>> .. why are schools so reluctant to expose children to anything that looks like rigorous training?
<<

My experience is that a lot of parents don’t know anymore what rigorous training looks like; rigorous training simply doesn’t have the same meaning for them as it would have for most of the readers of this blog.

In addition, in any teaching or coaching area I think it is hard for an outsider to distinguish between rigorous training and high volume work that’s not well thought out (think homework assignments).

There’s also some sort of “magical thinking” everywhere in the popular culture.

For learning hockey well, it makes sense for most people sense to group kids by mastery and motivation, it makes sense most people to seek out good coaches and good programs in the belief that they make a difference.
For most people it would also make sense that the kid has to attend the practices, pay attention and practice repeatedly the way the coach has shown.

For learning school subjects well we can teach kids at different level of mastery and motivation together, any teacher is as good as the next, any way of teaching goes and kids are supposed to discover things on their own and once they understand something, practice is not that important because it is boring and destroys creativity.

? ...

In my previous post I was talking about the parents because it puzzles and annoys me why so many uncritically accept the current situation.

Why the math curriculum and the math textbooks don’t emphasize rigorous training ... that’s even more fundamental because they are supposedly written by people who know math.

How anybody in their right mind can believe that a student can “think” without being able to do basic operations well or how can a student learn how to reliably solve problems without solving a lot of them is beyond reason.

How can we expect students to eventually understand algebra without having mastered multiplications, fractions, exponents is again beyond reason.

The only possible explanations is either there is some political corectness imposed from the top that imposes this curriculum or that the so called math experts are not at all experts in math.

What do you think? How did we end up with the current way of “teaching” math?

Hey Europe,

Your question, “How did we end up with the current way of “teaching” math?”, can be extended to all curriculum areas.  At some point in the early 90’s, I started encountering administrators who were more concerned that the students could be ‘saved’.  The implication was that it was more important to worry about their feelings and attitudes rather than worrying about attendance, punctuality and mastery of subject.  It has been a steady, downhill slide since then.

* Ok, so that probably explains the spiral curriculum part when you never fully master something once and forever but you keep repeating the same stuff - with very little extra - year after year.
The good students get bored and give up trying to learn since it will come again anyway, the poor students never get enough repetition to fully master it but look good because they’ve heard about it and know “something” about it.
I don’t think one can come with a more idiotic method of teaching fractions! They start fractions in grade 2 and keep doing fractions every year until .. so far my son has finished grade 6 math so I’m curious if there will fractions again next year. I’ll let you know.

* How about never teaching the standard multiplication algorithms or teaching them just as an alternative to estimating or doing a weird sums of partial products thingy that takes rows and rows of writing for a simple 4 digits by 4 digits multiplication?
How can one explain the idiocy of that?

Europe,

I always like your posts - you always hit the nail on the head.  When you ask, “How can one explain the idiocy of that?”,  there is no explanation, at least not by the Ministry or boards.  In fact, were you to go to your local board office and explain your ideas to them, you will probably be told that it is simply ‘drill and kill’.  I always bristle when I hear that term - it is as insipid as it is dismissive.

Nevertheless, it has become part of their mantra.  Remember, the goal of the Ontario education system is not to create a generation of expert students, rather a group of people who feel good about themselves.  Furthermore, please remember a large minority of the parents in the province (indeed, reading the NY Times and Washington Post - much if North America) have bought into this philosophy as well.

This aim reaches far beyond education as well.  Back in the spring, a local minor league soccer association outside of Ottawa hit the news with its new ‘mercy rule’.  Rather than simply not counting goals after the score becomes lopsided, they decided it would be a good idea to have teams lose by default if they score more than 5 goals more than their opponent.

Mind you, I see the tail end of these ‘feel good philosophies’:  18 year olds that can’t spell, can’t count and can’t survive - most tend to drop out - how good do they feel then?  Even those that graduate with decent marks (due to inflation) and are lucky enough to go to college or university are having to either take remedial courses there, or come back for another year of high school - how good do they feel?

