Arfa Daily wrote in message
...


"spamtrap1888" wrote in message
...
On Apr 19, 5:58 pm, "Arfa Daily" wrote:
"Gareth Magennis" wrote in message


A guy that comes into one of our food joints is an exam marker. The
missus
got talking to him about the state of education, and a couple of days
later,
he brought in a GCSE level maths paper for 15 year olds. They
apparently
had
90 minutes to complete this paper, and were allowed to use a
calculator.
I
was able to finish it, in my head, in about 20 minutes. I think that I
would
have been able to do the same at age 10, back in the days when we were
taught properly 40 odd years ago. The maths papers that we took back
then
at
age 15, were way, way above the level of this Mickey Mouse paper. The
standard even appears to have taken a nose dive since my own kids were
that
age 10 years or so ago.

Last week, we had the 9 year old daughter of one of our relations
staying
with us. She asked if she could borrow my wife's laptop, to do her
maths
homework. Intrigued, we let her. She basically logged onto a website
that
presented her with questions, and spaces to fill in the answers. When
she
is
finished, the program marks it and sends the result to her teacher.
With
this lack of interaction between teacher and pupil, its no wonder that
education in the UK has fallen to the level that it is now. I always
considered myself a fairly average student, but I kid you not, I am now
the
equivalent of a university professor to the kids ...

Has it declined like this in the U.S. also ?


US math performance was no great shakes to begin with -- look at any
league table of industrialized countries* over the years. The problem
starts in the primary grades, and to my mind is caused by a
fundamental mismatch: the sort of person who is drawn to spend their
day with young children seldom is drawn to spend their day doing math
problems. In fact most appear to fear and hate math. If your teacher
has no ability for teaching math, then you are unlikely to learn it on
your own.(And, unlike with language skills, which can be developed
outside the classroom through leisure activities such as reading for
pleasure, or by chatting or discussing current events; the random
student is unlikely to relax by doing some math problems.)

In fact, here computer assisted math instruction may save the day.
Instructional materials could include animations and live videos.
Exercises can adjust how difficult they are based on how each student
performs on them -- if the student misses too many midrange ones, the
computer could drop down to an easier level and so on. Finding out
what level each student operates comfortably at, and building from
there, should eliminate the panic of non-understanding.

* When I started at the university, I was amazed how far ahead the
foreign students were in math. Even people from countries like Peru
and Turkey.

An interesting evaluation. I always had the U.S. down as a country with
good
all round education, much as we used to have. Certainly, all of the young
Americans that I have met on my travels there, have seemed polite at
least,
which seems to me to be fundamental to getting educated. What has happened
here, is that a combination of liberal education policies, coupled with
over-liberal parenting, has resulted in primary school classes being
filled
with disruptive and uncontrollable kids, in informal class situations that
do little or nothing to modify those behaviours. Add to that the fact that
the last two generations of teachers come from this background themselves,
and you have the degenerating standards that we have been seeing for the
last 25 years or more.

Once the early primary education has slipped to the level that it now has,
secondary and further education stands no realistic chance. If the kids
can't even read and write properly, what chance do they stand in other
subjects where they need to read, understand, and creatively write ? We
now
have almost no scientists coming through our universities, which is very
sad
when you consider that the UK once led the world in scientific discovery
and
endeavour. Most universities now offer no maths courses at all. Science
and
maths and English of course all go hand in hand, and if the students are
not
getting a good enough grounding in core subjects like maths and English,
then any science subject will be a non-starter.

I find it all terribly sad and depressing. The world should advance, not
decline, but I guess that is the nature of the rise and collapse of great
civilisations, as has been seen many times throughout history.

Just a few weeks ago, I was reading a newspaper columnist who is a bit of
a
bleeding-heart liberal, and she was defending educational standards on
behalf of her own kids, and was saying that she got fed up of listening to
people (like me presumably) who harped on about and decried the passing of
a
golden age that never actually existed. I wanted to scream at the silly
cow
that she was wrong wrong wrong, and that she was not qualified to comment
as
she is not old enough to have been part of it.

Arfa



Perhaps there is a side issue that prople don't want to get their hands
dirty these days.
I arranged a talk by someone from The Culham labs , subject cold fusion
research. They find competent physics post-grads two a penny. But cannot
find competent welders/fitters/mechanics and technicians .