My niece started her junior year at a highly rated California high school. For her honors pre-calculus class, she was assigned to do a collage about herself. My sister thinks 11th grade is time enough to stop doing time-wasting — and mathless — art projects. “It’s a math class!” she said. “Why aren’t they doing math?”
I mentioned my journalism students seemed surprised when I told them not to write in the first person. They’d spent years being encouraged to write about themselves and their feelings and draw pictures about themselves and their feelings.
“Sometimes, it’s not about you,” my sister said. “It’s about pre-calculus!”
Update: Read the comments for Amber’s story of her first day at Harvard Law School; she provides a link to her collage. Or here it is on her blog.
There are places where graduate students in math have to do poster boards.
And all of a sudden, my college students’ inability to basic algebra all makes sense.
Whereas there’s no explanation for my inability to use verbs appropriately. Argh. Inability to DO basic algebra, natch.
I wonder what the psychology is here. Why this desire to turn everything into an arts & crafts project?
I heard about one class on the Holocaust which featured this project: pretend that you are a German Jew running from the SS…pack a box with all the things you would take with you. Making it all seem like a game.
A friend suggested packing a Luger…bet that wouldn’t have gone down too well with the teacher.
My first assignment at Harvard Law School was to make a collage depicting what I thought it was to be a good lawyer.
Amber..please tell me you are putting us on. Please.
photoncourier.blogspot.com wrote:
I wonder what the psychology is here.
No skills need to be learned – or taught.
Grading, and the justification for the grade, isn’t necessary or even possible. When the collage is handed in it’s done, when it’s done it’s done right.
It’s an undemanding task by any measure – skill, time or knowledge – so unlikely to generate resistance from students.
The collage allows for enthusiasm in the absence of any demonstration of skill which skirts the danger of judgementalism.
“I wonder what the psychology is here.”
A central component of the anti-knowledge progressive/constructionist creed is “constructing one’s own knowlege”. Somehow, this construction takes place through endless hands-on activities, coloring, arts and crafts. Educationists are even pushing this creed in secondary education and beyond.
See this, for example, from a high priestess of this creed: http://susanohanian.org/show_commentary.php?id=55
A recent op-ed by Donna Harrington-Lueker in USA Today exposes the shocking secrets of high school English classes. The scandal is now revealed. English teachers are using creative ways to engage their students and make learning effective. Specifically, they are frequently allowing students to respond to literature by making maps of settings, designing games to illustrate themes, and creating art projects to detail character analysis. Goodness, high school English teachers are even occasionally using children’s books as part of what the USA Today headline calls the new “crayola curriculum.”
My heavenly days: pass me the smelling salts.
As a former high school English teacher and the president of the 77,000-member National Council of Teachers of English, I fully recognize what these crazy teachers are doing. I confess: I’ve done it myself. I’ll even go further than that: I still do it and have no intention of changing.
No joke! The prompt and my deliberately bad collage can be found here.
Ha! Making a collage is rocket science, compared with the crap we had to do at our back-to-school staff ‘development’ pupil-free day (for teachers)….An hour speaking Pig Latin, so we could feel what it was like to be a “second language learner”. I kid you not. But heaven forbid that we should spend our time setting up our classrooms and planning for the coming year. I guess the out-of-classroom powers that be don’t consider classroom setup and planning to be real ‘work’. Maybe I should write my lesson plan book in Pig Latin. Oink!
I heard about one class on the Holocaust which featured this project: pretend that you are a German Jew running from the SS…pack a box with all the things you would take with you. Making it all seem like a game.
Let’s change this to: pretend you are a Russian Jew running from a mob (stoned on vodka and Jesus) out to beat and rob you. But why pretend… if you’re a “nerd” or “geek” or whatever in some schools, that’s the reality.
Or even better… pretend you’re a teacher who believes in merit pay at a union function.
