Right Wing Nation

There are really good questions, good questions, not so good questions, somewhat clueless questions, and questions that indicate brain death. We get enough of the latter two that surely, the four questions you most frequently want to ask (but never do) are, "Did you read the problem?" "What planet do you live on?" "Where have you been for the last six weeks?" and "How did you graduate from high school?"

Imagine that you are teaching a class at the university, and we’ll say you’re about six weeks into the semester. Most of your students have been attending class regularly (as most of mine always have). After having modeled this sort of problem countless times in class, and after students have worked this sort of problem quite a few times, you give them the following problem to do on their own to prepare for the coming exam.

Leary Chemical manufactures three chemicals: A, B, and C. These chemicals are produced via two production processes: 1 and 2. Running process 1 for an hour costs $4 and yields 3 units of A, 1 unit of B, and 1 unit of C. Running process 2 for an hour costs $1 and yields 1 unit of A and 1 unit of B. To meet customer demands, at least 10 units of A, 5 units of B, and 3 units of C must be produced daily. Determine what daily production will minimize costs.

Immediately, hands shoot up in the air, and you, along with your peer tutors, start running around the room to help students–and you get questions like this:

"How are we supposed to know how to solve this?"
"How do we know how much of each product to make?"
"What does ‘yields’ mean?"
"How do we know what customer demands are?"

And those are, of course, in addition to the ever present, "I don’t understand."

Most students at this stage are tackling the problem and at least have some clue about how to solve it ("How do we know what the constraints are?" would be a somewhat clueless question, since it does indicate that the student at least has an idea what kind of problem it is). But there are always those students who have been sitting right there in the classroom along with the other students who are still lost. You have to wonder what has been happening between their ears all those classes they sat through when you covered the topic, modeled the topic, and they worked on the topic on their own. Were they thinking about a new pair of shoes they wanted to buy, last night’s kegger, or the hot babe in their economics class?

Or consider this one:

Lessen Waist, Inc. produces low-fat cereals, which they sell in 12-ounce (weight) boxes. Because of settling and production scheduling, Lessen Waist cannot weigh every box of cereal, and 0.35 ounces (weight) is considered to be an acceptable variance from the advertized weight. Lessen Waist weighs a subset of boxes because the filling machines must be adjusted periodically. Use the 100 sample weights below and the appropriate statistical tests to determine if the boxes of cereal are within the acceptable weight. If they are not, use the appropriate statistical tests to determine how much the filling machines need to be adjusted.

And you get questions like this:

"How many calories are in each box of cereal?"
"Why does it say weight after 12-ounce and 0.35 ounces?"
"What do you mean by settling?"
"How do we know what the acceptable weight is?"
"What do you mean by appropriate statistical tests?"

Frustrating enough, though not nearly so frustrating as the above questions, is that invariably, some students will turn in the following:

then:

“12 - 11.59893 = 0.4010657, and 0.4010657 is greater than 0.35, so the machines need to be adjusted by 0.4010657 - 0.35, or 0.05106.”

So no, they didn’t even address either of the problems, much less answer them, but they want partial credit. Sure, they made a stab at it, but they demonstrate that they’ve been daydreaming for the last six weeks and completely miss the whole point and purpose of statistics. And these are the students who at least understand enough about statistics that they can find the data analysis toolpak in Excel and run it on the data, even if that doesn’t address the problem, but that’s rather like saying of a drunk driver that at least he knew enough to turn the key in the ignition; the ones who ask the questions above don’t get this far. And even the students who merely did the descriptive stats (as above) demonstrate their cluelessness when you try to help them and say, “Well, that would work fine for those hundred boxes, but we need to know about all of the boxes.” Deer in the headlights time.

Again, this isn’t all or most students. But it is enough students to be worrying, and that number of students has been slowly growing over the years. Do students have no experience with reading and solving problems in class–by themselves, and without the teacher or a classmate telling them how to do everything? Is that what’s going on? Are students asked to read problems, extract the data, and solve them using their brains? Are students unused to reading a problem critically and analytically?

And what has been going on in their heads all those classes they’ve sat through? How can you sit through six or eight weeks of statistics class and fail to understand the point and purpose of statistics, much less everything covered in class?

I’m just asking. I have no answers to these questions.

In the comment thread to this article, Phoenix said:

Those are the first and last sentences of a paragraph from your post. There is one word in there that you could change and exact the same frustration you outline: “university”. Substitute “high school” and it all ends up in the same hierarchy of blame.

It’s sad stuff all the way around. I taught 10th and 12th grade English for 20 years, and I cannot tell you how many times I sounded off just as you did here.

And Tony Iovino said:

Interesting–but instead of heading “upstream” from college to HS to middle school– how about a survey going “downstream”–to graduate schools and, ultimately, to employers. I have found, as an employer of 25 years, that young employees directly out of graduate and undergraduate schools are wholly unprepared– especially with regard to writing skills.

Look. I’ve said it before–I’ve been saying it for years–none of us teaches in a vacuum. It’s a cascading problem. And though we can all pass the buck, nearly all of us participate in it, because nearly all of us teach with no consideration or thought whatsoever to what the next teacher is going to cover. The result is that high school teachers get students who can’t read or write and in most cases do what they can with them, and then we get undergraduates who can’t read or write and do what we can with them.

One more time. You don’t teach in a vacuum. Learning cascades. What your students do or do not learn in the fifth grade affects how well they will learn in the sixth, and the process repeats until your students graduate from the university.

This problem can’t be fixed at just one level. Employers can’t blame the universities, the universities can’t blame the high schools, the high schools can’t blame the middle schools, and the middle schools can’t blame the elementary schools. The only way to fix the problem is fix it from the bottom up, all the way through the educational system.

You don’t teach in a vacuum.

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