Quick Takes: Scrutiny for Student Aid System, Conflicts of Interest, Grad Student Killed in Iraq, Security at Mass. Colleges, Help for Mentally Ill, Strengthening ‘Public’ Scholarship, New Campaign for Antioch, U.S. Warning on Private Loans, Math Teachers

Way Too Obvious ... Or Way Too Important?

Some reports are just soooo obvious they don’t deserve the space allotted.

On the other hand – and, Doug and Scott, I’m not challenging your choice of “feature” articles and essays today or any day – some potential articles are so much more important than what gets top billing in IHE, they deserve most of the space available.

We so infrequently see anything about higher education’s role in science and mathematics education in the U.S. on these pages, it’s very frustrating. Truth be known, I am much more concerned with the sorry state of American K-16 students’ knowledge of science and mathematics – including comparisons of our “successes” in those areas with the accomplishments of other “developed” nations – than I am concerned with another iteration of what’s going on at the “for-profits” ... or who’s who in diversity whatever this week ... or who’s suing whom over management of student loans ... or what idiotic university has decided to underwrite a Division I football program ... or hearing Professor X’s take on the intricacies of transfer credit.

Granted the National Council on Teacher Quality’s analysis of state guidelines for mathematics training for elementary school teachers belabors the well-studied obvious (it must have something to do with getting your drinking water from the Mississippi)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-...icle/2008/06/26/AR2008062600005.html

but it’s waaay more important than any of the other issues highlighted in IHE today.

In my opinion, InsideHigherEd should address its imbalanced reporting of issues of interest to the second-level administrators and staff amongst us in favor of issues of interest to those who are most important in higher education, the teachers, students, and research scholars. Let The Chronicle of Higher Education continue its emphasis on the former.

P.S. You’ve got to love the observation of Francis Fennell, past president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, who defensively said, “the study’s authors should have surveyed teachers to get their views on how well prepared they were to teach math.”

As much as any other organization, NCTM is responsible for the sorry state of mathematics education in this country.

P.P.S. Why would we not see on IHE pages, for example, a prolonged discussion of something as incredibly important to higher education as the extent to which information availability and technology is spelling the demise of the scientific method?

That’s the sort of thing I hoped IHE would be about!

Frizbane Manley, at 11:00 am EDT on June 26, 2008

Teaching Math/Science and IHE

Frizbane Manley,

As you have noted, IHE is not a “news” outlet that reports the most important happenings in higher education.

IHE is concerned with “shaping minds” “for all of the many constituents and diverse institutions” etc.

I would like to see a competitor to IHE that truly wants to serve the interests of those in higher education, as opposed to catering to a tiny (but vocal) worldview based on class, race, and gender.

ACF

ACF, at 12:30 pm EDT on June 26, 2008

Teaching Math

Let’s see ... for centuries we learned math by practice, and this included drilling of math facts. We made it to the moon. Then the calculator industry got to increase their market share exponentially by persuading the teaching community to mandate calculator-based instruction in the early grades, so as not to “drill and kill.” This would free the minds of our young geniuses-to-be. Now these minds are free to have to reinvent the wheel each time they scratch their heads at fractions, and they are unable to interpret bad data when viewing the result of electronic computations. So much for any benefit from early use of calculators. If this generation had to use the old methods to reach the moon again, they would have a much harder time at it.

The state of collective math knowledge today should serve as a reminder when rushing to embrace the next and newest shiny technologies for classroom use. I say Back to the Basics in the early years.

DFS, at 9:40 am EDT on June 27, 2008

RE: Why Antioch

I am a graduate from the early 1990’s... Certainly a lower point in the overall history of Antioch...

After I graduated... I was accepted in two of the three IVY League graduate programs I applied to. I spent three years at Yale and nearly graduated in the top 10% of my class.

It was only because I went to Antioch that I developed academic integrity... academic interests and intellectual prowess.

My professors were top notch and prepared me extremely well for classes at Cornell and Yale.

The program at Antioch was rigorous and life-transforming. My homework load was always intense.

Sure, there were always a lot of “strange” people running around there doing nutty things... but these were often the same people that made the learning opportunity there so rich.

I have lost touch with the school and how it fell apart financially... however, it was a great school.

Anyway, I am not really sure what you meant by “decline of academic integrity.” I am sure that this is not a phenomenon unique to Antioch.

In my experience, it’s the “shocking lifestyle” choices and appearances of many of the students there that immediately makes former generations uncomfortable... or leads them to believe that quality of education has gone down.

It is my understanding that the quality of education has gone down almost everywhere...I am not even sure how they measure this quality... not sure what data or rubric they use to determine quality...

In any case, I think it would be horrible if the school closed. It offered a truly unique educational experience that one would have trouble finding elsewhere. Despite what you have heard or read... there was always a significant faction of very serious students preparing for their futre.

I would like to see it managed better first.

