Re: the calculus wars

Peter Farruggio (pfarr who-is-at uclink4.berkeley.edu)
Thu, 20 May 1999 21:52:14 -0800

I don't know if this is of any help in this discussion, but in the area of
"school to work" vis a vis the current situation that faces most working
class kids...

Each year the National Association of Manufacturers and various chambers of
commerce are polled by some economists to find what the employers really
want in new employees (we're not talking about university graduates)
Despite all the rhetoric about basic skills being touted in educational
circles, as in "that's what employers want most!"... Here's what the bosses
always say. They want employees who:

are responsible (arrive on time, don't need to be monitored for productivity)

are ethical (don't steal or lie to the boss)

are sociable (don't create dissension or ill will among fellow employees)

are self motivated (don't need to be pushed, can be trusted to keep working
when boss is not present)

Sure they also want people who have basic language and math skills, but
those items are way down on the list

The point is that most kids in urban high schools who have some familiarity
with the work world realize that the argument that "a basic skills
curriculum is essential for job training" is bogus, and this "real world"
sophistication helps them disengage from academics that much more quickly.
Usually, these basic skills approaches are counterposed to critical
thinking, integrated curriculum, depth vs breadth, thematic teaching, etc
which could really turn our kids on to learning. Another instantiation of
the reproduction of social class inequality currently at work in our
inner-city schools, at least here in California.

The instrumentalist argument for "staying in school" does not work because
it's not true. Better to motivate our kids with an argument about
acquiring knowledge for empowerment and to change the world

Pete Farruggio

>Graham wrote:
>>I once had a research student who tried, in the district surrounding a high
>>school, to discover the relationship between what happened in school and
>>what happened in the local work-places where most of the high school
>>graduates got jobs. He observed in the factories and offices, and observed
>>in the high school classrooms, and tried to find similarities between the
>>two. There were very few similarities. Most of what the workers did by way
>>of mathematics, writing, etc., they had learned in elementary school. The
>>high school subject that seemed to have the closest fit was history,
>>largely because the interpretive and meaning-making activities that were
>>required in the high school history class were closest to the interpretive
>>and meaning-making activities that workers needed to make sense of their
>>workplace. But that was stretching it a bit.
>
>Graham, in five years of observing workers (skilled and unskilled) at
>volunteer construction sites I have yet to see a single example of someone
>using trig methods to solve problems involving angles. I watched, for
>example, a highly-competent professional carpenter walk a novice through
>the process of laying out a roof truss basically as a geometry
>construction, using a rafter square and a pencil. The carpenters that I
>have observed rarely do anything with angles, preferring to convert things
>like roof slopes into linear rise/run measurements.
>
>I don't think this means that math beyond algebra and geometry is a waste
>of time, however. If nothing else, there is some value in knowing that
>there is another way of solving problems, even if it requires things like
>protractors and trig tables that might not be ready-to-hand. Further,
>there is power in knowing about these other tools, even if you never have
>cause to actually use them---if only to keep them from being the exclusive
>domain of the engineers and architects on the job.
>
>This is not to say that the way that we currently teach things like
>trigometry and calculus is optimal. Having students do endless drill work
>on de-contextualized problems and memorizing formulas only to forget them
>immediately after testing seems pretty useless. Maybe if we engaged
>students in things like designing roof trusses in school, they would have
>an easier time seeing learning trig as an empowering skill. ---Tim