I think our educational system is in trouble. I have thought this for some time based on my own experiences (BA, MA, PhD), my reading, and my own children’s experiences (three who went through public schools).
This conviction was reinforced recently with an experience my youngest daughter had. She started in college intending to become some sort of engineer. For a variety of reasons, which did not include lack of math ability, she switched to education. After graduation she was offered a job teaching high school math.
That was when she discovered her B in Calculus 3 would not count as math credit in the education program because it was only a 200 level class! The education department has created and runs its own 300 level math classes which do count. Do you suppose these 300 level math education classes might be somewhat less rigorous from a math standpoint than calculus 3 as taught in the School of Engineering?
The purpose of this site is NOT to beatup on educators. Our three children were fortunate to have many dedicated teachers who worked hard to give them a quality education. However, those efforts were limited by budget, administrative, and facility constraints which limited what these people could do.
With our posts and pages on this site we try to show how educators and others can take advantage of the astonishing richness of tools and wisdom now available via the internet to give their students a state of the art education without a big budget.
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