RSSCurrent Events Roundup
December 6th, 2005 | View Comments
I was browsing Donors Choose the other day and came across this proposal titled “Integrating Literacy Into My Math Classroom” that was written by a teacher who wants his/her students to read a math novel in math class.
It may sound like a new age, half-baked idea; the “Back to the Basics” school of math education is cringing right now; but this teacher is exactly right that American students often have trouble seeing the connections between subjects, and in particular have trouble seeing the connections between math and anything else. The current drive towards high-stakes testing and national standards has done little to remedy this problem and has, if anything, made it worse.
Although the reform movement has started to take hold, math is still often taught as a series of disconnected and arbitrarily defined rules and procedures that students cannot ever hope to penetrate. An embarrassingly small percentage of students ever come to understand that math is a perfect, universal language with which you can try to describe all sorts of natural and social phenomena, and thus is infinitely useful, even for day-to-day living.
I was considered an excellent math student up through high school–straight As in all my math classes, but I still had very little inkling of what it all meant. It wasn’t until I started doing research in math education and I took Modern Algebra in college (not to be confused with the algebra people take in high school) that the pieces clicked for me and I went, “Hey, this is pretty neat!”
This teacher understands that a math program that produces students who can ace the standardized tests, but hate math so much that they would rather eat dung beetles every day than ever face math again, is still a failed math program. Students retain and continue to explore what they find to be enjoyable and meaningful and abandon everything else.
Thus, if this country is to catch up with math performance elsewhere in the world, the first thing that needs to change is not students’ math knowledge, but students’ math dispositions. If students can be taught to like math and to see its beauty and its usefulness, then the content knowledge will take care of itself.
Anyways, that was a long way of saying that if you want to support quality math education, you should hop over to Donors Choose and fund this proposal.
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The White House recently issued a statement about the death penalty, repeating the tired old line that it deters crime. Never mind the statistics that strongly suggest that the death penalty does nothing of the sort.
Even ignoring the statistical data, this claim still isn’t logically valid because it rests on two faulty premises: that would-be murderers are rational actors and that premature death is a major concern of would-be murderers. Many murders are crimes of passion; there is certainly no weighing of the pros and cons before the deed, and even if there were, there’s no reason to think the balance would tip in favor of not committing the murder rather than trying harder not to get caught.
Furthermore, many would-be murderers, particularly inner city youth, don’t have much in the way of life expectancy anyways. There is evidence that many welcome jail, even death row, as a badge of honor, a rite of passage, or a way to lengthen their lives.
This is just another sign of the intellectual laziness and the lack of critical reasoning that I find so loathsome in this administration.
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Krauthammer wrote a piece about the moral calculus of torture, basically saying that banning torture across the board is ethically unwise and that there should be two carefully defined exceptions to any such ban.
I actually don’t really disagree too much with what he says, although I fear I may be one of the “supremely impracticable” types he refers to; even if torture is ethically acceptable in certain circumstances, it’s always a lose-lose situation in my book, and it should never be practiced with the kind of glee that this administration seems to partake in.
The problem with the current torture policy is, as he acknowledges, the implementation. The Bush administration cannot be trusted with anything that requires a semblance of thought or ethical behavior, and that is what makes McCain’s torture ban so attractive–if it passes, we no longer have to think through the sticky ethical questions.
It seems to me that degrading and torturous treatment is currently being applied fairly indiscriminately because the lack of intelligence cannot figure out who actually has useful information and who does not. Throw in the fact that it’s not all that difficult to force a false confession out of someone and the fact that it’s not all that easy to tell when someone’s lying, and you have yourself a nice little conundrum.
How do you carve a policy such that you allow yourself the option of going to extreme measures to extract pertinent life-saving information, and yet deny yourself the option of abusing people on a whim? McCain wants to eliminate the former, but Bush is hell bent on preserving the latter. Given the PR problems that the U.S. has been having on this issue, I think I’d still throw my hat in with McCain.
Edit: Andrew Sullivan posts a fantastic response to Krauthammer here. Link via Elenita.
Yvonne posted this on December 6th, 2005 @ 1:44am in Charity, Education, News/Politics | Permalink to "Current Events Roundup"
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