Saturday, June 15, 2013

Sequestering the STEM

Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics (STEM).   Due to the sequester, Obama wants to consolidate 226 separate federal STEM programs into a mere 110.  These programs are scattered out between DoD, DHS, and NASA.  Obama claims that overall funding would be hiked 6% after culling out half the programs. 
   Wow.  All these cuts and we spend more money.  And on such a worthy idea.  Oh yes, the new program will increase participation by women and minorities in the STEM programs.  How uplifting.
   Too bad it won't do much to increase the number of US students taking STEM courses.  Students decide which educational track they are going to take way down in middle school.  Most of 'em decide to avoid STEM courses after being subject to a terrible one, taught by an ed major with no understanding or love for the subject.  The ed major reduces the science course to memorization of fancy scientific vocabulary and the math course to tedious solving of equations.   It doesn't take much of this kind of abuse to convince middle schoolers that math and science are hard and should be avoided. 
   No amount of federal STEM programs are going to repair the damage done to students by horrible middle school math and science teaching. 

3 comments:

DCE said...

It isn't just STEM education that has fallen by the wayside. Since we are of similar ages, I'm sure you remember taking shop in school, something I did from junior high school onwards. Our high school just dropped Tech Ed (shop) and stopped teaching Home Ec 5 years ago. The middle school never had exposure to those to subjects, something that is a grave mistake. All it does is keep our kids from learning skills they will use throughout their entire lives regardless of whet they end up doing for a living.

Dstarr said...

Shop. Yes, my public middle school offered shop to the boys and home economics to the girls. Shop taught me somewhat intangible things, the value of measuring and checking with a square, it taught me that you can do very precise work with just hand tools, and best of all, taught me that I could do decent woodwork all by my self.
Teachers ain't as good as they used to be. I clearly remember old Fred Swan, teaching me high school physics at Westtown Friends School, getting asked a trick question about conservation of energy by Tony Gaskill, a wise acre classmate. Fred, who knew physics backward and forward, had a good answer right on the tip of his tongue. That was 50 years ago.
My youngest son attended the same school. I had told son the trick question story. Son laid the same trick question on Barry Feuerman, the new physics teacher. Barry didn't know the answer. Progress.

DCE said...

'Progress', indeed.

My son has been fortunate because he's grown up amongst men who know how to do things with their hands and we showed him how to do them. He is the product of two families with a long history of machinists, engineers, electricians, and mechanics, meaning he knew a lot of the things we used to learn in shop before he entered middle school.It has given him a leg up over most of the kids he went to school with and serves him well today.

Your physics trick question anecdote reminds me of one parent/teacher conference when my son was still in high school. I was talking to his math teacher and we were discussing how 'everything is math' and how it is really important at all levels. The conversation digressed into some of the higher math I use in engineering, particularly optics, and the next thing I knew we were at the blackboard going over some calculus equations I use to calculate maximum safe laser exposures at given distances. He added a few of his own that have helped me do my job. It wasn't until the end when I found out his history - he was a physicist who got tired of the BS at one of the national labs and decided to go into teaching, but he didn't want to teach at a college, so he decided to teach at high school. I had wondered why this guy's class was so popular - he makes math come to life because he's lived it and used it every day. That's the type of teacher we want teaching our kids.

This has made me think that once I'm 'done' with engineering I should do likewise..assuming they're still teaching the subjects with which I am well versed when the time comes.