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TN near bottom in Math Progress IndexSubmitted by onetahiti on January 16, 2010 - 12:38pm.
Education Week gives the Quality Counts results by state for math progress: Link... (PDF). Tennessee ranks #45, but the news isn't all bad. Yes, only 28.4% of 4th graders and 25.2% of 8th graders tested "proficient" or above on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). In addition, only 1.5% of students in grades 11 and 12 earned "high" test scores (3 or above). However, this does represent an increase of 28% over last year's value (a little over 1%). Lest we be too elated over this improvement, note that the nation as a whole achieved a much higher increase: 68%. What can we do to help the students and raise these numbers? For starters, there was an excellent discussion on improving math performance a little over two years ago right here on RoaneViews: Link... -- OneTahiti
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The Report Card published by the Tennessee Department of Education has all sorts of scores: Link... and Link...
The latter link lets you look up scores by school as well as by county.
Overall the math scores here are about average for Tennessee or a little below. With Tennessee ranking #45 for the US, and the US not exactly ranking high in the world (Link...), we here in Roane County have real cause for worry. :(
-- OneTahiti
Sounds like it's time for the Tennessee "Department of Intellectual Disability" to come to the rescue.
When "sports programs" stop being the primary focus of our state's school system, we could get around to actual academic studies. But then again this is the region where winning coaches are more valued than outstanding teachers.
Living and teaching Earth friendly sustainable agricultural practices.
Link...
leaf@sustainability-teaching-farm.com
I found an excellent article by Dr. Robert H. Lewis, Professor of Mathematics at Fordham University, titled "Mathematics: The Most Misunderstood Subject" (Link...).
If you are interested in improving our local math education, it is well worth the read. He goes past the basic building blocks--which are necessary too!--to the real deal.
-- OneTahiti
There is good news, but I'll start with the backstory.
The good news is about recipes for accomplishing various tasks. These recipes are called algorithms. People who work with algorithms try to think of provably better ways of doing things.
When I was in school, way back when, the study of algorithms was categorized as a joint endeavor of the math and the computer science departments, but still with graduate-level math-department course numbers. I labored through the two semester classes offered and worked my way through the beautiful and elegant details of Knuth (a multivolume compendium of algorithms titled "The Art of Computer Programming").
The information and methods I gained greatly helped me through decades of R&D and consulting work.
Now, the good news.
I am delighted to see an article about the immense progress made in algorithms that enable many of our new electronics and programs to perform the tasks they do. See: Link...
So, for those who ask, "Is math good for anything beyond the arithmetic calculations we often face everyday?" The answer is a resounding, "Yes!" :)
While knowledge of math can make our products better, it is also true that ignorance of math can hurt business. I've seen programmers who squandered weeks trying to compute a problem that was mathematically not computable. I've seen others who wrote overly slow programs because they were not conversant in the relevant algorithms.
We need to emphasize math in this county, in this country, if we want a bright future.
-- OneTahiti