(no subject)
Oct. 7th, 2014 08:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnI just started tutoring this kid C. in physics.
The person or group who put together the science class sequence for our local high school, and who decided the ninth graders should take physics -- I am not sure whether this is a local thing or a California thing or what; C.'s mom seemed to think it was local school board thing, and I certainly hope it is not all of California that is suffering this way -- should be dragged out andshot forced to sit in the middle of a ninth-grade physics class and watch them all flail about. Personally I wonder if shooting might be more humane. It is painful just watching C. flail about, and she's only the one kid. I feel really, really sorry for the physics teacher and even sorrier for the kids.
Also, C.'s math education is super bothering me. Basically I'm not at all happy with American public school education this week.
When I was going through my local high school, ninth grade was biology, tenth grade was chemistry, eleventh grade was an advanced science class (either AP bio, AP chem, or "earth science" -- I don't know what earth science is), and twelfth grade was physics. There are good reasons for this ordering, mostly to do with math.
The first is that it's a natural progression from a science with less math to a science with more math. Biology has very simple quantitative logic required as well as simple pre-algebra-type math (simple fractions for Punnett squares, being able to calculate the occasional ratio for DNA and such; that's the only math I can remember). Chemistry has more; you have to be able to be very good at converting units, you have to be very comfortable with figuring out ratios and such, you have to be able to deal with simple equations, like the ideal gas law, that involve directly and inversely varying quantities. Occasionally there's a very small amount of algebra, usually in "enrichment" problems. By the time you get to physics, basically you have to start OUT with those skills; they're taken for granted in your first kinematics lecture.
So if you do it in that order (bio->chem->phys) you naturally build on the math skills you learned in previous science classes. If you start out with physics... you have to learn all those things before you can do any PHYSICS. Who thought this was a good idea??? Which... I guess you could have a two-month boot camp where you taught all this stuff, but... then how are you going to have time to teach any physics? Whereas in chemistry, if you learn how to muck about with ratios you have actually learned how to do some useful chemistry problems (e.g., calculating how much of something is made in a chemical reaction, etc.)
The other reason is that before twelfth grade or so, maybe eleventh grade, most kids (I am discounting the motivated mathematically inclined students, of course, as this entire rant isn't applicable to them anyway) don't have the math skills or the practice with math to really be comfortable with a course where that kind of familiarity is expected. (It might not be that much better after two more years, judging from C. -- that's another rant later in this post, how her math education has failed her even though she's a bright child, a smart kid -- but I've got to believe it's at least a little better in two years!)
Plus which there are some things that just don't even make any sense to teach if you don't have the math. How am I supposed to teach a ninth grader that you integrate the area under a velocity curve to get the total displacement? Oh, my (non-local) magnet high school (which selected for a good math level, so wasn't prone to so many of these problems) used to do it with eleventh graders: essentially, you have to teach them from scratch a discretized version of differentiation and integration. Which a) is still quite a lot of trouble, and in my recollection half the students ended up confused anyway until they got to calculus (while those of us who had had calculus were like, why don't we just call this a derivative and integral?), and b) takes a lot of time which, uh, you don't have if you're also trying to teach them about units and inversely varying quantities. UGH.
(Now, it is true that college physics classes have a venerable history of teaching math. E.g., most of what the physics and engineering majors I know know about linear algebra we didn't learn in math class, but rather in physics/engineering classes. But college physics/engineering classes have a LOT more freedom to do this kind of thing.)
And about that math education. C. cannot take an equation that looks like v = d/t and solve that equation for d. She does not know the metric system. She does not know fractions. I tried to teach her the factor label method for converting units, which I thoguht would only take a short period of time, but she looked at me as if I were an alien when I informed her she needed to multiply the numerators and divide the denominators. She does not know decimals. (Decimals!) ARRGH. It's not because she's stupid! That I would understand! (She does have ADD and her mom says she is a "visual learner," but I haven't noticed either of those things -- she seems to react pretty well to the same techniques I've used with other students. But I could imagine that it has an impact on her classroom learning.) Just -- something has gone really wrong.
