my schooling
I hope you all have had a great holidays so far. I have had a good old time here at home in Minnesota (yes, it is cold, people). Surprisingly, we do have computers in Minnesota, and just recently moved into real houses from our igloos.
My dad and I were rehashing some of the issues I've discussed on this blog the other night. (By the way, it's been made empirically certain that I got the ranting gene from him. Not that my Mm is too shabby at it either. I love you guys!). We actually got to discussing my own education, which was an interesting comparison to what I've been doing this year.
I went to my local public high school here in Minnesota. We live in a wealthy suburb of Minneapolis that is known for its good schools, which is why my parents chose to live here. In fact, the high property values here are largely based on the reputation of the school system. This gives incentive to older residents and those without children to vote for high levels of funding for the school system, despite the fact that they themselves do not partake of it. Thus, local referenda on increases to school funding usually pass quite easily. (One exeption is our crotchety right-wing neighbor, who doesn't see why he has to contribute to the education of the pesky kids of the neighborhood. Personally, I think he's just bitter because they discovered that the haunted park monster is really this guy in a mummy suit. Pesky kids.)
Anyway, my school was pretty good. They offered AP Biology, AP American History, AP European History, AP Calculus, AP American Literature, and a variety of AP languages. Kids could choose to take these advanced classes or not. The only tracked subject was math. Teachers were smart and competent (with notable exceptions. One of my teachers would regularly let my friend leave class to drive somewhere and buy bagels. And another time we spent an entire class period searching for textbooks that some kid had hidden in the ceiling). Administrators were proud of the academics (although not as proud as they were of the sports) and tried to protect them. I am grateful for the education I got there.
Still, overall, I don't think it was enough. This was supposed to be the best public high school in our state. But when I got to college (I went to a good one), I realized that I couldn't really cut it in the areas of science and math. Granted, I'm not exactly a whiz at either of these subjects, and they aren't my passion. Still, compared to kids who went to private schools or magnet schools, I was definitely behind. And compared to kids from other countries, I was definitely definitely behind. The entire math department at my school was dominated by foreigners, to the point where they couldn't find PhD students who spoke good English to teach intro math classes. The biggest complaint I heard about calculus classes was not that they were so difficult, but that the students couldn't understand what their teacher was saying. Most were from Asian countries and had very thick accents. I had a German dude who was reasonably understandable. But also freaky in a German grad student/robot kind of way.
As a freshman, I was still ambitious and over-confident in my academic skills. I was still in small-school Minnesota mindset, as opposed to world-class university mindset, which is "if it's math and science, you probably can't do it." I took a multi-variable caculus class and an advanced general chemistry class. It was the worst semester of my life. Multi-variable calculus was extremely difficult, mostly because it was taught in a completely different way than any of my high school math classes. Our textbook did not walk one through the problems. Problem sets had to be solved by combining different theorems and procedures in creative ways. Class met only three days a week, and the lectures were fast-paced. You had to give yourself the quizzes. There were only two tests, and they were impossible. I got decent grades, but only because the curve was so incredibly generous that a trained gerbil would have had to struggle only slightly to pass. For example, on the midterm exam, a 22 out of 100 was a D. A 56 out of 100 was an A-.
My chemistry class was worse, for me. I had taken only an intro type chemistry class in high school. My advisor, who was clearly a sadist, told me to take the advanced one anyway. I struggled. I went in for office hours, I asked my friends how to do things, I cried, and I worked all the time. I did ok...I was really proud of my B-.
I don't know...maybe it's just that I'm not talented in these areas. But still, I think that it was generally just difficult for me to cut it at my college based on the preparation I had been given. I think if my math and science education had been more rigorous, or even if there was a more rigorous option available, I could have survived and even though about majoring in one of those subjects. As it was, an "ordinary" student like me would not think of doing that. It was a small elite, at least among the American students, who could cut it.
Let me know what you think about this issue. I would like to know what the situation was like at other colleges.
posted by newoldschoolteacher @ 10:16 AM
9 comments
9 Comments:
Indeed, even our best K-12 programs seem to be lacking in rigor compared to what top-flight universities expect. I experienced the same problem (though I did manage to pull an A in the intro-chem weeder class).
Regardless of the cause(s) of this, it's bound to get worse rather than better. Resources are being shoved the other way.
I wasn't cognizant of anything during those years, but didn't we still do a good job of teaching everything from reading through English to math and science during WWII, the Korean war and even the first years of Vietnam?
Whatever the problems are, wars don't seem to have much to do with them. It seems more like "the soft bigotry of low expectations" and our instant-gratification culture.
