Whereas what I was actually doing was critiquing lousy work on all fronts in sociology by teaching how important - at a theoretical level - it was to really understand the operationalization of variables and the disciplined analysis of results... but, you know, there was no convincing them. Alan Rudy
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I was just reflecting on academia from a long time ago. Personally I was greatly intimidated by my own math phobia and worked a long time to get over it.
I still have a great difficulty in what's called dimensional analysis and calculation where you have to keep track of meters/sec, etc. This showed up big time some years ago, when I (with off-list help) tried to figure out if Ahmadinejad could produce enough enriched uranium to build a bomb. It was funny as hell. The newspapers reported enough of the units to plug into an equation (by Dirac) to actually figure it out, but I couldn't do the math. The equation produced a ridiculously long non-dimensional number. Of course I kept getting different numbers, a classic sign of wrong answers. The point was to empirically demonstrate Iran was nowhere near production of sufficiently refined uranium. I was surprized that none of the anti-nuke web pages didn't just do the math and present the results. My other problem was I didn't understand the equation, how it was suppose to work. It was an index number on production efficiency needed to reach fissionable mass.
I flunked algebra and geometry and had to take them over, where I actually managed to learn them--up to a point. So it's always been a question to me, as to why? I met a very similar problem when I took inductive logic which uses set symbols and barely got through with a C. This class acted as a barrier to a major in philosophy. It was used as a cut-out.
Because of these experiences, I spent a lot of time working with my son when he was boy, fiddling around and experimenting with ways to teach concepts of space and counting, making paper cut-outs, origami, inventing secret codes, and other children's games that have some of these concepts embedded in them. These were roughly based on Piaget's ideas... These ideas have been somewhat trivialized as manipulative learning skills, colored block theory.
Well, whether he was naturally inclined to these or not, they seemed to work like magic. He sailed through the math-sci curriculum with A's and went into chemistry. Then after a summer working in a bio-sci lab, he went into medicine. It turned out he liked being around people, being social. Working in labs is very unsocial, solitary kind of work. He didn't like it. Even so, what he turned out to be good at was reconstructive surgeries of the type that employs a great deal of topology.
That's one person's story. But there is something there that seems more significant than anecdotal.
When I think about what curriculum the feds are pushing, I just shutter with loathing. The two subjects I hated most were english and math. What I realized later was highly strange. I love writing and play with math ideas, so why did I hate them in school? It comes down to how these subjects are conceived and then taught within the education system.
The other aspect is how english and math are used as weapons to beat children into believing they are stupid, which leaves life long scars.
A work buddy in his fifties I helped through his algebra requirement had an amazing math phobia tied into his own self-esteem and his concept of himself. It manifested as a kind of panic when he was presented with homework problems he couldn't do quickly. It was like watching the boy he had been years ago, come back like a ghost to haunt him.
I think of NCLB and RTTT as how-to courses to reproduce mass injustice and institutionalize it.
CG