It seems that our education system have not enough emphsis on Math and the Sciences.
I was fortunate to have good science teachers. I am still interested in geology and mechanics. And I make a living at crunching numbers for the government.
Maybe I am wierd, but I like to watch the discovery channel
You can blame the dinosaur/human coexistence confusion on the media, as well. How many films, cartoons, etc., portray them together? In fact, text books until probably the late 70's had them together.
And how closely did they have to approximate the water coverage?
* The approximately correct answer range for this question was defined as anything between 65% and 75%. Only 15% of respondents answered this question with the exactly correct answer of 70%.
Hmmm - while I won't disagree with the general results - the survey showed zero demographics - how many were inner city? How many were less than high school educated? What is the time it takes the earth to revolve around the sun? A year - hmmm what is a year? 365 days? 365.25 days+leap corrections? A sidereal year of 365.256363004 days + leap second corrections?
Sorry; as a scientist I find the survey to be fundamentally flawed...
From Science Daily comes a report that shows how shockingly ignorant so many of us are. They took a poll of random adults, asking very basic questions about science, and the numbers didn't turn out too well. Here are the questions and results:
I can sort of understand some of the results of #2 since some religious groups believe that humans and dinosaurs coexisted, but these are really some basic questions. I don't really see how people who got these wrong, especially the first one, are capable of breathing on their own, much less functioning as adults in society.
Whoa, Rumrunner, "A sidereal year of 365.256363004 days?" Did you know that number, or did you have to look it up? And just when I was going to congratulate myself for getting all 3 answers right....
It really was an unfair question in once sense Shaz. I am an applied mathematician and I work with spacecraft of all types. We - with rare exception - use a sidereal year when calculating anything in a heliocentric (orbiting the sun) or geocentric sun-synchronous (orbiting the earth using the earth/sun for time and spatial references). To answer your question I did happen to have that number in my head - but I would not expect most people to have it in theirs. I was just questioning the validity of the survey methodology.
Whoa, Rumrunner, "A sidereal year of 365.256363004 days?" Did you know that number, or did you have to look it up? And just when I was going to congratulate myself for getting all 3 answers right....
Although, I did have one cashier back in my restaurant days make 8 dimes and 3 pennies for .83 in change. There was plenty of quarters and nickles in the drawer. She was about to graduate as a nursing student. Now, THAT is scary!!
Hmmm - while I won't disagree with the general results - the survey showed zero demographics - how many were inner city? How many were less than high school educated?
Excellent questions, and I've thought about asking people in my office the questions just to see how the results hold up with educated people who should know these things.
What is the time it takes the earth to revolve around the sun? A year - hmmm what is a year? 365 days? 365.25 days+leap corrections? A sidereal year of 365.256363004 days + leap second corrections?
365 days is still correct, since most of us don't need to calculate it to the level of precision that you do. We can round the number quite easily to get the 365 days.
365 days is still correct, since most of us don't need to calculate it to the level of precision that you do. We can round the number quite easily to get the 365 days.
Most of us should at least know 365.25 days in a year, since we all know we have to add a calendar day every 4 years.
In some elementaries, there is time and emphasis on science and social studies (another area sorely lacking). These are the schools that are populated by children of educated parents and the children come to kindergarten already knowing most of the alphabet....(yes it all starts here)
Then - in my school because we are swimming against the current, we focus almost entirely on math and reading to make our AYP. With crack babies, the up and coming ganstaa's and shaken baby syndrome and poor or malnourished children, it is difficult to say the least to please the "test Gods."
The point is -- if it isn't easily dicernable - that it isn't surprising to me and has roots in issues far bigger than education ultimately.
Ayep wash-n-wear exactly to my point. We don't know the demographics of that survey but we DO know that education is driven (or should be driven) by a) parents and b) properly funded and staffed school systems. I've seen way too many parents not bother to educate at home and treat the schools more like a day-care while at work than a place to seriously consider the future of their children.
How about when you ask a student why they didn't bring pencil and paper to class and he replies, "My mama says if you want me to do work then you should give it to me."
or...I am going to call your parents and tell them how you are acting in class. "Go ahead, and my mama will wanna know what you did to upset me."
It is not our educational system that is failing.....it is the breakdown of the family unit that is failing our children. Many families are single parent. Many single parents are working two and three jobs just to keep a roof over their head and food on the table. And then there are some parents who don't give a wahoo. I was shocked to learn when the boy was in elementary school there were some children who would not eat after they left school on Friday until they returned on Monday.
Most schools in our nation, I would dare to say, have taken on the role of parenting and mentoring. They teach more than the three r's. They are having to teach life and coping skills so they can teach the three r's. Teaching conflict resolution in first grade. Not a bad thing. Unfortunately, that has become the nature of the beast.
