In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Rich Ulrich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >On 25 Mar 2003 10:34:21 -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Dennis Roberts) wrote:
>> At 12:54 PM 3/25/03 -0500, Rich Ulrich wrote: >> > - But I do see big flaws, >> >some of them quite "objective": for example, I saw several >> >young teachers in their first years of teaching; and most >> >courses did fail to finish their textbooks by the end of the year. >> if college courses were judged by this standard ... then most college >> courses would fail miserably ... Many high school textbooks are designed for the length of the term or terms. Some college textbooks are so designed, but most are not. > - A phrase that comes to mind, relating to el-hi courses, is >"integrated curriculum". This is another innovation of the educationists. It used to be that the students were expected to apply what they had learned in one course to another. They did not achieve the extremely high percentage which educationists expected from recent rote, and so it was concluded that they needed to be shown exactly how the application took place. Down goes learning in many ways. I was in Texas, where the state is >notorious for its vetting and screening process. My impression >is that other states, as states, also make selections -- Texas >and California are big markets, and many other states follow >their lead. The fundamentalist/ religious sensitivities in Texas >are responsible for the "dumbing-down" of texts in biology >(evolution) and social sciences (multi-culturalism). Courses in "social sciences" were introduced in the 30s for the reason above. As this precluded the natural content of separate geography and history, the subject became a dumbed-down hodgepodge. The idea that education was mainly limited to memorization and routine, with little carry over from one course to the next, became established, and with it the tendency for students to memorize for the current course exams, and forget after it was over. >One course in a sequence presumes that the students >covered the previous material, even it they did not learn it well. This seems to be the case in mathematics, to some extent in English, and essentially not at all in the other subjects. >> most texts are NOT designed for any specific course ... in fact most are >> designed for all kinds of courses ... depending on how the course is configured >> take any decent intro stat textbook ... there is NO way an instructor can >> cover all that stuff in one term ... It depends what you mean by this. One can do a decent probability and statistics course in one year, but I consider it dangerous to do any statistics without that much probability. By probability, I do not mean being able to compute, but to understand. >I don't remember any statistics textbooks that I did not >keep for long-term reference. And I am happy that they >were designed for dual purpose. I kept most of my other >textbooks, too, at least for a while. I disagree. There were some worth keeping, but not many. In fact, I have never had a statistics course, and only one quarter of probability, which may have filled in a few gaps. The schools instill the foolish idea that one needs to have formal courses to learn something. >The state owned all the textbooks for my first twelve years. >No underlining allowed, and turn them back in at the end >of the year. -- This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University. Herman Rubin, Deptartment of Statistics, Purdue University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558 . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
