Update: Here is an example standardized math test the adult failed. I am more math fluent than most, having taken engineering-level math classes all through college. I cannot imagine that a successful businessman has no need to use basic graph-reading, estimation, or even understand basic equations. Here is the answer key if you want to see how well you do.
Is this test harder than you thought? Easier? It is much easier than I thought it would be based on the man's exclamations and I find it hard to believe he could only get 10 questions right--and those being guesses.
There has been a lot of buzz around the
Washington Post's blog on an adult who took a standardized test and failed it. For everyone who hates the idea of "teaching to the test", who homeschools by radical unschooling, or hates having teachers and budgets held to the results of standardized tests, the post is flaunted as proof that testing is unhelpful.
The adult who took the test is a member of the school board in the district. He is well-educated with grown children and an apparently healthy bottom-line. If he cannot do well on the test, then why are we expecting our students to know 70% of a test he did not?
His argument: I don't know this stuff now and I am successful, so why should high schoolers need to know it. Very simple answer: Not every kid is going to do what he is doing.
I see the same bias in homeschoolers who do not understand why kids need a strong foundation in math in their younger years. Even a certified secondary school math teacher in a seminar I attended implored stay-at-home mothers to envision how they use math and to use that knowledge as a basis for how they teach math to their children.
As long as you are OK that your child could never become an engineer, scientist, actuary, and a host of other math-dominated careers, even if they desperately wanted to be one, then, by all means, teach the kids only the math you now need as an adult.
Secondarily, just because you do not use something in your career or everyday life does not mean that there are not very good reasons to know it.
When I was in engineering school, I often heard the rumblings of other students (since I am at least young enough to have gone to school realizing that computers were going to be doing some seriously heavy lifting by the time I entered the work force), "Why should we bother to learn this? When we graduate, all we will need to do is press a button."
And how will you know what data to enter? How will you select the appropriate parameters for the program you are working on? If your program's finite element analysis grid size is wrong, then you may miss the failure point and you will have no way of knowing how much or little confidence to place in the results. You won't even know enough to calculate a confidence interval.
And if, for some reason, the computer spits a spurious result out at the end of its work, the engineer who was never taught the principles by which the code operates has no way of knowing that his design may not be as robust as he believes. Also true even for calculators.
Another misconception is that because an adult does not appear to need such information now, they have never needed that information. There are some very strident opinions that I hold today specifically because, at one point, I went through the hard work of applying some information that I knew way-back-when and confirmed. I cannot remember details at this point because I have had no reason to revisit them.
Does that mean that I will defend everything I learned at school? Hell, no. No one today will ever learn to draft blueprints by hand and will never be at a loss for having avoided it. Just like it would have been ridiculous to for me to learn the slide rule.
What is the difference? I know the purpose of those objects and I understand that purpose conceptually. The tools can change and the presentation can change.
I would argue forcibly that mathematics sees too much theoretical math pushed down into elementary grades (my daughter has worked on set theory, prime numbers, and exponents in 3rd and 4th grade without even learning about division) because teachers and curriculum developers think they are teaching harder things by introducing high-level concepts.
Mathematicians are part of this nonsense because they want to see children exposed to their favorite math-theory puzzles or fascinations because that is what turns them on about math. They think that if kids see these ideas earlier that they will be excited about math.
More frequently, the children miss out on developing a real number and operation sense because they were too busy trying to figure out how to divide numbers without actually ever having being taught division and they end up frustrated and puzzled.
As you can see, I am no 'test no matter what' advocate. I am also against using any one person's experience as a barometer for what children should be taught.
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