Funding? We need something. In all of the boy's classes there is only one set of books for all periods. Nobody brings a book home. That has been so since he was in middle school. Check a book out from the high school library? Nope. It may not be returned and there is no extra money to purchase another one. Come in early before school to read it or stay after school to read it.
Yet, funding can fund, fund, fun, not so funny away. How do you fund rebuilding the family unit?
This survey was conducted by telephone within the United States by Harris Interactive on behalf of the California Academy of Science between December 17 and December 21, 2008 among 1,002 adults ages 18+.]
I'd wonder too, how the participants were selected. Harris is the Big Gun in surveys, though. Surveys by phone suck though IMO.
Earth surface/water - digging down I know the number is supposed to be 70 percent but I first thought "2/3 rds" off the top of my head. It sound right, between 2/3rd and 3/4 would be my fast answer. It just sounds right even if you don't know exactly and picture the standard image of the earth from space. But I suspect that wouldn't be correct in the poll.
People and Dino's - I guess I'm surprised 41 per cent of those polled would answer based solely on religious belief - isn't that the 6,000 year age of the earth thing? I'd actually think that in a poll the answer would be qualified by a lot of people, knowing they were being polled. I'd like to see the question - was it "did dinosaurs and man exist at the same time?" or exactly what? I really find it hard to believe that many adults would answer "yes" without some form of explanation attached and I'd want to know how that was reflected in the results. Dunno.
Without the exact wording of the questions and the exact data results it is difficult to know if they calculated the results correctly. Add to that if people were expected to give a specific answer. . and you answer the phone as you are trying to cook dinner, get kids ready for some activity etc... and you are only half listening to the questions or they are so badly worded as to make it impossible to give a good answer.
I was once in one of those national surveys that get posted to news stories. (I didn't know what it was going to be used for until I saw the news story)
Knowing what they asked and what my answeres were made me realize just how flawed those surveys actually are.
IT wasn't the questions that were so bad but how they extrapolated the data they recieved.
I reminded myself tonight that I am a dumbster. I didn't know until a few weeks ago that Pluto is no longer considered a planet in our solar system. It is a plutoid thingy along with that other heavenly orb that was "discovered." There was a very important meeting of astronomers and it was voted by most of them to decide such. The National Geographic episode was made a couple of years ago. I thought I had watched something new!!!
I told several people about it and they all responded, "Yeh, you didn't know that?" Then my little 89 year old lady friend said, "Honey, where have you been?"
I reminded myself tonight that I am a dumbster. I didn't know until a few weeks ago that Pluto is no longer considered a planet in our solar system. It is a plutoid thingy along with that other heavenly orb that was "discovered." There was a very important meeting of astronomers and it was voted by most of them to decide such. The National Geographic episode was made a couple of years ago. I thought I had watched something new!!!
I told several people about it and they all responded, "Yeh, you didn't know that?" Then my little 89 year old lady friend said, "Honey, where have you been?"
I gotta get out more........
Realistically, Pluto is still what it always has been, we've just defined it differently. So it doesn't matter that much I suppose. It's not like misunderstanding what a year is.
"The point is -- if it isn't easily dicernable - that it isn't surprising to me and has roots in issues far bigger than education ultimately."
I would agree. Family environment, parenting, what's happening in the home, all of that figures in. If the parents assume that education happens in the school system and that's "their job" the child could have a tough time, particularly today when school's are struggling to maintain curriculum standards, materials, teachers, etc. etc.
The schools where we live have done a decent job overall but have had some serious break downs over the years. Some years, teachers have come into the system, instituted their own curriculum and approach to teaching, stay a couple years and then leave. The Principals change every few years - in the high school here that position rotated every year, for years. The School Board juggled increasing confusing requirements, testing standards as well as teacher preferences, plus the constant concern for funding and administration. Net result - our kids would go from one grad to the next in elementary and some years it was like they were starting all over, with little or no connection to what had been done previously.
It got so bad by the time my son hit Middle School that they had a teacher who ran the class by student preference - each student picked the chapter of the years text book they wanted to study and the teacher "assisted" them in learning. There was little or no presentation of the material to the entire class at the same time, and when there was no one understood it if they weren't in that chapter.
I spoke to the teacher then the Principal but it was like pulling teeth to get any kind of managment oversight of what was going on. This being the second year that teacher had been there, it finally took the following year's teacher to admit they were having to do months of remedial work to get the students up to par, wasting months of time. It was very difficult to get any kind of recognition of what was going on, despite the fact at least half the parents were concerned and complaining. And this is in a school system in a fairly small town that you'd think would be manageable.
It illustrated to me how f@#$%d up the system can be. There were teachers, there were students, there were schools and money was being spent. But the management of the entire system, from the standpoint of curriculum and consistency in delivering it over a 12 year period - in a word, sucked in various years. The result was there were blanks in some years for the kids, depending on what level of chaos was going on.
