Chet Raymo, who for years wrote very enjoyable science columns for the Boston Globe, has a blog called Science Musings that is well worth checking out. He posts today about an article in the Atlantic, derived in turn from this report, that compares the mathematical performance of U.S. students to those in various Asian countries.
(I wonder if the Australian scores were collected before or after Mark got there?) Now, self-confidence is a good thing, all else being equal. But being educated well is also a good thing. It’s no secret that we don’t train our teachers well, provide schools with proper resources, or challenge our students enough in the classroom. Maybe there’s something we can learn from what’s going on in Asia.
54 thoughts on “But We Feel Good About Ourselves”
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I hate being the threadkiller.
Thanks for the link to the incompetence article, Allyson… I’ve been thinking for a long time why so many incompetent people do so well (i.e. get professorships at Harvard or become presidents of Harvard, etc.) and while so many competent people aren’t in better positions of power/ prestige. While it’s a different topic, I think the inability to estimate one’s (in)abilities is somewhat related.
Sean makes the point that “…we don’t train our teachers well, provide schools with proper resources, or challenge our students enough in the classroom.”
Some good points. But we also need to give teachers some credit. If you want to teach 8th grade math or science half the job will be dealing with the “problem” students – the child who’s totally unsupervised at home & used to doing as they please, whenever they please, the child who’s being bullied, the child who’s doing the bullying, the chronically disruptive child, the withdrawn child who may be pregnant…just teaching won’t be enough. You’ll have to be a surrogate parent and social worker as well, and for that – there are no test scores.
Since there is no proof that science curricula in these countries were standardized, what sense does this comparison make?