I felt the same way -- unprepared for college. I didn't do too badly, I guess, because I only made two C's -- the rest were mostly A's and some B's. But I do remember working for those grades. I went back and re-read my research paper for 11th grade. My teacher had given me a 100 on it, if you can believe it. I told her later, when we were colleagues, that I wouldn't have given it a 100 at all. I felt that my math preparation was particularly good, but I was lost near the beginning of Chemistry and never did figure it out. I was afraid to take it in college. My teachers never did figure out how lost I was in Chemistry, which is very bad. I don't know -- I think in retrospect, that my high school education prepared me better than I thought, but not quite as well as it should have.
A huge area in which high school did not prepare me for college centers around reading - I was assigned very few primary texts in high school. Every course but English was taught from a grade-level-appropriate text book at my school. When I got to college, I found out my math class was the only course which didn't require some type of "real" reading - from Locke and DeToqueville's works of political theory to sociologists' accounts of the sixties, I had to read books that weren't meant to be user-friendly. There weren't helpful sidebars or captions or chapter summary review questions, and the vocabulary and sentence structures were tough. I considered myself an excellent reader in high school, and I was stunned to find myself so weighted down with college-level texts that it took me twice or three times as long to read with real comprehension. (The fact that I took few math and science courses undoubtedly skews my perception of college reading - I imagine the hard sciences assign more textbooks.)
I think my school's attitude that English teachers should be the only ones to teach reading comprehension skills contributed to this problem - I knew how to read difficult fiction, but had never encountered an OLD, LONG, AND DIFFICULT work to read for history class or a COMPLEX, ESOTERIC article to understand in science class. I have the conception that private schools like the one my college roommate had gone to were more likely to teach using more primary sources and fewer reader's digest-like summaries and translations. Is there anyone who knows more about a private school and can speak to this issue?
I can see now why you are having trouble. If your "problem" in high school was that your AP classes were too easy for you to excel in an Ivy League school--well, you will be in shock when you deal with inner-city type tough kids or even regular middle class kids.
I grew up in a blue-collar environment (although my family was college-educated)and I was one of the smartest in my high school. I went to a fairly non-prestigious school in the suburbs and was in shock when I was less well-prepared than the kids from the more suburban area nearby. Today I teach in the poorer city next to mine, and I continue to be saddened by my students attitudes towards authority and education.
Why don't teachers push and push and push and make it harder and harder and harder? Because most kids would fail. Most kids can't--or won't-- study math for hours on end like Russian or Asian immigrants. Most kids won't sit and peruse the meanings of difficult non-fiction. They'd take an F--or even better--get Mom to complain until it was made easier.
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Interesting comments. You've succeeded in making me feel both whiny and snobby. My point was not to bemoan my own situation, or to brag about how good my schools were. I consider myself one of the luckiest people in the whole world.
Allison is right that I tend to like things that I'm good at. And she's right that any kind of accomplishment takes a lot of hard work. The fact that she was able to graduate from MIT with sub-par preparation no doubt shows that she is incredibly hard-working and very bright. My story was not meant to belittle this kind of gargantuan effort, but to highlight it. Should all American kids have to run such a gauntlet if they are to become physicists, biologists, chemists, astronomers, computer scientists? Or should our country take a cue from those overseas or in the private school system and make sure that our kids at least have the opportunity for such preparation?
My point was not supposed to be about my life or my choices, but how my experiences could illustrate a wider problem. Perhaps they don't. In any case, another commentor was absolutely right when he said that the situation is far more dire in inner cities and rural areas. That's mostly what this blog is about. But if our "best" (ie in the most wealthy/property-tax-rich area) public school education is not really up to par, then that is also a problem. Because it means that whatever we are striving for in improving our inner city schools might not even be good enough.
And what's wrong with being from Minnesota, Ms Smith? It's good people.
"China can teach its students how to solve a certain problem a certain way, but innovativeness? Creativity? Invention? American culture teaches those skills in ways other cultures don't."
This is urban legend. If US students are so creative, why do they do so poorly on international math exams that the Chinese beat us on? Because the problems are substandard? I've talked to math professors who find that their Chinese and other Asian students are quite creative. US K-8 math emphasizes problem solving "strategies" which means letting kids stumble around with inefficient solutions (like "guess and check") trying to solve problems for which they have not been given sufficient background. In Asian countries, students are given information and asked to solve progressively harder problems, but by applying the efficient techniques they have learned. This takes creativity. Stumbling around with inefficient solutions seems to satisfy the US definition of creativity but it doesn't cut it on the international scene.
If multi-variate calc was your first math class in collee after having AP calc in high school, you probably had difficulty because the high school class just taught you enough to pass the AP exam. The problem with AP classes in high school is they don't prepare students for calculus. Many students really would be better off taking the first year calculus class in college rather than in high school. But with tuition so high, there is an economic necessity to doing it, I suppose, in addition to the prestige it gives a lowly freshman.
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