Without some level of involvement and interest in the home, a child completely reliant on the schools would have been lost. At some point whether it was the child themselves and/or their parents, they had to rise above and take control of their own education and make sense out of the chaos.
This wasn't all years, all grades or all teachers. But how the school's were run and education executed daily allowed for big breakdowns to occur and when they did it could very difficult to navigate the whole thing to get anything done.
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Zshot
Sadly, I am not surprised.
It seems that our education system have not enough emphsis on Math and the Sciences.
I was fortunate to have good science teachers. I am still interested in geology and mechanics. And I make a living at crunching numbers for the government.
Maybe I am wierd, but I like to watch the discovery channel
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GeorgeStGeorge
You can blame the dinosaur/human coexistence confusion on the media, as well. How many films, cartoons, etc., portray them together? In fact, text books until probably the late 70's had them together.
And how closely did they have to approximate the water coverage?
George
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Zshot
* The approximately correct answer range for this question was defined as anything between 65% and 75%. Only 15% of respondents answered this question with the exactly correct answer of 70%.
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RumRunner
Hmmm - while I won't disagree with the general results - the survey showed zero demographics - how many were inner city? How many were less than high school educated? What is the time it takes the earth to revolve around the sun? A year - hmmm what is a year? 365 days? 365.25 days+leap corrections? A sidereal year of 365.256363004 days + leap second corrections?
Sorry; as a scientist I find the survey to be fundamentally flawed...
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Bolshevik
If you could translate that information into dollars they might start remembering better.
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shazdancer
Whoa, Rumrunner, "A sidereal year of 365.256363004 days?" Did you know that number, or did you have to look it up? And just when I was going to congratulate myself for getting all 3 answers right....
;)
Shaz
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RumRunner
It really was an unfair question in once sense Shaz. I am an applied mathematician and I work with spacecraft of all types. We - with rare exception - use a sidereal year when calculating anything in a heliocentric (orbiting the sun) or geocentric sun-synchronous (orbiting the earth using the earth/sun for time and spatial references). To answer your question I did happen to have that number in my head - but I would not expect most people to have it in theirs. I was just questioning the validity of the survey methodology.
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kimberly
Bolshevic, I hooted.
Although, I did have one cashier back in my restaurant days make 8 dimes and 3 pennies for .83 in change. There was plenty of quarters and nickles in the drawer. She was about to graduate as a nursing student. Now, THAT is scary!!
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Mister P-Mosh
Excellent questions, and I've thought about asking people in my office the questions just to see how the results hold up with educated people who should know these things.
365 days is still correct, since most of us don't need to calculate it to the level of precision that you do. We can round the number quite easily to get the 365 days.
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WordWolf
Most of us should at least know 365.25 days in a year, since we all know we have to add a calendar day every 4 years.
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washn'wear
In some elementaries, there is time and emphasis on science and social studies (another area sorely lacking). These are the schools that are populated by children of educated parents and the children come to kindergarten already knowing most of the alphabet....(yes it all starts here)
Then - in my school because we are swimming against the current, we focus almost entirely on math and reading to make our AYP. With crack babies, the up and coming ganstaa's and shaken baby syndrome and poor or malnourished children, it is difficult to say the least to please the "test Gods."
The point is -- if it isn't easily dicernable - that it isn't surprising to me and has roots in issues far bigger than education ultimately.
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RumRunner
Ayep wash-n-wear exactly to my point. We don't know the demographics of that survey but we DO know that education is driven (or should be driven) by a) parents and b) properly funded and staffed school systems. I've seen way too many parents not bother to educate at home and treat the schools more like a day-care while at work than a place to seriously consider the future of their children.
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kimberly
How about when you ask a student why they didn't bring pencil and paper to class and he replies, "My mama says if you want me to do work then you should give it to me."
or...I am going to call your parents and tell them how you are acting in class. "Go ahead, and my mama will wanna know what you did to upset me."
It is not our educational system that is failing.....it is the breakdown of the family unit that is failing our children. Many families are single parent. Many single parents are working two and three jobs just to keep a roof over their head and food on the table. And then there are some parents who don't give a wahoo. I was shocked to learn when the boy was in elementary school there were some children who would not eat after they left school on Friday until they returned on Monday.
Most schools in our nation, I would dare to say, have taken on the role of parenting and mentoring. They teach more than the three r's. They are having to teach life and coping skills so they can teach the three r's. Teaching conflict resolution in first grade. Not a bad thing. Unfortunately, that has become the nature of the beast.
Funding? We need something. In all of the boy's classes there is only one set of books for all periods. Nobody brings a book home. That has been so since he was in middle school. Check a book out from the high school library? Nope. It may not be returned and there is no extra money to purchase another one. Come in early before school to read it or stay after school to read it.
