A recent item on New York City’s public radio station announced an award program for local science teachers. Featured was a teacher who had his students keep journals “reflecting on their scientific thinking,” ” in the tradition of Leonardo.”
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Meta
Sadly, this does not surprise me. I’ve heard that in many schools, the kids “vote” on whether a particular mathematical answer is correct or not. For years, I’ve heard all of the stories about how bad our school system is. Several years ago, I spent time around several school teachers. What they told me about their experiences in their schools made it clear to me that the situation is far worse than I had imagined it to be previously.
We are destroying our education system by run amok political correctness combined with flaky trendy educational concepts in the same manner that the Soviet Union destroyed themselves with their obsession with communist ideology. We did not win the cold war. We lost it.
I’ve heard that in many schools, the kids “vote” on whether a particular mathematical answer is correct or not.
I really, really hope this isn’t true. 🙁
How is keeping a journal on one’s scientific thinking a bad thing exactly? Is the journal replacing other aspects of the science curriculum? If not, I honestly see nothing wrong here.
Kurt, that would be an extraordinary claim. May I ask where you heard it?
What do they mean, “in the tradition of Leonardo”? These are, after all, high school students who’ve presumably only just passed their first couple of classes in elementary algebra. Very often the language of science is mathematics, and somewhat advanced mathematics at that, which these children would not likely have been introduced to. But journaling to encourage thinking with the scientific method seems to be a worthwhile assignment, even if the student isn’t fluent with the mathematical modeling.
I’m with Roger on this one, your reaction appears to be based on a misunderstanding of the value of such exercises. As the holder BA in Art History (and MA in Interdisciplinary Studies) and being employed as a Research Assistant in an NIH funded lab, (doing bioinformatics) I can easily see how such a pedagogy is relevant and useful. Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks were filled with visual documentation of mathematical concepts that were for his time cutting edge. Remember algebra was still a new science for Renaissance Italy, it had only recently been imported from the east; Newton and Leibniz were centuries later. I am not alone in this opinion, Durer’s depiction of the magic square is discussed at length in the introductory chapter of Mathlab, a substantial computer program used in science and engineering labs. Lastly, the Leonardo being referred to may also be the famous Fibonacci, who was Leonardo of Pisa, and his notebooks are extremely useful for education in science and mathematics. Mind you I did not hear the piece, and so it may be oh so much new age bs; but then again it may be a method that allows the students to develop a visual vocabulary that supplements the textual one they are traditionally forced to regurgitate. The reason the Principal Investigator brought me into the lab was not just for my programming skills, but also relies on my ability to evaluate the images used and to suggest improvements to enhance the understanding of the data. Within two weeks of my hire, I changed the methodology and a approach to the data, and started on the path to a first author paper.
If kurt9 is talking about Peer Instruction, he’s correct about the voting but wrong about the implication. The voting is the method by which the teacher determines whether the students understand the concept just taught. It’s a very effective teaching tool that I’ve used in many courses.
More info: http://www.physics.umd.edu/perg/role/PIProbs/
@John
I have heard it from two personal sources and two internet sources. One of my personal sources lives in Lake Sammamish, WA, which is in the Seattle area. Since the Seattle area has become so liberal-left, I am not surprised anymore to hear these things.
Oh well. I guess I can learn Mandarin and go live in Shanghai or Ningbo at some point in the future.
A few nipicking things about public education.
I have heard that kids do not learn grammer until the seventh grade. This was told to me by the same school teachers who told me about the matters that I mentioned previously. I guess we can no longer call grade school grammer school. I started learning grammer (including sentence diagramming) in the 4th grade. I also learned to read via phonics starting in the first grade. I understand phonics has been replaced by the “whole word” approach, which does not work worth beans.
How can anyone feel any thing other than contempt for a society that deliberately enstupidates its kids?
The liberal-left values equality over excellence and achievement. I believe in excellence and achievement over all else. I consider the respective worldviews to be irreconcilable.
kurt9 heard something somewhere about grammar and how the left “enstupidates” people and yet does not link to any evidence of this. I love how you say you got it from two Internet sources. At this moment I suspect someone is linking to your first comment as a “source.”
Is this performance art?
@Derek Scruggs
Ask any school teacher if you do not believe me. Or you can ask any of the parents with school-age children that you may know in your neighborhood. If they all send their kids to private school, then that’s a default answer to your question. Trust me on this. Not only am I not making any of this up, but learning about it myself has been as much of shock for me as it is for any of you.
Kurt9, You should have taken the out that Derek afforded you. Now you simply demonstrated your position in the Dunning Kruger camp. I suspect even Heather regrets this post given that the responses clarify what is likely a mistaken belief.
BTW – I volunteer in schools (teaching cartography through using Google maps) and “any” school teacher tells me more of the failings of NCLB more than any issues you bring up. Good luck with those Mandarin lessons.
Kurt9, I’m the parent of two boys who attend a public elementary school in Austin, Texas — quite a liberal-left city. Do I count? My sons are learning to read with a combination of whole words (because they need to be able to recognize common words at a glance) and phonics (because they need to be able to sound out words they haven’t memorized yet). And they are introduced to basic grammar concepts starting in second grade. The school they attend has the highest rating possible in Texas for students reading at or above grade level. Are we doing it wrong? Or maybe “what you’ve heard” is not the current standard in modern education pedagogy?
Guys,
I’m not just making this up. Everything I have said is based on what I have been told by people I know. When I first heard these things, I did not believe them myself. I don’t my friends would be making it up either. You guys can say what you want, but it does not agree with what my friends are telling me about the school system today.
Well guys I don’t think we can really argue with kurt9 here. After all, he heard it from somewhere. Compelling stuff.
“I read it on the internet, it must be true.” — Jimmy Buffett
The school they attend has the highest rating possible in Texas for students reading at or above grade level.
Wouldn’t this sort of make your school an outlier? Is what’s happening there being done east of I-35?
Generally, though I agree. The problem isn’t so much quack trends as the general dishonesty mandated by the NCLB. The big problem we had in Houston was a tendency to either shed bad students through shell games and transfers or to just push them along. This happened under Mr. “Education” President’s Secretary of Education stint as superintendent.
One of my beefs with trends, though, is the tendency in history to deprecate memorizing dates of significant events. The rationalization for this was that it was more important to understand the “why” instead of the “when.” Unfortunately, you really need the “when” to get to the “why.” I never got a good handle on synchronizing historical epochs until I made a point of commiting key dates to history. One example is that I was reading about the Tudors and then went on to read about the rise of the Spanish Empire. Knowing the dates of events in Tudor England helped contextualize things going on in Habsburg Europe.
As for Heather’s example. We need to know more about the project and the class. If it’s part of a solid regimen of facts and formulae, then it’s probably helpful. If it’s being used in place of a solid regimen of facts and formulae…not so much.