The other thing is, I think actually that part of her difficulty is that she is the kind of kid who really wants to understand something before she can learn it. My sister was the same way, and I basically tutored her through half her math and all of her physics classes (half of what I know about tutoring I learned from her). The school system does not reward that kind of learner! My sister is now an excellent and awesome scientist BECAUSE of that same trait, but it really killed her in school. It's really wrong that our school system rewards people who can follow directions without understanding things and penalizes people who don't do that. But at the same time I can understand that they don't have the resources to make sure everyone understands everything. ARGH.
I just don't know. I think her math difficulties are on the extreme side (at least I hope so), but it really, really bothers me that I have a very strong sense from things she and her mom have said that she's not the only one who is utterly lost, at least in physics. I don't know what to do about it. I used to have these grand pipe dreams about revamping the math educational system because kids don't really need to know calculus to graduate, but everyone should know some probability and statistics to live life.
I still think that. But something fundamental is just broken, and that has to be fixed first and I don't know how to do it. If you don't understand decimals, there are so many doors that automatically close for you. Forget about STEM. You will have trouble doing, say, nursing (where you have to calculate dosages, and get them RIGHT). Architects and surveyors presumably need to know how to, well, measure things. Any kind of financial job. Any kind of job where probabilities are even discussed.
Also, ugh, I'm going to be learning a lot about fraction and decimal pedagogy in the next couple of weeks. I've got a lot of experience in explaining high school science, as well as having had good pedagogy examples in both my chemistry and physics teachers -- but very little on either score for explaining fractions, which I've always assumed the kid understood, and I don't even remember how I learned them! Oh well. I suppose figuring out how to explain this stuff will come in useful for E. or something.
The person or group who put together the science class sequence for our local high school, and who decided the ninth graders should take physics -- I am not sure whether this is a local thing or a California thing or what; C.'s mom seemed to think it was local school board thing, and I certainly hope it is not all of California that is suffering this way -- should be dragged out and
Also, C.'s math education is super bothering me. Basically I'm not at all happy with American public school education this week.
When I was going through my local high school, ninth grade was biology, tenth grade was chemistry, eleventh grade was an advanced science class (either AP bio, AP chem, or "earth science" -- I don't know what earth science is), and twelfth grade was physics. There are good reasons for this ordering, mostly to do with math.
The first is that it's a natural progression from a science with less math to a science with more math. Biology has very simple quantitative logic required as well as simple pre-algebra-type math (simple fractions for Punnett squares, being able to calculate the occasional ratio for DNA and such; that's the only math I can remember). Chemistry has more; you have to be able to be very good at converting units, you have to be very comfortable with figuring out ratios and such, you have to be able to deal with simple equations, like the ideal gas law, that involve directly and inversely varying quantities. Occasionally there's a very small amount of algebra, usually in "enrichment" problems. By the time you get to physics, basically you have to start OUT with those skills; they're taken for granted in your first kinematics lecture.
So if you do it in that order (bio->chem->phys) you naturally build on the math skills you learned in previous science classes. If you start out with physics... you have to learn all those things before you can do any PHYSICS. Who thought this was a good idea??? Which... I guess you could have a two-month boot camp where you taught all this stuff, but... then how are you going to have time to teach any physics? Whereas in chemistry, if you learn how to muck about with ratios you have actually learned how to do some useful chemistry problems (e.g., calculating how much of something is made in a chemical reaction, etc.)
The other reason is that before twelfth grade or so, maybe eleventh grade, most kids (I am discounting the motivated mathematically inclined students, of course, as this entire rant isn't applicable to them anyway) don't have the math skills or the practice with math to really be comfortable with a course where that kind of familiarity is expected. (It might not be that much better after two more years, judging from C. -- that's another rant later in this post, how her math education has failed her even though she's a bright child, a smart kid -- but I've got to believe it's at least a little better in two years!)
