I've written several recent posts about the decline of math education. It's usually not mathematics professors who want to dumb down math, it's math education professors who want to.
Remember Jaime Escalante, about whom the movie Stand and Deliver was made? How far have we sunk?
I’m so old I can remember Jesse Jackson challenging black kids in the 1970s by asking, “What could you accomplish if you spent as much time and worked as hard at math as you do at basketball”? No black “leader” will dare say such a thing today. Instead, they will be told they are victims of white supremacy, because math itself is white supremacy.
To be sure, Escalante is a rare teacher. He was absolutely riveting in person. And while that kind of genius can’t be easily acquired, it can be studied and emulated as an example of human excellence and effective pedagogy. I suspect the number of education schools that teach a case study about Escalante (or Marva Collins, who I also met once) is precisely zero.
Instead of Escalante’s challenge, students at the University of Illinois they will get this....
3 comments:
I was only a third of the way through her bio and already I was thinking "Holy C***"
Recently, I noticed that my alma mater has a Department of Engineering Education. I don't know what they do, but it probably isn't what the departments of Physics and Mathematics do for the College of Engineering.
The Department of Engineering Education is part of the College of Engineering, along with Electrical, Mechanical, and the other actual engineering disciplines. The department chairs must meet occasionally. Do the other department chairs smirk a little bit?
The initial web page for the Department of Engineering Education prominently displays their "Department Health and Community Safety Plan" and the "Department Statement of Racial Injustice". The page for my department, the mechanical engineers, prominently displays a drone built by two undergrads to assist first responders.
Clearly one of those departments is more useful than the others.
"living mathematx"? Oh, boy ...
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