Long rant: I am going to preface my thoughts with a few things. First, if you dont know, I have 2 degrees in chemistry and am a faculty member (now administrator) at a high quality public university whose mission is to educate regular folks. That makes me someone with an actual STEM job in todays vernacular. I have been an early adopter of active teaching pedagogy and when I am in the classroom (not so often anymore, unless you count my online classroom) I am not the proverbial sage on the stage,instead I encourage active participation and inquiry learning that promotes the development of critical thinking skills. I have resisted any urge to dumb down standards, rather I choose to encourage my students to reach the standards I have set, which were set in my educational lifetime by the faculty who taught me and those who taught them. I have been in this profession 15 years and I have seen my share of students who struggle with, or despise, any form of math or science. I have seen those, who actually somewhat like math or science, struggle with it. I have seen their work on paper and known in my heart that they just dont even get basic mathematical concepts which, in turn, hold them back in science. I have been interested in and an advocate for girls in science. I read the literature and know that girls are often, historically, turned off to harder STEM topics around middle school, when the pressure to look and act a certain way impedes the social desires to look cool, mature quickly and join the crowd in lusting after the boys on the new middle school football team. I am also a parent of a 17 year old girl who excels in math and science at her private school, yet to this day, continues to lack confidence in her STEM abilities at her core being, something I first saw develop in her 7th grade math class (the one and only time I met with a teacher and pretty much questioned everything she was doing). With all that being said, I find myself increasingly concerned and dismayed every time I get on FB, basically since September, when mom friends began posting about how horrible their kids math homework was. These poor moms (and probably dads) have dealt with crying, frustration and anger on a nightly basis. The parents have expressed time and time again that they do not even know how to help their child because they cannot understand the math themselves. Now, these are not just the viral posts that go around FB about wrong answers, testing, Pearson, conservative/religious issues with Common Core. These are real parents, every night, dealing with stressed out, upset elementary school children. These are parents who cannot understand 1st, 2nd, 3rd grade homework. They are the parents of both girls and boys, but overall, MOSTLY girls, crying every week and caring moms who have to reassure them that if they fail their test tomorrow they will still be loved and accepted, which is the opposite of todays testing = success mantra. I am at my wits end. Thus, this post. This post is not about politics in any way, it is about the future of STEM education in this country. I am not sure what change I can effect, but someone needs to figure out how to REALLY teach math and science while raising standards all the while preventing turning another generation of young girls away from STEM at an even EARLIER age than middle school. Someone needs to realize that the STEM faculty at average, caring and quality universities have no plans to use the methods of new math (i.e common core or any other fancy construct) at the college level. They will increasingly have to spend additional time, unteaching and reteaching that which has been ingrained in students at crucial, foundation building moments in their students education. This in turn puts pressure on universities as politicians question the DFW rates and push a completion agenda on colleges. Mom friends, I feel for you. I am fortunate enough to be able to send my kids to a private school where, while I have seen a little bit of new math in my 2nd grade sons homework, the crying and frustration have been minimal. We are still rote memorizing times tables and learning other basic math skills in traditional ways. For once, we are fortunate to live in a state that has been slow to adopt common core changes. Usually GA is backwards, too conservative and falling behind (just watch our ridiculous overly redneck, pandering political ads this season, from both sides). Our public education is in shambles, but so far on these issues, my GA mom friends are at least not the ones having to rebuild the self-esteem of their daughters around 3rd grade math. Please excuse any typos or poor grammar, I was a STEM major after-all. ;-)
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 10:19:24 +0000
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