[MD] Imaginings

[John Carl]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 7:46 AM, Steven Peterson
<peterson.steve at gmail.com>wrote:


>  If we are to be concerned about
> these test scores, we have to decide how much we care about whether
> are students should be willing to submit to tedious tests or whether
> we want them to be creative thinkers.
>
>

Well Steve, I've been wondering if we really WANT our students to be
creative thinkers.  We pay it lip-service, but do we actually reward
creativity or do we reward conformity to standards?

Let's drop the "we".  I don't want to identify with "them" - the powers that
be that run the world.  The teachers, preachers and parents who mostly want
their little charges to color between the lines and step according to the
beat of a conformist drum.

"They" need to be stopped!

Introverted Anarchist of the World Unite!









> Best,
> Steve
>
> "Every four years, an international group of educators administers a
> comprehensive mathematics and science test to elementary and junior
> high students around the world. It's the TIMSS...and the point of the
> TIMSS is to compare the educational achievement of one country with
> another's.
>
> When students sit down to take the TIMSS exam, they also have to fill
> out a questionnaire. It asks them all kinds of questions, such as what
> their parents' level of education is, and what their views about math
> are, and what their friends are like. It's not a trivial exercise.
> It's about 120 questions long. In fact, it is so tedious and demanding
> that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank.
>
> Now, here's the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number
> of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to
> country. It is possible, in fact, to rank all the participating
> countries according to how many items their students answer on the
> questionnaire. Now, what do you think happens if you compare the
> questionnaire rankings with the math rankings on the TIMSS? They are
> exactly the same. In other words, countries whose students are willing
> to concentrate and sit still long enough to focus on answering every
> single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries
> whose students do the best job of solving math problems.
>
> The person who discovered this fact is an educational researcher at
> the University of Pennsylvania named Erling Boe, and he stumbled
> across it by accident. "It came out of the blue," he says. Boe hasn't
> even been able to publish his findings in a scientific journal,
> because, he says, it's just a bit too weird. Remember, he's not saying
> that the ability to finish the questionnaire and the ability to excel
> on the math test are related. He's saying that they are the same: if
> you compare the two rankings, they are identical.
>
> Think about this another way. Imagine that every year, there was a
> Math Olympics in some fabulous city in the world. And every country in
> the world sent its own team of one thousand eighth graders. Boe's
> point is that we could predict precisely the order in which every
> country would finish in the Math Olympics without asking a single math
> question. All we would have to do is give them some task measuring how
> hard they were willing to work. In fact, we wouldn't even have to give
> them a task. We should be able to predict which countries are best at
> math simply by looking at which national cultures place the highest
> emphasis on effort and hard work.
>
> So, which places are at the top of both lists? The answer shouldn't
> surprise you: Singapore, South Korea, China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, and
> Japan. [Mainland China doesn't yet take part in the TIMSS study.] What
> those five have in common, of course, is that they are all cultures
> shaped by the tradition of wet-rice agriculture and meaningful work.
> They are the kind of places where, for hundreds of years, penniless
> peasants, slaving away in the rice paddies three thousand hours a
> year, said things to one another like "No one who can rise before dawn
> three hundred and sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.""
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