Most readers of PT probably know of the attempts to inject creationism (teach the "controversy") into the curriculum, but New York Times reviewer was startled byWitness an ongoing culture war raging in Texas -- a tempest in a textbook. The state's Board of Education has been engaged in a pitched, years-long battle over what belongs (and doesn't) in public school textbooks. Legislators, educators, parents and students debate the facts and the theories -- including what constitutes a fact versus a theory. The chair of the Board of Education fights tirelessly to include intelligent design in science books, while a board member argues to exclude mention of the slave trade and the Enlightenment in history books. The result is a chaotic scene, with the next generation's education held hostage.
not to mention inserting Hussein between Barack and Obama. I saw the full 84-min movie last night; the PBS version has been whittled down to 52 min and, I gathered from a talkback with the producer, not entirely to his liking. I was astonished at what twits the SBOE members were. The star of the movie, in some sense, was Don McLeroy, the former chair of the SBOE. He came across as a completely honest, pleasant, ignorant ninny who evidently believes everything he thinks and is more than willing to let you know. The scene where he tries to convince Sunday-school students that there was plenty of room for dinosaurs and other creatures on the Ark would have been hilarious, had it not been so earnest. McLeroy could be an excellent, even inspiring teacher, if only he were not so badly misinformed. Those are only some of the impressions I got from a movie that some will doubtless criticize for being too even-handed. See it for yourself, either on PBS or, preferably, the full-length version.the casual way the board injected opinion into social studies textbooks, requiring, among many other additions, references to Ronald Reagan's leadership in "restoring national confidence" and replacing hip-hop with country in a citation of pop music
55 Comments
https://me.yahoo.com/a/JxVN0eQFqtmgoY7wC1cZM44ET_iAanxHQmLgYgX_Zhn8#57cad · 24 January 2013
Anyone who says that "Someone has to stand up to experts," is no doubt a little too willing to let you know what he thinks to fit in with the DI plan.
Not that Don wasn't quite the opposite of expert, which apparently qualified him in his own eyes.
Glen Davidson
apokryltaros · 24 January 2013
ogremk5 · 25 January 2013
One thing about living and teaching in Texas during the McLeroy years was that I found he had minimal influence, even on the standards.
He tried to ignore teacher and expert input into the state standards, he tried to get publishers to put misleading information in the text. He gave tactic approval to use public schools to teach creationism and Bible literalism.
Yet, even with all that, he was largely unsuccessful in all of them. I am especially thinking of the process by which the Texas standardized test was created. The test items were all checked by professional fact checkers and content specialists who were scientists or science teachers (not the bad ones either). The test items were individually approved by an independent group of science teachers and science experts. (Same for History.)
There would never have been anything misleading or incorrect on the tests. The same applies to the textbook. Most schools in Texas use the Miller Levine books and I'm confident that misleading information is not going to get into those textbooks.
The most effect he had was giving tactic approval to the few teachers who would teach creationism. And they would have done that anyway.
I'm not saying that he hasn't caused a mess here in the state. Texas is a massively divided state in terms of religion/science issues. And honestly, the students that are going to follow creationism are getting that support at home. No mere teacher will be able to crack the brainwashing that takes place in fundamentalist homes. On the other hand, no kid from a home that teaches and encourages thinking will fall for the crap McLeroy peddles.
Helena Constantine · 25 January 2013
Not all PBS channels. Mine is showing a propaganda piece praising Ronald Reagan's foreign policy in that slot. May have something to do with the fact I live in Shimkus' congressional district.
https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawnFAay-zoqIoDy5LfsNDShmyX9u_xNgSt8 · 25 January 2013
As someone who lived through the Carter and Reagan years, I can attest as to what a restorative Reagan's optimism was. In a textbook it may be "opinion", but it squares with my experience.
harold · 26 January 2013
Karen S. · 26 January 2013
Karen S. · 26 January 2013
PBS also posted 10 Interesting Lessons from Creationist-Inspired School Books on their Facebook page. What an shock...I never realized just how kooky these creationists are. Be sure to watch the video also...I can't imagine why God doesn't approve of Set Theory!
DS · 26 January 2013
phhht · 26 January 2013
phhht · 26 January 2013
And there is this.
