Subject: What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects?

Posted by Sharon Villines on 6/4/2010
In Reply To:What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? Posted by Tony Phuah on 6/4/2010

Message:

On Jun 4, 2010, at 6:48 PM, tony phuah wrote:

> Thanks for your comment. Do all K-12 students (or secondary students
> outside US) need to learn physics or calculus?

Yes they do -- or most do. There are ways to avoid it, by playing dumb, for example, and getting assigned to special education classes, but in many instances the students don't make the connection between the text book and real life. Numbers are numbers and just for school.
Life is your friends and hanging out on the corner and fighting with or loving your parents. It doesn't have anything to do with numbers larger than your allowance unless you like baseball and memorize statistics.

The connection isn't there.

And as a college teacher for 25 years, teaching adult students, average age 38, very little of that learning sticks, even from college courses. Perhaps it underlies other learning but go over your own college transcript from college after 20 years, even 10 and try to remember what you learned. Unless students are using the knowledge outside the classroom -- even just watching the news -- it dissipates pretty quickly.

One of the things I learned is that many adults, not just a few, do not read books and rarely have to write anything. Perhaps they fill in a form. Think about all the jobs out there. And telephones. Letter writing was never a universal practice and it certainly isn't now.
During the periods people mourn because the letters were poignant and literate, large numbers of people were completely illiterate. To be able to copy words and numbers, not understand them, was a skill taught in business schools. (Read history of Palmer Method.)

Attending an elite school like MIT creates an illusion; certainly being in a program based on physics and calculus does.

It would be interesting to have a large body of college students take the SAT 10 and 20 years after graduation and compare them to their first scores.

My college and others, however, once tried to set up a study in which students from about 10 colleges took the SAT at graduation to measure value added. All the top schools declined to participate. The study was never done (to my knowledge) because the feeling was that the less prestigious schools would be stigmatized if the better regarded schools didn't participate. Since their students begin college with high scores, the feeling was that they wouldn't show the same gains and would even show losses in general knowledge. A Swarthmore colleague told me they have students take the GRE after the sophomore year because they lose the general knowledge by the fourth year.

Sharon

Follow Ups:

What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? - Tony Phuah 6/6/2010 
What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? - Sharon Villines 6/6/2010
What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? - Tony Phuah 6/7/2010
What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? - Sharon Villines 6/7/2010
What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? - Bob Gorman 6/7/2010
What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? - Alex Leus 6/6/2010
What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? - Steve Crowley 6/6/2010
What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? - Tony Phuah 6/6/2010