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Adventurer
Joined: 28 Jan 2006
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 Posted: Fri Oct 20, 2006 6:58 pm Post subject: Confident students do worse in math; bad news for U.S. |
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Confident students do worse in math; bad news for U.S.
POSTED: 7:22 p.m. EDT, October 18, 2006
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WASHINGTON (AP) -- Kids who are turned off by math often say they don't enjoy it, they aren't good at it and they see little point in it. Who knew that could be a formula for success?
The nations with the best scores have the least happy, least confident math students, says a study by the Brookings Institution's Brown Center on Education Policy.
Countries reporting higher levels of enjoyment and confidence among math students don't do as well in the subject, the study suggests. The results for the United States hover around the middle of the pack, both in terms of enjoyment and in test scores.
In essence, happiness is overrated, says study author Tom Loveless.
"We might want to focus on the math that kids are learning and just be a little less obsessed with the fact that they have to enjoy every minute of it," said Loveless, who directs the Brown Center and serves on a presidential advisory panel on math.
"The implication is not 'Let's go make kids unhappy,"' he said. "It's 'Let's give kids better signals as to how they're performing, relative to the rest of the world."'
http://us.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/10/18/unhappy.achievers.ap/index.html |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Fri Oct 20, 2006 7:46 pm Post subject: |
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I am normally not a fan of high-brow, Nabokovian wordplay, but this was too good to pass up...
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In essence, happiness is overrated, says study author Tom Loveless.
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Fri Oct 20, 2006 9:23 pm Post subject: |
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| My Puritan ancestors heartily agreed with that attitude, too. |
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jinju
Joined: 22 Jan 2006
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| Posted: Fri Oct 20, 2006 11:03 pm Post subject: |
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| When did it become some kind of dogma that students have to enjoy themselves? School aint a party, school is school. Math isnt a party game, math is hard, math is a challenge and math takes hard work to learn. Unless you are some kind of mathe genius. 99% of people are not. Math was never emant to be fun. School isnt some kind of a playground. |
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Adventurer
Joined: 28 Jan 2006
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| Posted: Sun Oct 22, 2006 5:08 am Post subject: |
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| jinju wrote: |
| When did it become some kind of dogma that students have to enjoy themselves? School aint a party, school is school. Math isnt a party game, math is hard, math is a challenge and math takes hard work to learn. Unless you are some kind of mathe genius. 99% of people are not. Math was never emant to be fun. School isnt some kind of a playground. |
We are, warts and all, part of the counter-culture of the 1960s. With the advent of the counter culture, sophisticated use of language was considered elitists, and one heard arguments that exams that contained sophisticated vocabulary was anti-immigrant, anti-minority.
There has also been such a focus on engaging children, keeping them focused as if promoting the notion that adolescents need to be encouraged to be similar to those in kindergarten who play with legos, blocks, and tinker toys.
I don't oppose the counter-culture's influence in every way. It contribute so much to us. Yet, people went too far to remove the conventions present in North America when it came to learning like valuing memorizing math tables, poems, and grammatical rules, and you had the failed whole-language approach. |
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Hater Depot
Joined: 29 Mar 2005
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| Posted: Sun Oct 22, 2006 7:20 am Post subject: |
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Bad news for the US eh? Korean students kick our arses eh?
Anybody who thinks so has never watched Korean adults try to do some basic applications of math, like convert Fahrenheit to Celsius. |
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