At College of the Desert (somewhere near the surface of planet
Mars) where I teach math, the poor sods are given the ETS placement exam
which can (or so the line goes) place students accurately (sic) in any
class from College Arithmetic to Calculus. With this in mind you'd also
have to "drill them into submission" on the trig identities, quadratic
formula, weird exponents, etc - which, in some sense, amounts to putting
them through the 4 semester sequence: College Arithmetic, Elementary
Algebra, Intermediate Algebra and Precalculus. The idea of
"outsourcing" would be very popular in Sacramento, though, where the
current thinking is that welfare moms can get a college education in the
space of a year or less. I give my students lots of tests - with
precisely the goal of making them skillful test takers and skillful
mathematicians, though I give no multiple guess questions and the tests
take alot of skill to grade. I think this beats the crap out of getting
them to be skill multiple guessers!
<> How did the prospective students who need remedial/developmental
courses get there? Lots of reasons. I'll speculate that many of the
under 25 group need developmental education because they were
indifferent learners in high school. (Many of them freely admit this.)
Why were they indifferent? Some grew up in a culture that under-values
education or even trivializes it. But also look at the way many of them
were taught in the public schools by otherwise wonderful teachers who
were too burned out by the system or didn't know any better:
Math is busy work computational drills for no useful purpose.
Writing is getting the grammar correct and getting a few ideas on
paper to satisfy the teacher and fill up the page. You only have to be
careful about spelling and grammar in English class.
Reading is boring if the stories are too long. Poetry is something
you have to do; nobody really knows why.
Science can be entertaining at times, but hard when you got to use
math or memorize Latin names.
History is learning dates and people and events.
Social studies is boring government stuff.
Sports really matters. Usually the popular folks are the sports
jocks. >
Yeah, (cynical snicker) that's about it.
<> So, when I get many of these remedial/developmental students in my
classes they come in with preconceived notions of what school is and
what learning is about, and it's usually close enough to my rambling
above to be a bit frightful. Now why in the world would I want to
out-source developmental courses to a learning factory that will only
reinforce these students' perception that school is nothing but a bunch
of senseless drills and hoops to jump through in order to get that
sheepskin employers want to see?
Furthermore, out-sourced R/D students would now come into my
college-level classes without a good sense of how to get by in college,
how to manage time, the importance of adhering to a schedule, the
importance of coming to class and so on: basic college survival skills.
Summarizing my concerns, I'd worry that although the out-sourced
student could pass a multiple-guess timed test (I don't give those, by
the way), they would have no experience in the independent thinking and
problem-solving I and my colleagues will force them to do and little
idea of the basic college survival skills that you build up in taking
those R/D classes. I fear they'll get blown away walking into my
college algebra class, and I won't water the course down for them
because I do not want to hold back those who really were prepared for
college-level courses to begin with. >
Right - college algebra is a killing field. We have no way of
insisting students are ready for a class before they enroll. A CA cc
was successfully sued for insisting on proper placement and since then
any student who wants to can take college algebra and fail it
repeatedly. Many many many do. Since it's the last math class you need
for a BA, why take any other? The trick is to figure out which teacher
gives take-home multiple guess tests.
<> That said, I fully understand the interest in out-sourcing R/D
stuff. To administrators who think more like managers than educators,
it probably looks cheaper. It's close to suicide to run a basic math or
developmental writing class with more than twenty students. Beginning
algebra doesn't work well with more than twenty-five or thirty.
To some faculty I've known in the past, out-sourcing looks good
because they are too good to teach those low level classes. That's what
you hire the part-timers for, right? Ugh! The best teachers you got
ought to be teaching some of those low level classes--that's where you
need the best teaching! Any math hacker can teach calculus; the
students are good enough to take care of themselves (compared to the
lowly R/D classes).
In a world according to me, I'd wave my hands and change the culture
of college education so that those R/D classes would be recognized as
very important. I'd use them to wean students away from the mechanical
rote thinking they are accustomed to and to really bring them up to
college-level speed. These courses would be considered valuable
investments instead of money drains, and out-sourcing would not be an
option. >
Due to governors Deukmejian and Wilson and the anti-tax fanatics of
prop 13, 75% of out math classes are taught by part timers and the
average class size in College Arithmetic is about 60.
<> Then again, someone will probably write in and contradict me with
glowing results by Sylvan. Oh well, stuff happens.
Jon>
>
>Jon Davidson
>Mathematics Department
>Southern State Community College
>Hillsboro, Ohio
>jdavidso@soucc.southern.cc.oh.us
Who is Sylvan?
Geoff Hagopian
College of the Desert
Palm Desert, CA
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