Wayne wrote “At some point in the early 90’s, I started encountering administrators who were more concerned that the students could be ‘saved’. 

That also suggests to me that admin. looked upon their charges in a negative light and saw them as some sort of losers who needed saving. What nonsense.

“Remember, the goal of the Ontario education system is not to create a generation of expert students, rather a group of people who feel good about themselves”

.....and are dependent on the “system” as their only hope for salvation.

“I see the tail end of these ‘feel good philosophies’:  18 year olds that can’t spell, can’t count and can’t survive - most tend to drop out - how good do they feel then?  Even those that graduate with decent marks (due to inflation) and are lucky enough to go to college or university are having to either take remedial courses there, or come back for another year of high school - how good do they feel?”

That last paragraph rings so true for me at the moment because I’ve met so many university students over the summer who are in their 3rd and 4th years at their post-secondary schools but who have NO IDEA about where they’re headed or what (if any) their career goals are. They appear to be coasting into nothingness.

I believe it’s because they have little to know idea and/or experience through their educational lives to learn how to develop their goals and make choices based on their skills and interests. They’ve also been given a free pass to taking responsibility for their own futures.

Don’t worry if you fail because the world’s more accepting of it and the government social programs will be there to pick you up when you can’t get a job or end up getting psychological help because at the age of 30, you’re still coasting hoping for someone to recognize the skills you don’t have or the work ethic you developed at the hands of the state’s education system.

I can tell you that I have one of those 3rd year university coasters who lost her drive to succeed as she entered Grade 12 and saw students trying less, handing in late assignments or who didn’t complete their work getting the same high grades as she did. It taught her two things:
1) that the system really didn’t care about her or her success

And

  2) it was ok to stop trying so hard because no one noticed anyway.

  We, her parents and the advisors at her university are working overtime these days to help her rediscover that passion for learning and excitement about school that was lost.

To Chuck
>>  2) it was ok to stop trying so hard because no one noticed anyway<<

Chuck, I’m so with you on this one. That’s my biggest worry of all.
As a parent, one can manage - despite odds stacked against them - to teach or have somebody teach their child what they need to know.

However, when there are no standards or when the standards are so low that everybody gets good grades whether they have mastered the subject or not, even kids that are healthy, have no deficits and have a decent mastery of the subject up to that point, at some point give up.
Why would they keep doing good work if anything goes?
Why would they try to write legibly if the teacher says it’s ok no matter which way they scribble?
Even if they know how to spell well, why would they be careful to check their work if they see that bad spelling is perfectly acceptable?
And so on and so forth ...

See, the problem that’s the most obvious is that a lot of our students don’t have the basic skills and knowledge.

Three other problems are not so obvious but much more damaging in my opinion.

One) Students don’t know any more what good quality work looks like. Anything they do is good;they are impervious to any feedback about their work.Who is going to want to hire them?

Two) The students haven’t really mastered the subject, however they’ve had enough “exposure” to it to feel they know something.
It is very hard to build new knowledge on top of such shaky knowledge. It is a lot harder to teach them.
Teaching somebody who knows nothing from scratch rather is much easier than teaching somebody who knows something but hasn’t really mastered it because they have entrenched bad habits of thinking and an attitude.

Three) This system is grooming people that have poor work habits, lack perseverence and hardiness to persist when encountering obstacles and have high expectations about what life, society owes them or ought to give them.
We train them for 12 years that everything they do is great, that nothing matters and then the world of work or secondary education suddenly makes real demands on them.

To Wayne
>>This aim reaches far beyond education as well<<
Yes, I agree, it’s not just in education it is becoming a frequently encountered mindset.
Even in sports, or in music at the non-professional levels there is a lot of the same anything goes, it’s important to feel good.
As a parent, it is hard to find sports and music programs that do a good job in teaching the basic skills that cater to regular kids, not the ones that try to make a profession out of it. There are not a lot of them and you have to take time to go and see for yourself how they teach and you have to know what to look for.

The Kitchen Table Math blog has a recent post along the same lines; very interesting!

http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2010/08/math-in-ukraine-some-impressions-from.html