Yet, funding can fund, fund, fun, not so funny away. How do you fund rebuilding the family unit?
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oenophile
Psalm 93:1
...the world is stablished (fixed, see Young's) that it cannot be moved...
So much for biblical accuracy and inerrancy.
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socks
I'd wonder too, how the participants were selected. Harris is the Big Gun in surveys, though. Surveys by phone suck though IMO.
Earth surface/water - digging down I know the number is supposed to be 70 percent but I first thought "2/3 rds" off the top of my head. It sound right, between 2/3rd and 3/4 would be my fast answer. It just sounds right even if you don't know exactly and picture the standard image of the earth from space. But I suspect that wouldn't be correct in the poll.
People and Dino's - I guess I'm surprised 41 per cent of those polled would answer based solely on religious belief - isn't that the 6,000 year age of the earth thing? I'd actually think that in a poll the answer would be qualified by a lot of people, knowing they were being polled. I'd like to see the question - was it "did dinosaurs and man exist at the same time?" or exactly what? I really find it hard to believe that many adults would answer "yes" without some form of explanation attached and I'd want to know how that was reflected in the results. Dunno.
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leafytwiglet
Without the exact wording of the questions and the exact data results it is difficult to know if they calculated the results correctly. Add to that if people were expected to give a specific answer. . and you answer the phone as you are trying to cook dinner, get kids ready for some activity etc... and you are only half listening to the questions or they are so badly worded as to make it impossible to give a good answer.
I was once in one of those national surveys that get posted to news stories. (I didn't know what it was going to be used for until I saw the news story)
Knowing what they asked and what my answeres were made me realize just how flawed those surveys actually are.
IT wasn't the questions that were so bad but how they extrapolated the data they recieved.
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Bolshevik
didn't we have one of those "once in every four hundred year" corrections a few years back? maybe that was for a miscalculation, not sure . . .
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kimberly
I reminded myself tonight that I am a dumbster. I didn't know until a few weeks ago that Pluto is no longer considered a planet in our solar system. It is a plutoid thingy along with that other heavenly orb that was "discovered." There was a very important meeting of astronomers and it was voted by most of them to decide such. The National Geographic episode was made a couple of years ago. I thought I had watched something new!!!
I told several people about it and they all responded, "Yeh, you didn't know that?" Then my little 89 year old lady friend said, "Honey, where have you been?"
I gotta get out more........
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Mister P-Mosh
Realistically, Pluto is still what it always has been, we've just defined it differently. So it doesn't matter that much I suppose. It's not like misunderstanding what a year is.
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socks
"The point is -- if it isn't easily dicernable - that it isn't surprising to me and has roots in issues far bigger than education ultimately."
I would agree. Family environment, parenting, what's happening in the home, all of that figures in. If the parents assume that education happens in the school system and that's "their job" the child could have a tough time, particularly today when school's are struggling to maintain curriculum standards, materials, teachers, etc. etc.
The schools where we live have done a decent job overall but have had some serious break downs over the years. Some years, teachers have come into the system, instituted their own curriculum and approach to teaching, stay a couple years and then leave. The Principals change every few years - in the high school here that position rotated every year, for years. The School Board juggled increasing confusing requirements, testing standards as well as teacher preferences, plus the constant concern for funding and administration. Net result - our kids would go from one grad to the next in elementary and some years it was like they were starting all over, with little or no connection to what had been done previously.
It got so bad by the time my son hit Middle School that they had a teacher who ran the class by student preference - each student picked the chapter of the years text book they wanted to study and the teacher "assisted" them in learning. There was little or no presentation of the material to the entire class at the same time, and when there was no one understood it if they weren't in that chapter.
I spoke to the teacher then the Principal but it was like pulling teeth to get any kind of managment oversight of what was going on. This being the second year that teacher had been there, it finally took the following year's teacher to admit they were having to do months of remedial work to get the students up to par, wasting months of time. It was very difficult to get any kind of recognition of what was going on, despite the fact at least half the parents were concerned and complaining. And this is in a school system in a fairly small town that you'd think would be manageable.
It illustrated to me how f@#$%d up the system can be. There were teachers, there were students, there were schools and money was being spent. But the management of the entire system, from the standpoint of curriculum and consistency in delivering it over a 12 year period - in a word, sucked in various years. The result was there were blanks in some years for the kids, depending on what level of chaos was going on.
Without some level of involvement and interest in the home, a child completely reliant on the schools would have been lost. At some point whether it was the child themselves and/or their parents, they had to rise above and take control of their own education and make sense out of the chaos.
This wasn't all years, all grades or all teachers. But how the school's were run and education executed daily allowed for big breakdowns to occur and when they did it could very difficult to navigate the whole thing to get anything done.
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