W. H. Heydt · 26 January 2013
Scott F · 26 January 2013
W. H. Heydt · 27 January 2013
Dave Luckett · 27 January 2013
I have a permanent and irradicable blind spot for mathematics. I'm quite reliable with arithmetic, because I was taught the multiplication tables by rote, and the four operations by drilling them, even with fractions, even with positive and negative numbers.
But that's as far as it goes. My son, who's a whiz, undertook to tutor me. I was quite willing, and even made some progress in trig - until I fetched up against the idea of the sine of an angle greater than 90 degrees.
I knew what a sine is: the ratio between the side opposite the angle and the hypotenuse, ie, the side opposite the right angle, in a right-angled triangle. So, what's the sine of an angle of ninety-four degrees? What's the sine of an angle of two hundred and forty degrees?
I simply cannot get my head around such a notion. It's completely meaningless to me. An angle of ninety degrees and another of more than ninety degrees cannot exist together in a plane triangle. It's an impossible idea. Being impossible, it can't exist.
I mean, really. I deal all day in things that don't exist - characters, events, fantasy. No problemo. But I also live in the real world. I know that they don't exist. I don't kid myself that they do. That would be crazy.
But mathematics is all about things that don't exist. Sines of angles of more than ninety degrees. Square roots of negative numbers. For that matter, negative numbers themselves. Infinities that are bigger than other infinities. And maths guys act as though they do exist. They're impossible, but they simply act as if they were as real as wood.
But that means that they're acting crazy.
I can't be having with it. My brain simply locks up and refuses to function.
Karen S. · 27 January 2013
Sylvilagus · 27 January 2013
harold · 27 January 2013
Scott F. -
1) Elementary, high school, and most university math should include a lot of problems, because that's the only way that most people can learn to apply the priniciples in problems, and application is 99.9% of why we study math.
2) There is also such a thing as too much rote grinding. I attended a rural elementary school with elderly teachers, which gave me a solid education but in a sometimes ridiculous way. In "grade four" (I went to elementary school in Canada), our math class consisted of mainly of doing endless long division problems from a book full of pages of long division problems. If you finished the problems for the day, you could read from a shelf of books. No-one else was interested in the books, but I loved reading. I learned how to do long division but then was unable to resist. I did maybe 5% of the assigned problems and then pretended to be done and grabbed a book. Much to my shock, at the end of the year, the "test" was to hand in our notebooks. I got a "D" in fourth grade math. I am very good at long division, and was in fourth grade. I went on to do well in math in subsequent years and to mainly enjoy my math and stats at college; most of the kids who ground out dozens of long divisions a day did not and many didn't even get much better at long division. That class was probably the ultimate "old math" class, based on the idea that math is like artillery drill - you get better by doing the same thing over and over and over again. Mercifully it didn't kill my liking of math. It's possible that my childishly deceptive behavior actually saved my enjoyment of math. A couple of hundred repetitive three digit number into a seven digit number long divisions by hand per day might have killed it.
The truth lies somewhere between the extremes. "New math" emerged because "old math" had serious issues of its own.
Mike Elzinga · 27 January 2013
There are vast differences in the way students approach math; and pedagogical methods have to be adapted to make the most of student abilities, backgrounds, and perspectives. One of the biggest mistakes is to place all students together in the same kinds of classes. What works for some sets of students is a complete disaster for others.
After I retired from research, I spent the last ten years of my career teaching in a program for gifted and talented students at a math/science center. It was a lot work, but also a lot of fun. I taught calculus, statistics, and physics. Many of those kids came into the program as freshmen (9th grade) taking calculus. There were also many freshmen in my statistics courses. These students were better than many of the graduate students I had taught.
In their second year, these students took a somewhat advanced version of 3rd semester calculus which I taught out of a book by Mary Boaz that was designed for sophomore/junior level college physics students. That course included vector calculus (divergence, gradient, curl stuff), functions of a complex variable, matrix algebra, and Fourier transforms.
In their third year, these students took differential equations or statistics, and in their 4th year they took whatever elective they missed or any elective in math that they could get at a nearby university (our teaching load was too heavy for me to teach yet another advanced math course on top of everything else I was doing).
