Good grief. As a female that studied and is employed in STEM, this is bizarre. There are many ways to pull "non-traditional" students into STEM that don't require lowering standards. My mother used to take me to a NYS University sponsored conference (in the late 80's through early 90's every year) "Females + Math = Success" to encourage …
Good grief. As a female that studied and is employed in STEM, this is bizarre. There are many ways to pull "non-traditional" students into STEM that don't require lowering standards. My mother used to take me to a NYS University sponsored conference (in the late 80's through early 90's every year) "Females + Math = Success" to encourage girls to get into STEM fields. It was a fun day conference at the university campus in which you could take different workshops engaging in hands on math and science concepts, or meeting and having Q&A with female STEM professionals. If the concern is that minority students and "representation" is a factor, why not organize similar conferences for minority STEM professionals and students in a similar vein? And, yes, there are plenty of minority STEM professionals to participate before anyone asks.
The point being, the coursework shouldn't be guided towards "equity" by downgrading the content, but to provide more supportive resources and examples for students to have, even if they have to be identity based - or not. Provide examples of why "STEM" can be relevant, exciting, fun, or interesting - and perhaps importantly, a remunerative field economically speaking for an individual's future . It worked for me. I took all four years of high school math including pre-calc, and took Linear Algebra, Calc II and III in college. I ended up pursuing computer programming/CIS.
But this "lowering of standards" is a race to the bottom that benefits exactly no one, but I'm sure benefits some pompous academics that get to chastise criticism as "racism". I'm center-left/nominally progressive but I'm increasingly sick and tired of the activist/academic bent of "progressivism". It's lazy, stupid, and harmful.
A big part of the problem is an increasing educational teaching apparatus that is also not schooled in *how* to teach math properly, instead going off into bizarre methods to even teach *elementary school math*. I know this from having to help my son in the early oughts with his math homework, where, weirdly, the "old" ways of learning how to do complex computations (long division, multiplication using cross addition/subtraction) involved some very baroque ways of arriving at a "method" to get the answer, rather than just doing the operations. I had to teach him the way *I* knew because the instructions made no sense otherwise, and yet his homework would be marked down for not using their idiotic and cumbersome approach. No wonder we have a large student population that can't do basic math. Let alone the "literacy reading" debacle. Educational schools have a lot to answer for. But there does also need to be a concerted effort to recruit actually qualified professionals to teach - which does mean both raising the bar for being a teacher, but also raising the salary.
I also taught my sons the 'old' way of simple calculations because the methodology form school was bizarre and prone to error. They found 'my' way much more logical.
Sadly my daughter refused to change, and has struggled throughout her life with anything other than basic maths.
Funnily enough she has an accounting minor with her marketing major.
Good grief. As a female that studied and is employed in STEM, this is bizarre. There are many ways to pull "non-traditional" students into STEM that don't require lowering standards. My mother used to take me to a NYS University sponsored conference (in the late 80's through early 90's every year) "Females + Math = Success" to encourage girls to get into STEM fields. It was a fun day conference at the university campus in which you could take different workshops engaging in hands on math and science concepts, or meeting and having Q&A with female STEM professionals. If the concern is that minority students and "representation" is a factor, why not organize similar conferences for minority STEM professionals and students in a similar vein? And, yes, there are plenty of minority STEM professionals to participate before anyone asks.
The point being, the coursework shouldn't be guided towards "equity" by downgrading the content, but to provide more supportive resources and examples for students to have, even if they have to be identity based - or not. Provide examples of why "STEM" can be relevant, exciting, fun, or interesting - and perhaps importantly, a remunerative field economically speaking for an individual's future . It worked for me. I took all four years of high school math including pre-calc, and took Linear Algebra, Calc II and III in college. I ended up pursuing computer programming/CIS.
But this "lowering of standards" is a race to the bottom that benefits exactly no one, but I'm sure benefits some pompous academics that get to chastise criticism as "racism". I'm center-left/nominally progressive but I'm increasingly sick and tired of the activist/academic bent of "progressivism". It's lazy, stupid, and harmful.
A big part of the problem is an increasing educational teaching apparatus that is also not schooled in *how* to teach math properly, instead going off into bizarre methods to even teach *elementary school math*. I know this from having to help my son in the early oughts with his math homework, where, weirdly, the "old" ways of learning how to do complex computations (long division, multiplication using cross addition/subtraction) involved some very baroque ways of arriving at a "method" to get the answer, rather than just doing the operations. I had to teach him the way *I* knew because the instructions made no sense otherwise, and yet his homework would be marked down for not using their idiotic and cumbersome approach. No wonder we have a large student population that can't do basic math. Let alone the "literacy reading" debacle. Educational schools have a lot to answer for. But there does also need to be a concerted effort to recruit actually qualified professionals to teach - which does mean both raising the bar for being a teacher, but also raising the salary.
I also taught my sons the 'old' way of simple calculations because the methodology form school was bizarre and prone to error. They found 'my' way much more logical.
Sadly my daughter refused to change, and has struggled throughout her life with anything other than basic maths.
Funnily enough she has an accounting minor with her marketing major.