To continue my rant from last night:
In his video on The Big Think, Clayton Christensen says America has retained its innovator’s status through our immigration policies, by stealing the best minds from Asia. (This is hard to refute.) But conditions will soon be favorable enough in India and China that those math/science/engineering geniuses will just stay put, and then we’ll be a nation of humanities grads.
That’s what I was wondering as a I read Stiglitz’s Vanity Fair article. We can reform and improve our education system, but my question is, can we do it in a way that emphasizes the hard sciences? That’s a cultural shift more than a funding shift; and if it doesn’t happen, we’re improving the education system just so we can make more humanities grads.
Note: I have nothing against humanities grads, except on a macro level. I minored in Philosophy, read a lot of interesting thoughts by Greeks and Cartesians and empiricists, and had fun doing it. And a journalism degree isn’t much more useful than a humanities degree–I got lucky. (As did Corinne with her anthropology degree.)
Anyway, Christensen is right when he says that our schools are failing to teach math and science in a way that is intrinsically motivating.
A tiny example with a sample size of 1: I was good at math once–I even skipped a grade in math when I was 12. But a string of bad teachers in JH/HS completely turned me off to it. I went from being a year ahead to a year behind, took Algebra 2 my Junior year, and decided to never take another math class. Once you’ve decided in high school never to take another math class, that has a huge impact on the areas of study that are open to you. The sciences are out, computer science and engineering are out, economics and business school are out, even marketing is out.
I went to college knowing I wanted to major in Comms and be a journalist, but as I said: I got lucky and found a good job after graduating. Plenty of journalism grads, philosophy grads, and humanities grads don’t. Meanwhile, we’re importing engineers and scientists, and even so, can’t fill our engineering openings.
I remember reading an article about James Dyson, the British inventor (who makes a killer vacuum–we just got the DC41 and love it!), and he was bemoaning the fact that he literally can’t fill his engineering positions. There just aren’t enough industrial engineers in Britain to fill the available jobs. The same is true in Silicon Valley. TechCrunch did a series of articles four years ago with the then-presidential candidates, and one of the main questions was what they would do to fix the H1B visa shortage. The engineering talent pool just wasn’t big enough, and we needed more immigrants.
This is scary. I’ve got a brother studying physics right now and I’m totally jealous of him. I wish I could go back and study something real.
I thought I hated Math in High School. I took AP Calculus and AP Statistics. Both were horrifically boring, and I dreaded going to those classes. I ended up forging my dad’s signature to get out of the stats class mid semester (took pottery instead… seriously), and I failed the AP Calculus test at the end of the year with a 2. I made my mind up that I hated math and that I wasn’t any good at it.
Four years later I took a calculus and statistics class as a sophomore in college. Both prerequisites for the business program (I later got into), and both considered very difficult classes. As I prepared to go to the classes, I was VERY nervous. From my previous high school adventures I KNEW that I hated math. Turned out I got As in both. They each took a lot of work, but I realized pretty quickly in the semester that not only did I LIKE math, but that I was really, really good at it.
I’m not trying to shirk responsibility for my poor performance in my math classes in High School. Clearly I could have worked much harder, but I do think our system is set up to make students feel like humanities classes are fun, and hard sciences are not. It also encourages the idea that math is something that really, really smart people are good at, and that’s not you.
I don’t know exactly what the solution is, but I think it has to start pretty young. Maybe better courses when kids are in grade school and jr. high? Or maybe it’s instilling the idea that math may not be fun now, but having a job, eating food, and driving with insurance WILL be in the future… and you can’t do that without the hard sciences.
Jeff, I had some of the same experiences. I took a couple logic classes my senior year for my philosophy minor. They blew my mind, and I did well in them, and it made me wonder about whether I’d quit to soon.
TOO soon
Two months late to this party, but I have some thoughts. After spending time and money back in college to become a chemistry teacher, I have gone three years with no job openings due to the economy flattening the school districts.
Finally, there came an opening at my very favorite high school in the area, but to save money they crammed 40 students (in a lab built for 24) into each of three periods (120 student load, typical of a full-time load) and defined it as a half-time job. Then the district spent two months of the school year (and the prospective teacher’s salary) coming around to making an offer (which hung the poor principal out to dry with teachers, students and parents). I interviewed at the beginning of Sept. and was offered the position on 10/28 to start on Halloween. They offered me $14K, temporary contract until June (which is the only kind of contract the cash-strapped district will allow, which rendered the half-benefits moot — who is going to cancel their health insurance to switch over for a temp. job?).
Even at $14K (did I mention that it was a measly $14K?) I would have even considered accepting, perhaps, except that on 10/27 I had accepted a writing project that is keeping me busy until April. So I had to turn it down.
I was the only chemistry teacher who applied, because there aren’t any others. Almost no one is graduating in chemistry education. You know why? Because people who do chemistry can also do math — as can math teachers — and they can figure out that their skills can make better money for less time elsewhere (myself included). For district legalities, they had the ‘redefine’ the job as a general science job instead of a chemistry job, in order to hire their long-term sub who isn’t a chemistry teacher.
Hence, in the schools you have advanced math and advanced science teachers who don’t really know the subjects but get stuck there by principals because there aren’t enough math and science teachers, so they are limited, confused, swamped and drowning. Or if they are good, they are still swamped and drowning. Plus a very few really good ones who seem to love it and handle it. I’ve only seen a handful.
That, plus we start chemistry and physics and math WAAYYYYY too late. We should be teaching the periodic table to 3rd graders. There’s my two cents, which appears to be my hourly rate as a high school chemistry teacher.
I love science (but I didn’t at first — nearly killed me), but I will confess that after a rigorous science course, a humanities or history or literature course seems quite fun. I think we have lots of people following their “passion” for thought-provoking fun, and opting out of seriously hard work that can be rough going at first.
There are no more job openings this year. My three-year license will expire this summer, and it would cost me $2K to get the CE credit to renew because I am not employed as a teacher. Catch 22. The world will lose another chemistry teacher. It’s all a shame, because I LOVE teaching chemistry to teens, and watching them smile with comprehension.