I’m so angry at this crap I feel like making a poster. Last semester I entered a colleague’s honors 10 English class to find students doing crafts in response to the novel they just read. Educrats love stuff like graphic organizers and other visuals. They get their cue from Gardner. It’s called “alternative assessment,” which allows students that can’t read or write to pass their classes.
“Football is a game of blocking and tackling.” –Knute Rockne (1922)
“English is a class of reading and writing.” –BadaBing (2005)
I suppose this is what they mean by “the old collage try”.
I keep on thinking the education system can’t get any more stupid and irrelevant. Then I read about garbage like this.
The first chance I get to move to another planet, I’m outa here.
In a few years, will we see “Opening Collages” in court cases? … http://www.ishkabible.com/archives/2005/09/arts_and_crafts.html
This is not terribly new – when my (now a Junior in College) was in 5th grade at a highly touted middle school in a highly though of school district in Kansas (Olathe School District), his math teacher decided that he was a sub-standard math student because his math project looked so bad – he was supposed to build a house out of paper. She gave him the only D of his school career.
It happens that my son hates arts and crafts and is now a computer science major with well over 24 hours of advanced math courses behind him.
And she told me that he needed remedial math help.
“And all of a sudden, my college students’ inability to basic algebra all makes sense.”
No, actually, it doesn’t. Any kid taking precalc as a junior knows basic algebra–collage or not, verbs or not.
The collages, the poster boards, the drawings–they’re all disgusting jokes perpetrated on high-achieving students by teachers who didn’t do nearly as well when they themselves were in school. Most likely, this is part of their revenge on smart people. But by and large, the teachers in quality schools are teaching well.
The real issue in school these days is grades, not collages or other absurd artwork. It’s quite normal for the kid to get a D on the collage and have it count as a fourth of his grade, with the As in the tests and homework only counting for 50%.
Grades are becoming a monstrous joke. The elite kids are getting Bs and Cs for work that would give them an A in any other class, and the kids in urban and poor performing schools are getting As for work so incompetent that 8th graders would be flunked for it. And yet they are all being compared as equals for college admissions.
Maybe we can have an economy based on collages and similar arts & crafts projects. Instead of sending civil engineers to reconstruct bridges, etc in New Oreleans–which might involve some actual algebra–we could just put up giant collages and do some more emoting.
Maybe we can have an economy based on collages and similar arts & crafts projects.
Doesn’t that describe Hollywood? Or am I giving it too much credit?
No, actually, it doesn’t. Any kid taking precalc as a junior knows basic algebra–collage or not, verbs or not.
Ha. Ha. Ha. Hoo boy; that’s a howler. I had precalc students who didn’t know that fractions were numbers.
“Ha. Ha. Ha. Hoo boy; that’s a howler. I had precalc students who didn’t know that fractions were numbers.”
The SAT math scores of high school seniors nationwide have a median of just above 500, which can’t be achieved without a basic understanding of both algebra and fractions. And then remember that the kids taking precalc are, as a group, doing much better than just slightly over 500. I’m sure that some small percentage of the poor and minority kids who sit in pre-calc classes haven’t absorbed any math, but they are a fraction of the whole.
Or you can continue to confuse actual data with anecdata. It’s your choice, of course.
Cal, how’s your English? Or, for that matter, your logic? You said, Any kid taking precalc as a junior knows basic algebra–collage or not, verbs or not. I said, no, some kids don’t: I’ve had some in my class. You countered with, “but wait, ON AVERAGE KIDS TAKING PRECALCULUS KNOW BASIC ALGEBRA, look at the SAT scores!” and then slammed me for confusing “anecdata with real data”. (Never mind that I teach in Canada, so your data on SATs is irrelevant to my region.)
Cal: A single counterexample is required to demonstrate that a claim is false. I learned that in a high school math class. Had I been been using my several years’ experience to argue that most kids who take precalculus know basic algebra, then your accusation would be valid. Or, you can continue to confuse pat insults with logical arguments. It’s your choice, of course.