The ultimate effect of remedial education
By Professor Doom
“Hey. We’re selling a plot of land, and thought we could ask our math
professor friend for help. The land is a rectangle, 120’ on one side, and 300’
on the other. I know you need that much. What’s the square footage and how do
you get it?”
--question from the wife of a longtime friend, valedictorian at her
school, and a bright person. She and her husband just didn’t take math in high
school.
Now, it’s easy to blame the high schools,
or the students themselves, for the unprepared students entering college, but
that’s not fair. High schools offer College Algebra-level material, and often
more advanced math, and also simpler courses, as well as other options. They
tell students “this is what you need for college, this what you need to get by,
and this is what you need to pump gas” giving their students the option to take
the challenging material, something simpler, or no math at all. Students choose
(or are advised by counselors or parents) not to take the challenging
coursework, improving their GPA and chances of graduating high school. I don’t
blame students for taking the easy way out when asked to do so; I would have
myself if my parents had let me. A student who puts effort into it can avoid
having a math class for his last few years of high school, if he wishes; I
commonly get students that tell me they haven’t taken math since the 8th
or 9th grade, and looking at their tests, I am in no position to
disagree.
“Find the exact area under the
curve of the graph of y = 3x2 + 2 between x = 2 and x = 4, using the
limit of sums method.”
-- High school calculus problem. Using sums in this way is way beyond
what I would attempt in an elementary college calculus course, where I often
spend considerable time going over fractions.
I’ve certainly heard tales of bad
teachers, teachers not doing their jobs, teachers that don’t care about
students, and, of course, teachers that succumb to the immense pressure to pass
unprepared students. While I believe such teachers exist, I’ve met quite a few
public school teachers, and through tutoring many high school students, I can
only conclude that the vast majority of teachers are dedicated, hardworking,
knowledgeable, and do a legitimate job in offering real mathematics courses to
their students. In short, students that want to learn have a fair opportunity
to do so.
Perhaps public schools shouldn’t give
students the opportunity not to learn, but I suspect they’ve long since figured
out that forcing students into classes they have no interest in taking doesn’t
really help the students. If only that knowledge could be passed up to
postsecondary institutions.
If a student chooses not to be prepared
for college, it’s no great surprise that such a student, when tricked into
going to college, is not prepared for it. A student shouldn’t be made to suffer
forever for a poor choice made in high school, but…recall how years ago getting
into college was not a certain thing. It was reserved for those who worked hard
and studied, demonstrating they were willing to do what it takes to achieve
higher learning. The great slobbering greed and the “increase the student base at all costs”
major goal of administration have led to a massive influx of unprepared, often
wildly unprepared, students onto college campuses.
These students, being unprepared for
college, naturally do very poorly in college courses, and administration (with
“graduation rate” being a goal of what makes a college good) clamps the pressure
down on faculty to increase passing rates, as well as opening up an array of
less regulated remedial courses, with no restraints on what goes into such
courses. Unfortunately, the remedial faculty (often with less qualifications
and job security than other college faculty) are bullied into having high pass
rates, and the only surefire method of doing so is to lower the difficulty as
much as possible.
(Two students at my door): “Hi. We’re in your statistics class, and we
have a question about lines of regression.”
(Me, welcoming them in): “Certainly, those are some rough formulas, the
key is to be very careful and not try to skip steps.”
(I take out some paper and start setting up a typical problem)
Student: “No. We’re not even going to try that. Our question is for when
you already have the line, like for y = 2x + 1, because we can get that on our
calculator. How did you get the points, and how do you graph the line? We’ve
both had 6 hours of developmental and got A’s in College Algebra, and neither
of us had to do anything like that.”
--Students at an accredited institution where developmental math wasn’t
handled at all by the math department, and College Algebra wasn’t either, to
some extent.
The example above really emphasizes what’s
going on in college now. The remedial departments do whatever they want, and
realize they get better passing rates (the goal) if they do nothing and hand
out A’s (the “average” grade in college is A-, now). These A students then hit
a brick wall when they go into actual college classes. This forces course
material in those classes to likewise be watered down, or else face sharply
dropping pass rates. Remedial work was supposed to prepare students for
college; instead, the college work has turned into remedial.
The example above has students in their
third year of college still not knowing how to graph a line, but “graph a line” is hardly a skill that only
the most educated can have. In 1977, I begged my father for a board game, Code Name: Sector. I wanted it because
it had a computer (little more than an LED display in those days, running off
of a 9 volt battery), but he was reluctant. The game was for ages “12 and up,”
you see, and I was but 10 years old; eventually he relented, and I had the toy.
Why the age restriction? Well, the computer gave out the coordinates of two
points, which you had to plot on a grid, and then connect the dots with a
crayon. This is what is known in mathematics as “graphing a line.” That’s not
even addressing the rest of the game, which was about tracking down submarines,
drawing a line segment representing the course of a warship was merely a small
part of it.
The issue: in 1977, corporate America
(never accused of overestimating consumer intelligence) had no doubt every
interested 12 year old could read a page of instructions explaining how to plot
two points and draw a line between them, confident enough that this task could
be a small part of a game.
In the 21st century, a large
portion of my job is trying, and often failing, to teach high school graduates
how to plot two points and draw a line between them—a concept most have never
seen before. To emphasize: college administration sees nothing strange in
having an experienced professional spend a week or more training rooms full of
normal adults how to do what any child can learn in a few minutes with just a
bit of effort. If I was 80% successful in teaching adults skills that children
used to have, administration would be thrilled.
Remedial classes, unlike college classes,
have no real restraints or guidelines as to what goes in them. With no
restraints, “reduce difficulty as much as possible” results in very low
difficulty indeed, which is why at one campus, it was quite common to have
students with 4.0 GPAS, 9 hours of passed math courses…and still completely
overmatched by what should have been basic concepts.
Since the flood of unprepared students
doesn’t stop at remediation, faculty in the higher level courses have no choice
but to likewise reduce course requirements, or lose their position. So, in my
case, it isn’t just statistics students that can’t handle graphing a line,
nearly half of the students I have in calculus, for years now, are unable to
add fractions, despite the high GPA and multiple prerequisites. Teaching
calculus to students that have no basic math skills is about as reasonable as
teaching Shakespeare to students that don’t speak English.
As long as administrators view everyone
with a pulse as a source of a government check, with no concerns about how such
a person can end up trapped in a lifetime of debt, remedial students will be a
common feature on “higher education” campuses. Student loan debt for college
education is over a trillion dollars now, but with the majority of that “higher
education” money spent on pre-college coursework, nearly every institution in
this country should be prosecuted for fraud, or at the very least have their
accreditation, which asserts institutions act with integrity, revoked.
But never has an institution lost
accreditation due to lack of integrity, even when the institution approves
ripping off students or to doing strange things to children in the showers. How
can a system this corrupt have anything legitimate to sell you or your
children?
Think about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment