http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/biztech/09/16/ibm.education.ap/index.html

My question is, as an engineering graduate of NC State do you think the state of Math and Science education in America is that bad? Did you feel under prepared for your engineering courses?

It has been six years since I was in high school but I obviously felt more than prepared for my education. Of course, I may have just been in a good school system. Maybe the lure of a better life will just pull in the better engineers if we can't create them here.

9/17/2005 8:06:06 PM

First IBM open sources its software, then IBM gives away its PC division, now they are encouraging their employees to seek new careers. Interesting business strategy.

9/17/2005 8:11:09 PM

Math education is fairly bad, I think. It seemed like 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th grade math were exactly the same. I think that children get bored and uninterested in the subject. Call me crazy, but I think children should be in pre-algebra by the fifth grade. Of course, if you want to get more engineers and physics/chemistry majors, the stigma of doing well (especially in math and science) in school needs to be eliminated.

To answer your question, the AP calculus & Ap physics classes that I took did a fairly good job of preparing me for my calculus classes.

9/17/2005 8:11:34 PM

It depends where you go to school. Some of the larger HS around here seem to be decent, but I feel that at my HS, it was pretty horrible (test scores will bear this out).

9/17/2005 8:20:27 PM

I went to school in a small, impoverished county in Eastern NC and I took AP Calculus. The class wasn't good enough for any of us to pass the AP test, but I learned everything they teach in MA 141 and half of MA 241.

I think the problem is there is a stigma against math in our society. I think its passed down from parent to child and from TV to child. The attitude is that math is something that you can leave to a few really smart people and that you'll never need the math they teach in school beyond the 3rd grade. It's probably a remnant of our once strong manufacturing economy. Hopefully we can shake the stigma over the next 10-20 years.

9/17/2005 8:26:44 PM

Quote :

"The attitude is that math is something that you can leave to a few really smart people and that you'll never need the math they teach in school beyond the 3rd grade. It's probably a remnant of our once strong manufacturing economy."

During the Cold War, public schools put stress on mathematics, science, and engineering related fields. In recent years, this has been realized and compensated for by stressing the liberal arts. Now, due the different education of the latest generation, America is falling behind in math related fields.

9/17/2005 8:34:34 PM

Quote :

"I went to school in a small, impoverished county in Eastern NC and I took AP Calculus. The class wasn't good enough for any of us to pass the AP test, but I learned everything they teach in MA 141 and half of MA 241. "

I wouldn't call my school impoverished, but the same thing happened in my AP calculus class. Except, the only 2 students that DID get a 5s on the AP AB/BC happened to be the only 2 students that spent the first part of the semester at a different school (NCSSM). The next year, no one in the class got 5s. That, to me, seems to indicate bad teaching.

9/17/2005 8:46:32 PM

Part of our problem in AP Calc was that it was only taugh one semester, rather than both as the AP folks intended. To make things worse, it was taught the first semester, but we had to wait until the end of the year to take the test. I got the only 2, everybody else got a 1.

9/17/2005 9:16:32 PM

I'd love to see IBM put up a bunch of money to provide advanced math and science course to students in poor school districts through distance education.

9/17/2005 9:22:08 PM

i thought the calc ap tests were overly easy

9/17/2005 10:30:23 PM

This has been in the works for years, and started with their education partnership.

9/17/2005 10:33:49 PM

My high school prepared me very well for engineering, even though it was probably the worst in Durham as far as SAT scores go. Freshman year of college was way easier than senior year of high school. Calculus was pretty much a review of high school for the first two tests. (I took Calc AB in HS and started in 242 at State)

But my math education could've been much better. My high school only offered up to Calc AB, so I didn't take math my senior year because there was nothing left. And in elementary school it was terrible. We spent like three years on fractions.

The only class I felt unprepared for was CH 101. My chemistry class in tenth grade consisted mostly of making foam models of atoms. Then I get to State where they're talking p orbitals and I'm like, wtf.

9/17/2005 10:47:52 PM

calculus was awesome, pwnt AB and BC

AP Physics was a different story; eight people took the class, four took the exam, one passed(with a 3, lowest passing score), guess which one...