Geoff, at 6:35 pm EDT on July 3, 2008

Back To You Mr. Gettys

I was hardly applying mathematics to a social issue ... not even close. I was merely using a mathematical example to explain a simple matter of vocabulary to you.

The solution – you may want to call it the resolution – to the “problem” is easily ascertained by defining “rule.” First, I assume we are both using “rule’ as a noun.

R1: Habit ... “it was his rule to knock on wood before making a wish.”

R2: Prescribed guide for conduct or action ... “as a rule U.S. Marines are forbidden to grow goatees.”

R3: Linguistics, a rule describing (or prescribing) practice ... “i before e except after c, except when said ‘ay’ as in ‘neighbor’ and ‘weigh.’”

R4: Principle (a basic generalization that is accepted as true and can be used as a basis for reasoning or conduct) ... “For any declarative sentences, p and q, if p is false, then ‘if p, then q’ is true.”

R5: The duration of a monarch’s or government’s power ... “It occurred during the rule of George III.”

R6: Probability: As a rule, NBA centers are taller than NBA guards.”

R7: Directions for a game or sport ... “She knows the rules of backgammon.”

R8: Principle: (a law concerning a natural phenomenon or the function of a complex system) ... “The direction of the magnetic field is easily found by using the right-hand rule.”

R9: Mathematics (a standard procedure for solving a class of mathematical problems) ... “If the last three digits of a number are divisible by 8, then the number is divisible by 8.”

R10 Half-baked conjecture ... “Taylor’s rule (law) describes how a central bank like the Federal Reserve should set short-term interest rates as economic conditions change to achieve both its short-run goal for stabilizing the economy and its long-run goal for inflation.”

Now, I assume neither of us is thinking of a rule in terms of R5.

If the “definition” of rule is along the lines of R2, R4, R7, R8, or R9, then my statement about there being no exception(s) to the rule is right on the button.

If the “definition” is along the lines of R1, R3, R6, or R10, then there are definitely exceptions to the rule ... but it really pains me to resist putting rule in quotation marks in this sentence.

And you see, I am obviously not applying mathematics to social issues. If anything, I am discussing logic and the careful use of words. Of course I feel compelled to repeat, “and that’s why we need better mathematics training for our elementary, middle, and secondary school teachers.”

Frizbane Manley, at 8:20 pm EDT on July 6, 2008

Science “versus” Art

I had in fact expressed my own concern about the state of math and science education in another version of my original comment, “Frizbane and Rules.” The wrong version appeared.

Not surprisingly, we tend to privilege our own academic discourse or epistemology, or way of knowing over others’. But we need more than one. Consider Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” the poet’s response (common among poets in those days) to the rise of Logical Positivism in the 19th c.:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,/When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,/When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,/ When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with muchapplause in the lecture-room,/How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,/Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,/In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,/Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

James W. Gettys, at 11:40 am EDT on July 10, 2008

A Syllogism

Well-defined problem solving takes place in a (social-historical) sea of NECESSARILY ill-defined problems, as the psychology text Cognition, by Margaret W. Matlin, points out. And “Some psychologists have argued that all problems—even those that are typically considered well defined—are really somewhat ill defined. Simon (1973) suggests that the boundary between well-defined problems is quite vague and fluid—it cannot be formally described.”

The book gives examples. Could it be that math can actually train people in a kind of “blindness” to the ill-defined, fuzzy boundaries between things? (Look up, say, Deconstruction and Theoretical Math.) Could it “indoctrinate” by instilling math and hard science students with (dare I say it?) a kind of arrogance about their disciplines?

I’ve certainly witnessed plenty arrogance within in my own field! And I share your worry about the state of math, even as enrollments in the humanities also have plummeted in recent decades. (What ARE students studying nowadays?)

I wholly support your call: Teach students to strive for logic and linguistic accuracy: no less important in treating ill-defined problems.

Neither has science been immune to lapsing into false science (See Stephen J. Gould’s essay “Women’s Brains” as but a single example): nor immune to resisting paradigm shifts, as in Galen’s resistance to William Harvey on blood circulation). What we wouldn’t want is to produce engineers or physicists (or English majors with their own versions thereof) to think like Prof. Ethan (at least as I understood him) in our lengthy exchange in IHE July 1-7:

1) Math and science solve well-defined problems. 2) I am a mathematician/scientist. 3) Therefore, I am qualified to tell English professors how to teach students to grapple with literary problems that cannot be well defined (i.e. insisting that they leave off discussing the relevant—though messy—social-historical processes that generate literature in the first place.)I hope you see the non sequitur. You’re a mathematician. Explain it to him. According to that reasoning I must drop from my syllabus Whitman’s poem above (indeed every single text that appears in any anthology!) as well as the one below:

“It is difficult/ to get the news/ from poems, yet men die/ miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there.”

—William Carlos Williams “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”

James W. Gettys, at 1:55 pm EDT on July 10, 2008