Plus which there are some things that just don't even make any sense to teach if you don't have the math. How am I supposed to teach a ninth grader that you integrate the area under a velocity curve to get the total displacement? Oh, my (non-local) magnet high school (which selected for a good math level, so wasn't prone to so many of these problems) used to do it with eleventh graders: essentially, you have to teach them from scratch a discretized version of differentiation and integration. Which a) is still quite a lot of trouble, and in my recollection half the students ended up confused anyway until they got to calculus (while those of us who had had calculus were like, why don't we just call this a derivative and integral?), and b) takes a lot of time which, uh, you don't have if you're also trying to teach them about units and inversely varying quantities. UGH.
(Now, it is true that college physics classes have a venerable history of teaching math. E.g., most of what the physics and engineering majors I know know about linear algebra we didn't learn in math class, but rather in physics/engineering classes. But college physics/engineering classes have a LOT more freedom to do this kind of thing.)
And about that math education. C. cannot take an equation that looks like v = d/t and solve that equation for d. She does not know the metric system. She does not know fractions. I tried to teach her the factor label method for converting units, which I thoguht would only take a short period of time, but she looked at me as if I were an alien when I informed her she needed to multiply the numerators and divide the denominators. She does not know decimals. (Decimals!) ARRGH. It's not because she's stupid! That I would understand! (She does have ADD and her mom says she is a "visual learner," but I haven't noticed either of those things -- she seems to react pretty well to the same techniques I've used with other students. But I could imagine that it has an impact on her classroom learning.) Just -- something has gone really wrong.
The other thing is, I think actually that part of her difficulty is that she is the kind of kid who really wants to understand something before she can learn it. My sister was the same way, and I basically tutored her through half her math and all of her physics classes (half of what I know about tutoring I learned from her). The school system does not reward that kind of learner! My sister is now an excellent and awesome scientist BECAUSE of that same trait, but it really killed her in school. It's really wrong that our school system rewards people who can follow directions without understanding things and penalizes people who don't do that. But at the same time I can understand that they don't have the resources to make sure everyone understands everything. ARGH.
I just don't know. I think her math difficulties are on the extreme side (at least I hope so), but it really, really bothers me that I have a very strong sense from things she and her mom have said that she's not the only one who is utterly lost, at least in physics. I don't know what to do about it. I used to have these grand pipe dreams about revamping the math educational system because kids don't really need to know calculus to graduate, but everyone should know some probability and statistics to live life.
I still think that. But something fundamental is just broken, and that has to be fixed first and I don't know how to do it. If you don't understand decimals, there are so many doors that automatically close for you. Forget about STEM. You will have trouble doing, say, nursing (where you have to calculate dosages, and get them RIGHT). Architects and surveyors presumably need to know how to, well, measure things. Any kind of financial job. Any kind of job where probabilities are even discussed.
Also, ugh, I'm going to be learning a lot about fraction and decimal pedagogy in the next couple of weeks. I've got a lot of experience in explaining high school science, as well as having had good pedagogy examples in both my chemistry and physics teachers -- but very little on either score for explaining fractions, which I've always assumed the kid understood, and I don't even remember how I learned them! Oh well. I suppose figuring out how to explain this stuff will come in useful for E. or something.
no subject
Date: 2014-10-07 07:32 pm (UTC)Agreed that it's terrible that school systems penalize people who actually want to understand what they're learning. It seems especially awkward to foist physics upon kids who haven't had a strong enough math prep to feel comfortable with fractions and that notation; it seems unlikely to me that C. is alone there.