When I placed into PY208H... well, let's say I was a little fucking confused. It seemed like every single person had spent their summers working on breadboards and I was like wtfbbq? Seriously, if I had to work alone on those labs, I wouldn't have passed the class.


Kind of unrelated, but I have a theory: the younger(more moody and sexually frustrated) a female teacher is, the more bitchier. Those teachers that were fresh out of college were occasionally hot, but they felt like they needed to control you so they acted like psychopaths. The nicest teachers I ever had were middle-aged(they start to get senile after a certain point).

9/18/2005 1:38:20 AM

^ I didn't notice a correlation between age and quality of teaching. I had some really bad old teachers, and some really good old teachers. My calc teacher was old and sucked.

9/18/2005 1:45:19 AM

overall, that's not what I was really saying. I wasn't comparing teaching quality to age; I was comparing bitchiness to age

however, I did have some really bad young teachers and some of my favorite teachers which I think I learned the most from were older

9/18/2005 1:47:52 AM

27000

thats what the average beginning teacher across nc makes...and thats on the high end, some of the wealthier counties

and you wonder why many people skilled in math, chemistry, and physics decide to do other things, particularly engineering

9/18/2005 2:55:39 AM

^ exactly. who wants to take a pay cut that is more than half?


people who work for 27k are duuuuuuuuuuuumb

9/18/2005 9:48:50 AM

Quote :

"27000 thats what the average beginning teacher across nc makes...and thats on the high end, some of the wealthier counties and you wonder why many people skilled in math, chemistry, and physics decide to do other things, particularly engineering "

Thank god we dont pay them enough such that people skilled in those subjects would actually take the job.

It would be an incredible waste of resources to have those people babysitting a bunch of kids and imparting them with a little bit of rudimentary knowledge on those subjects when they could be doing productive work in the private sector or doing important research at a university.

[Edited on September 18, 2005 at 10:10 AM. Reason : ]

9/18/2005 10:09:31 AM

^are you fucking serious

its obvious enough that these people are needed to the point that ibm is trying to do somthing about it

i know many teachers that could have worked in private sector, but they chose to teach.

[Edited on September 18, 2005 at 10:24 AM. Reason : afda]

9/18/2005 10:22:53 AM

You can't put all the blame on teachers....

I am a math teacher, and I put a lot of the blame on the students and parents.

Instead of getting them a calculator they need for class, they spend that money on CDs and Ipods.

Instead of opening up a book for 15 minutes to look over the days materials, they choose to go out and party.

My geometry and honors algebra 2 students are very lazy. They expect everything to be handed to them on a silver spoon. Hell this past week I had a couple students fail a quiz on graphing linear equations.

You can hire anyone, but until the parents and students pull their share it won't f'n matter.

9/18/2005 10:50:37 AM

Quote :

"Instead of getting them a calculator they need for class"

I wonder how I managed to finish high school and become a mathematician without ever using a calculator.

9/18/2005 10:55:25 AM

^HOW WAS MATH INVENTED WITHOUT CALCULATORS?

9/18/2005 11:03:04 AM

i never had a TI-80 anything until I went to college. I used a casio graphing calculator when I took AP Calc and that was for small computations so I wouldn't make careless mistakes.

But like I said before....students these days are lazy

some of my students can't add 2 numbers without a calculator

9/18/2005 11:03:30 AM

plus the state only cares about the scores on their EOCs so they can get the bonus money..

There are a ton of problems that would/could take 3-4 minutes solving by hand when it will only take 1 minute to put it on the calculator.

This next week my Honors Alg 2 students will have to solve systems of equations by hand. Then they will have a quiz on it, then they will be shown how to do it on the calculator.

9/18/2005 11:07:54 AM

Well, my son is just 9 months old so I haven't had a dis/pleasure to meet American public school teachers. Our nanny warns that this will be the most shocking experience of our lives. They are lower middle class as far as can tell, and they pulled their son out of the public school system because they said what they saw was just beyond ridiculous.

If your students cannot add numbers, you should flunk them. If you don't, you send a message that one's inability to do basic arithmetic is, well, literally, satisfactory. I do agree it's ltimately the fault of the students and their parent that they are stupid. But I can't call the quality of such teaching acceptable either.

