Minority Students Needed in Math and Science to Fight 'Brain Drain'

Re:Minority Students Needed in Math and Science to Fight 'Br... by tokenadult on Wednesday September 23, 2009 @04:29PM (#840056)

I have a somewhat different kind of suggestion for what would most improve math teaching in the United States. See some of my favorite articles on the subject by mathematicians

http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/fall99/ame...

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/fall99/ind...

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/math/pdf/0503/0503081v1.pdf

for the idea that proper mathematical education includes learning certain facts by heart through practice, but also includes a lot of flexibility of thinking and making deep connections between seemingly unrelated subjects.

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Re:Minority Students Needed in Math and Science to Fight 'Br... by wsprague on Wednesday September 23, 2009 @04:39PM (#840073)

My only concern is that we have to come up with a plan that can be explained to the 100,000 or primary school teachers in the USA. Rarefied curriculums are like rarefied programming languages -- they don't "take", or they just distract. We need a Python, not an ML to explain to folks, and, honestly, "drill the crap out of your students and test them regularly" is easy to explain in a staff meeting... and would be a vast improvement over the BS that passes for education these days.

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