These students handled my calculus level physics course out of Halliday, Resnick, and Krane with ease, but I also had to take into account students who were just beginning their calculus sequences as seniors.
These students thrived on the “Integrated Math” approaches in their middle school years where they picked up most of what they needed to advance into calculus by the time they reached 9th grade. Many of them had taken summer courses in a program sponsored by a nearby university.
On the other hand, students in technical programs at community colleges need an entirely different approach. Many of them need to be able to do trigonometry; but as Dave Luckett has described of his own experience, they want only “right-angle trig.” They clutch at any notions of sines of angles greater than 90 degrees. They also have an aversion to both positive and negative current flows in electrical circuits. For them, current has to flow from positive to negative. Most of the integrated math approaches used for those students at the math/science center would not work for these students.
Even more different are students who come from homes in which one or both parents have an intense fear or hatred of math. My wife once helped tutor a home-schooled boy for four years whose math-phobic mother purchased one of those A Beka math books. The book had only a few religious references in it; but my wife pulled together other materials to supplement the book. The kid was terrified of math in the beginning, but ended up liking math by the time he finished four years later. Drill and practice helped him, but he also needed to expand his horizons in math in order to lose his fear of math.
My own recollection of the “New Math,” when it came out back in the 1960s, is that it was very poorly presented. It was far too abstract in its approach, making assumptions about the concrete experiences of children that were totally unjustified. There was no way students at that age could know what the “objects” of a set meant without having experience with specific examples of the properties of those examples.
Numbers and operations on numbers have patterns that are at the heart of algebra. But trying to teach those ideas using a general, abstract language didn’t work. Students first need to have experience with those properties of numbers and the operations with those numbers. Furthermore, set theory encompasses more than just numbers. Other “objects” or “elements” of a set can have entirely different kinds of properties from numbers, and one has to have experiences with those as well; otherwise all sorts of misconceptions and conflations arise in the minds of students. The result is confusion ending up in an aversion to math.
The “epsilon-delta” approach to calculus assumes a huge background of experience that many, if not most, students entering calculus don’t have; therefore it is not an appropriate approach for a general course in calculus that includes all students. It is meant more for math majors; and it becomes more relevant as one gains more experience with math. Eventually physics and engineering students can benefit from this perspective. On the other hand, many math majors could eventually benefit from the perspectives of physics and engineering applications of math.
There has also developed an artificial distinction between “pure” and “applied” math; with the “applied” math holding a lower status than “pure” math. However, most of the great mathematicians of the past were motivated by applications of math to the real world. Only later did those applications lead to abstract generalizations and recognition that the mathematics developed in one area also applied to seemingly unrelated areas.
Scott F · 27 January 2013
Mike Elzinga · 27 January 2013
Scott F · 27 January 2013
Scott F · 27 January 2013
raven · 27 January 2013
phhht · 27 January 2013
You can see Josh Kornbluth's moving and hilarious story about being a math whiz - until he "hit the wall" in calculus at Princeton - now on DVD. Here's the trailer.
The Mathematics of Change
harold · 27 January 2013
Mike Elzinga · 27 January 2013
Way back in the Cretaceous, during my undergraduate years, I switched from electrical engineering into physics in my senior year after discovering late that physics was where I belonged all along. It meant a few more semesters of undergraduate work. And I was always scrambling to keep up with the math and afraid that I didn’t know enough. So I kept taking more math courses as well. Finally someone informed me that if I took two more math courses, I would also have a major in math; so I did.
Looking back, and comparing my math education with the way math is taught today – and with the way I taught it to those bright young students I had at the math/science center – I think that calculus is taught much better today than it used to be. The textbooks are also much better. It is no longer that “high pinnacle” of math one arrived at after taking College Algebra, College Trigonometry, College Geometry, Analytic Geometry, Calculus I, II, and III, finally Differential Equations.
Today there are far better integrated concepts that reinforce each other and allow one to move to what used to be considered “advanced” notions that required years of preparation. It has taken many decades of mathematics “reform” to get here. Nevertheless, it is still a long haul until one gains enough experience with the various areas of math and it all begins to really “sink in” and unify.