9/18/2005 11:10:27 AM

just disallow calculators in you class. problem solved.

ideally, calculators aid in understanding concepts, but it's probably hard to achieve that in a HS classroom with immature kids.

[Edited on September 18, 2005 at 11:19 AM. Reason : asd]

9/18/2005 11:18:57 AM

Calculators cannot possibly aid in understanding concepts. They are a tool to finish your solution, not begin to understand the problem. There's absolutely no place for them in high school. Even with a calculator students cannot approach problems that are of at least infinitesimal practical importance. We are not living in Aristotle's times when every half-assed idea was a scientific breakthrough. The emphasis should be on building the foundation: abstract thinking, classical literature, arts, music. By teaching kids monkey skills you rob them (especially the best of them) of their time that could be spent on their fundamental development, time that is very difficult to make up for later.

9/18/2005 11:42:59 AM

^aren't you contradicting yourself?

A lot of math can just be grunt work. If you can outsource the grunt work to the calculator, more of ones efforts can be focused on solving problems from a conceptual level. At some point (maybe upper level math classes), it serves no purpose to make students laboriously go through arithmetic and calculations.

The reason this cannot work in high school is because the students are immature and the problems are probably too simple.

[Edited on September 18, 2005 at 12:03 PM. Reason : daf]

9/18/2005 12:01:58 PM

I vote for no calculators until you get your college degree.

9/18/2005 12:04:31 PM

^^ You answered your own question with the last line.

9/18/2005 12:49:13 PM

^But you said "Calculators cannot possibly aid in understanding concepts."

9/18/2005 1:16:08 PM

I don't think they can. Nobody does any serious computations in high school that require computational power. It's like having a car. Nobody will dispute you'll get faster to the next block if you drive. But if you seriously cannot get to the next block on foot quickly and with virtually no effort, you're in a bigger trouble than you could imagine.

9/18/2005 1:24:31 PM

^ When I was taking AP Calculus and AP Physics in HighSchool, I couldn't have done it without my TI-86.

9/18/2005 1:49:10 PM

Quote :

" Calculators cannot possibly aid in understanding concepts. They are a tool to finish your solution, not begin to understand the problem."

I disagree. Seeing the graphs of the equations for the various physics properties helped me understand them. It also helped me truly understand the relationships between acceleration, velocity, position, and integrals and derivatives. If I had to take someone's word for it, instead of punching in the equations and seeing the graphs myself, my understanding of those concepts wouldn't be as complete.

9/18/2005 2:47:18 PM

Quote :

"First IBM open sources its software, then IBM gives away its PC division, now they are encouraging their employees to seek new careers. Interesting business strategy."

9/18/2005 7:54:20 PM

I actually want to be a teacher, but hell if I'm gonna get paid next to nothing to babysit a bunch of retards that don't want to learn anyway.

I got bills to pay and a somewhat stable emotional balance to maintain.

9/19/2005 1:30:36 AM

First Physics class I've had here, astronomy, and the teacher goes over yesterdays stuff again and new stuff. Each day we go over the exact same slides we did the day before, before moving on. He tells us only Science/Math is important because philosophy & religion is all mumbo jumbo supernatural stuff. He tells it is "very important" to bring your books everyday to class, because some of you might not be able to see the slides. He tells us its very important to pay attention in class because we are moving sooo fast, even though we do the same chapter from the last day over again, and have days that are nothing but review where he lets us out early. And then he stresses how much we've covered some more.

And his favorite chapter is on the history astronomy with the babylonians, thales, aristotle, and the religious influences on astronomy during later times.

I find it somewhat hyppocritical to say science vastly outweighs every other academic subject, then to openly admit his favorite section is the history/religion part of it. Humanitees have an important part in our education too. Sometimes in his class its hard not to view science as a necessary/boring evil for some people to deal with while everyone else learns the fun stuff. Or a necessary/boring evil to make money with, but not that interesting on its own.

Although science is a subject I do in general enjoy... Engineers and Humanitees majors are supposed to be allies against ignorance, not enemies of each other trying to prove which one is actually academic.

[Edited on September 19, 2005 at 2:26 AM. Reason : .]

9/19/2005 2:07:46 AM