Earth sci is seismology and geology, no? That's what it was in my sixth- and seventh-grade units, anyway. Eighth was tilted towards life sci because it had the second of three carefully spaced sex ed units (also fifth and tenth grades). For my district, in HS science was elective, and most people took "college prep" bio and chem in tenth and eleventh, then stopped. I had bio in ninth, chem in tenth, AP bio eleventh while most of my friends took AP chem, and AP physics in twelfth; I was waiting for actual college-caliber chem lab facilities at college. There weren't other options, though they've added an anatomy class since.
no subject
Date: 2014-10-07 09:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-10-08 12:34 pm (UTC)My middle-school-ish science background was very odd (I got moved around some due to being advanced in math and having a strange schedule to accommodate that), so I never did take the earth science units :) Oh, sex ed... that was not very well organized in my school system (probably on purpose); in Health we were told we'd get it in Biology, and in Biology we were told we'd get it in Health.
no subject
Date: 2014-10-08 12:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-10-08 03:21 pm (UTC)Yes to most of this, absolutely. Our school tracked science courses to math courses, because it's only logical to do for all the reasons you laid out. Of course, I still learned a bit of algebra from my general chemistry course, and I learned some calculus from physics, but for the most part the math fed into the science as it should. Our advanced track program had bio in ninth, chem in 10th, non-calc physics in 11th, and then the freedom to do whatever you wanted in 12th, which in my case was AP chem and AP physics at the same time because I'm an idiot.
Non-calc physics worked the first time because the non-calc physics teacher was a jaded asshole who told us that nothing we were doing was going to make sense until we had the calculus, and if we asked where the 1/2 came from in the displacement as a function of velocity and acceleration formula, he would tell us "I'll tell you when you're older." So the class was about developing intuition about the physical world, solving simpler physics problems that can be done with algebra, and learning the vocabulary of physics. Also, most of us were taking calculus concurrent to the physics class, so we kind of had a sense of where these numbers were coming from even if we couldn't quite work them out ourselves yet.
But seriously, fuck attempts to teach discretized fake calculus with pseudo-Simpson's method. That just makes people fear calculus: "Look, there is this useful thing we want to be able to do, and there is a really straightforward and elegant way to do it... we're not going to teach you that. We're going to teach you a messy and tedious way to do it that no sane person would ever use."
But I am very familiar with the frustrating phenomenon of tutoring someone in science and math that you are deeply familiar with and having the constant feeling that their teachers have been failing them for years before you got to them. I had to help my little brother with math and physics all through high school because whatever the hell nonsense they were trying to teach him wasn't working. It was repeatedly horrifying to sit down with him and realize just how far behind me-at-his-age he was and not know how to remedy the problem. It was generally a two-step process for me: first, detangling the new pedagogical approach they had attempted so I could figure out what my brother had actually learned, and only after that, trying to explain the math to him in a way that made sense to him and would hopefully still make sense the next day when his teacher used an entirely different vocabulary for talking about the math. I wish you great luck, I certainly was a failure at this with my little brother.
no subject
Date: 2014-10-09 03:58 pm (UTC)And yes, I'm not saying that one can't learn math from science classes in high school -- it was in chemistry where I learned how to efficiently change units, which sort of straddles that borderline between science and math -- but it should complement the math one has already (hopefully) learned.
Your physics teacher actually sounds kind of cool, and not that different from my physics teacher (who is part of the reason I stayed in physics).
But seriously, fuck attempts to teach discretized fake calculus with pseudo-Simpson's method. That just makes people fear calculus
ahahahaha, yes. In C.'s case, I ended up punting the whole problem of pseudo-Simpson's method by telling her, "Look, if he gives you a problem like this, just count the squares under the curve," without giving her anything in the way of justification. Which I hate. I hate doing stuff like that. But in this case I can't see how it would actually help and could very well hurt by confusing the heck out of her.
What was the new pedagogical approach they attempted with your brother? Ugh, that sounds awful. My sister only had the normal slate of inferior teachers and old-fashioned pedagogy to deal with. I don't even know what C.'s story is yet, as we haven't had time to get into it.
no subject
Date: 2014-10-12 06:26 am (UTC)My own math weaknesses probably are directly attributable to early morning geometry. I am really, really not a morning person, and those bleary 8 AM proofs came back to haunt me in college calc.
no subject
Date: 2014-10-14 07:20 pm (UTC)