By Professor Doom
I try to focus on
higher education, but the interconnectedness of the modern world (more
accurately, government involvement in everything) means that I often have to
look beyond the ivory tower to gain a better understanding of what’s going on
inside the tower.
Our public
education system is pretty bonkers about guns now. It’s weird how in my
father’s day, shooting clubs were common at high schools, and even when I was a
kid it was no big deal put a .22 rifle in my hand and let me take shots at targets,
along with a bunch of other kids, down at the Boy’s Club a block away from
school.
Now when a kid
even mentions the word “gun” at a public school, the place goes nuts, and the
adults swarm like ants to do everything but figure what the problem really is.
At a high
school, there was a “new” math symbol up on the board, and the kids were
puzzled by it:
Some kid says it
looks like a gun, and hysteria ensues:
To judge by the recent event in Florida,
the police here acted according to policy: upon being told about a possible gun
on campus, they first waited until there was no actual shooting going on, and
then sprang into action.
After
several students made comments along those lines, another student said
something the sheriff’s office said could have sounded like a threat out of
context.
Police
searched the student’s home, where they found no guns or any evidence that he
had any access to guns. Authorities also wrote there was no evidence the
student had any intent to commit harm.
Now, I don’t begrudge the police’s actions
here, they’re just following orders, and we all know once you put humans in
government uniforms, about all you can expect of them is to follow orders. So,
the merest mention of a gun involves a full investigation, because that’s our
“solution” which will keep kids from being killed by guns on campus (simply
shutting down the schools forever seems a better solution, and if we must have
the schools, allowing teachers to protect themselves and the kids if they so
desire strikes me as a common-sense option…I just don’t understand how bump
stocks are relevant at all, but I digress).
But the gun hysteria detracts from the
real issue here, because the fact that these high school students were puzzling
over this symbol is very revealing of what’s happened to our public school
system.
The symbol in question is called the
“radical” or “square root” symbol, and denotes the positive number which, when
squared (i.e., multiplied by itself), will be the number under the symbol. For
example, a 9 under this symbol, read "the square root of 9," is 3, because 3 squared is
9.
The use of this symbol is something of a
big deal, because many numbers, though they should be easy to calculate, cannot
be easily represented. The classical example of this is in a right triangle,
where each leg has length 1. The Pythagorean theorem says the square of the
hypotenuse is the sum of the squares of the legs.
Question in an advanced college math class this semester: “What’s
a rational number?”
--the concept of “rational number” used to be taught in high
school…but it was removed.
By the Pythagorean theorem, then, the
square of the hypotenuse is 2. And so the hypotenuse length is that number, which
when squared is 2. So, what is this number? This was a problem for ancient
mathematics, which honestly believed this number could be easily calculated, or
possibly represented as a rational number (i.e., a ratio of integers, which
usually looks like a fraction).
“1/6 + 1/6 + 1/6 + 1/6 = 4/24 = 1/6"
--the most common answer on the last pop quiz I gave (multiple students wrote exactly the above), in a 2000
level statistics course. The question was “What is the probability of rolling a
6 four times in a row on a typical 6-sided die?” Yes, I did define the concept
of independence, and worked out a few examples as well, before asking the
question. Fractions used to be taught in 8th grade or so, but almost
all calculations involving fractions are removed in the grades afterwards,
because so
many students fail to learn how to use fractions that they would simply continue to fail all future courses
otherwise.
But this number, though easily
represented on a simple triangle, cannot be easily represented as a number.
Eventually, humanity gave up, and just decided to call this number "the square root of 2," designate it with a radical symbol with a 2 under it, and get on with life.
Me, in advanced course: So here we have this equation x^3 - 6x^2 + 16 = 0.
Noting that 2 is a root, we
divi…
Student: Wait. How did you know 2 was a root?
Me: Well, 1 isn’t a root, and -1 isn’t, so I went to the next easy
guess…
Student: How do you know what to guess?
--the guessing technique I used is called the “Rational Root
Theorem.” It used to be taught in high school algebra, but was removed…
The square root symbol used to be taught
around the 8th grade (I cover the symbol in remedial math courses,
which approximate the material that’s supposed to be taught in that grade, so I
have some idea what’s taught in 3rd through 9th grade,
because that’s “college material” in many campuses).
Today we can have a group of high school
students standing around the board staring at this symbol, a symbol that they
should have learned years earlier, and puzzling over what it can mean. And THIS
is the real issue behind the story.
When the curriculum for our government
education system was set down, scholars were asked what kids should know, and
when they should know it…and everything was laid down. That was many years ago.
Since that point in time, scholars have
been removed from education, to be replaced by people with no education
themselves, and no appreciation of scholarly thought. Now, I’m not saying
everything was laid down perfectly, but what is definitely happening today is
more and more of those original foundations are being chipped away, to the
point that we’re seeing real problems, huge gaps in knowledge in students who
supposedly have been studying concepts for years.
The prosecution in the Zimmerman trial suffered a major blow when a key witness, a high school senior, showed she was unable to read cursive. Reading cursive used to be a skill taught in the 3rd grade,…
Because of these huge lapses in education
in our public school system, our students which move on to college, even quite
good students, are finding themselves hitting brick walls which shouldn’t be
there…because our college courses are based on the education system we were
told was being used in the public schools: a solid system, and not one filled
with holes.
Now, some colleges are responding to this
big problem with social promotion. This is cruel and evil,
as it destroys the value of a college education while still extracting a huge
sum of money from the student, who eventually gets a worthless piece of paper.
It isn’t just that these huge holes ripped
into education are causing our college students to fail, of course, as we now
have students so ignorant that a “weird” math symbol can literally cause the
police to search a kid’s home…
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