Math is a much more integral part of physics. For engineers – electrical engineers probably being an exception – the ability to design and test designs is more important. Math is important; but engineers have a more direct responsibility for producing products that other people will use. The ability to design tests that really shake out the flaws in a product is probably better than a set of calculations that “show that the product works.” You just can’t foresee every contingency in a mathematical model of an engineered product; it has to be tested under a wide variety of conditions for which it is expected to operate. Math isn’t necessarily the answer in this case.
On the other hand, math is very important in many of the interdisciplinary fields of applied research and development in which I have worked. These are areas in which engineers, physicists, computer scientists, and mathematicians work together in teams to develop basic science research into technological applications. In these cases, it is the engineers who can really shake out the bugs in design and trim down the design to efficiency and lower the cost; and they quickly uncover things that weren’t usually seen in advance. They don’t need math to do that.
I am sure, as harold can probably verify, that medicine has become specialized for a very good reason. In dealing with human health and life-or-death decisions, it is probably better in the long run to confine oneself to a specialty. But I suspect that can only work well as long as the specialists are communicating effectively and efficiently with each other and sharing information, and as long as there are general practitioners who can pull together the bigger, overall picture of a patient’s health.
Henry J · 27 January 2013
I recall being fascinated reading a book that described how to model the real number system using axiomatic set theory (non-negative integers to rationals, to reals, to complex, with negatives inserted in a somewhat arbitrary point early in that series). (Such a model turns the real number axioms into theorems.) As far as I can recall, that use of set theory didn't get covered in any of my math classes.
But that was well after having learned how to deal with real numbers without all that.
Henry
W. H. Heydt · 27 January 2013
Mike Elzinga · 27 January 2013
harold · 27 January 2013
harold · 27 January 2013
I either had set theory somewhere in high school, or read about it on my own.
I encountered a few years ago when I took a graduate-level, albeit basic, course in probability.
It is useful and, now that someone has done the hard work of figuring it out for the rest of us, highly intuitively credible.
In my opinion, the issue is that authoritarianism and obsessively concrete thinking go together. Neither correlates with "intelligence" - there are plenty of highly intelligent obsessively concrete authoritarians - but they go together.
It is a pure emotional bias against anything that seems abstract in a challenging way and nothing more.
Mike Elzinga · 27 January 2013
The ideas of Boolean algebra and logic are also done with sets. So it is interesting that many authoritarian sectarians are drawn to Aristotelian logic combined with their “book of singular authority” to argue for uniformity under their sectarian views.
Perhaps their objections to hierarchies of infinity and Georg Cantor lie in their perception that it is threat to the supremacy of their deity. After all, if a deity created the universe, what created the deity? Can’t have that kind of questioning on the part of the kids, can we?
Joe Felsenstein · 28 January 2013
harold · 28 January 2013
Karen S. · 28 January 2013
harold · 28 January 2013
Henry J · 28 January 2013
DS · 28 January 2013
Come on man. I really want to teach biblical genetics, maybe even biblical genetic counseling. I could make a fortune just making sure that parents never looked at any sick people while they were doing the horizontal momba. According to biblical genetics, that should protect them from every known genetic disease. I'm sure you could get lots of people to pay big money for this advice, especially if they promised not to sue if it didn't work. That would just be because their faith wasn't strong enough.
Teach the controversy!
Ian Derthal · 28 January 2013
There's a PBS channel here in the UK, PBS America, but I can't see any mention of the movie on the EPG.
Lee Hughes · 28 January 2013
Karen S. · 28 January 2013
Karen S. · 28 January 2013
Remember Evolution Schmevolution?
DS · 28 January 2013
Henry J · 28 January 2013
So the solution is paint a picture on the ceiling of what you want the kid to look like?
DS · 28 January 2013
Richard B. Hoppe · 28 January 2013
Joe Felsenstein · 28 January 2013
Karen S. · 28 January 2013
Matt Young · 28 January 2013
harold · 29 January 2013
Tomato Addict · 30 January 2013
Set Theory is the basic for logic, and likely the reason Creationists might not want it taught. Can't have the kiddies learning what logic is before they are fully indoctrinated, now can we?
Henry J · 30 January 2013
Yep, now that would be illogical!
dalehusband · 4 February 2013
SLC · 5 February 2013