced math kids in HS that the only way to solve the roots of a complex equation is with a graphing calculator? No wonder they drop out of engineering.
Math is hard but only if you a) have no talent whatever for it or b) you fail to learn the foundations as it is all built on that which you learned before.
I still might bag the teaching idea but am going through the certification program in the spring nevertheless. I’ve done a lot of things and made money in the past but never felt like any of it mattered. I still think this does but am fearful I won’t be able to deal with the environment. We’ll see.
Late to the Latin chat, but thought I would weigh in with my ha-penny’s worth. I had five years of Latin, courtesy of the California public school system and the U of California. Our curriculum in the public schools was [note proper grammatical usage despite else-where-leading syntax] based on the New York Regents program, which was mighty stringent. The grounding in Latin gave me two things that remain with me to this day. 1) We had to translate ancient works, which largely were military histories. Good military histories. Go, Achilles! 2) We. Learned. Grammar. Oh, yes did we learn grammar. So now, any mistakes I make are done for effect. Heh. Spelling, though… anothar mattar entiyrely. Must be the resulting confusion from reading so much Olde English as part of the Medieval Studies curriculum. Yeah, that’s what it is. Medieval Studies did it.