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On Sun, 19 Aug 2001 16:37:52 -0700 Tom Sullivan wrote:
>The same principle holds true for (some) high school students and graduates
>who can not write coherent sentences and paragraphs, coupled with their
>inability to spell correctly. My neighbor is a high school English teacher
>and has frequently told me horror stories about the abilities (or lack
>thereof) of some of the students she has attempted to teach.
I have not seen a US-educated person under the age of 30 in a long, long
time who could write worth a damn. In fact, I have seen very few *school
teachers* in my kids' public schools who can put together an entire
paragraph without at least one error in spelling, grammar, usage or
punctuation. It's a disgrace. I am constantly having to correct my kids'
teachers' "corrections"! It goes way beyond schools: I cannot read a
newspaper, magazine, or even read something off the TV screen without
finding gross errors in spelling and grammar. Apparently the people who
write for nationally known newspapers can't even use a spell checker these
days.
By comparison, I rarely read anything written in English by someone educated
outside the US, which has as many errors as I find in American writing.
Even people for whom English is a second or third language do better than
many native speakers.
>Another friend is a college Math instructor. She says that up to one-third
>of her semester in class, is review work specifically to make sure that
>students are up to par before she goes on to the work the class is designed
>to teach. She says it is this way in algebra, trigonometry, and calculus.
I have tried many times to take college level calculus, not because I need
it but because I love math and would love to learn calculus as an
intellectual discipline. I have failed repeatedly because of the mechanics
of the class as taught at undergraduate levels: the standard is 40+ hours a
week of homework, the equivalent of a full time job. None of the instructors
was a professor, they were invariably foreign graduate students whose
command of English was poor at best, who had no training in curriculum
development or the art of teaching. The texts were taught by rote and the
explanations were perfunctory. When I have asked for help from teachers or
even department heads, I have been told to my face that calculus is taught
deliberately in this way "to screen out people who aren't serious about
becoming engineers", in the same way organic chemistry is used to weed out
people from the medical professions. I consider this tantamount to a public
fraud. I have no interest in becoming an engineer, and I do expect to be
taught calculus with no hidden agenda. But until our system of teaching
calculus is reformed, we can expect to hand over the next generation of
technological advances to non-US educated persons.
>When I was in school there were no pocket calculators. I was in my teens
>before the transistor was widely used to miniaturize electronic devices.
We
>had to learn math the old fashioned way. We memorized the multiplication
>tables. I don't know if that is still required in school.
Both my kids (in middle and elementary school) have been required to
memorize the multiplication tables. Nor are they permitted to use
calculators in the local public schools until they have mastered the basic
four functions. Calculators are permitted in checking answers, but the real
meat of math instruction is, as it was when I was in school, a matter of
"showing your work". A calculator can get you the right answer, but my kids
are graded on whether they went through the proper steps to get that answer.
No calculator I know of, not even my Mac running Mathematica, can do that.
>Even some of the "highly educated" folks in my current line of work have
>serious (glaring) Math and English deficiencies. And these are not people
>from broken homes, from the ghetto, or from second-class institutions of
>higher learning. They are however, generally folks under age forty.
I have found the same thing to be true. What's most annoying is when they
want to retain errors in material I have proofed/corrected, because they've
seen the same errors they perpetuate in the industry journals. When an
article in a trade journal misuses a term, or commits an error, most of the
engineers and software developers I work with accept that mistake and don't
want me to "correct" it when they do the same. I have had people put
misspelled words *back* into a document. The universal reaction to my
corrections is to dismiss proper English as something for nitpicky
obsessive-compulsives. And these same dismissive folk *do* tend to be
younger than forty. :)
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A landmark hotel, one of America's most beautiful cities, and
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IPCC 01, Oct. 24-27 in Santa Fe. http://ieeepcs.org/2001/
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