5 Worst College Degrees? I don’t think so. May 12, 2013

It’s very rare that I turn my nose up at an article steering kids away from college degrees that will never, ever pay the bills.  With tuition costs the new bubble, engulfing an entire generation of hard-working kids, it’s time to start telling our students that some college majors will not pay the bills.  Some degrees, though exciting and rewarding, will have them working a lot harder, for a lot less money, than anyone has ever sold to them.  “You can be anything you want to be” should be amended with an “as long as you don’t mind paying $3k in student loan interest charges per year, on top of a monthly payment, for the next 40 years.”

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I’m under no illusions that all majors are created equal.  I do believe that we should warn kids about the dangers of taking it too easy in college, but steering young people away from majors that will lead to fulfilling careers is where I draw the line.  Have you ever noticed that doing nice things for others makes you feel good?  That pulling in a big paycheck still doesn’t put a smile on that rich lady’s wrinkled face?  That in a society we need to help each other and that getting paid for it is a bonus?  It’s been shown that once basic needs are met, additional income makes little difference to a person’s happiness (Forbes’s Tim Hartford reports on this here.  The film I Am is another wonderful example).  I don’t think Alex Planes had Life in mind when penning his nauseatingly narrow minded article The Five Worst College Degrees for Your Career.  It was less an analysis of bad degree choices and more an attack on the selfless act of helping others.  Every one of Alex’s targeted career choices is one that makes society run a little smoother.  It left me wondering if he had recently been jilted by a teacher.

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Alex’s 5 worst college degrees are, along with my responses to each:

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5: Special Education – I’m a special education teacher.  On top of being in the most rewarding teaching position that I have ever held, Special Education teachers are in very high demand.  A dual-certified Special Education teacher will never want for work.  Alex’s median mid-career salary is also way off, unless he only surveyed teachers in the most rural parts of the US.

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4: Human Development – Admittedly I have no idea what Human Developers do, but seeing as this career choice is sandwiched between two very important careers, I can only assume that Alex has no idea what he is talking about.

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3: Elementary Education – It was an elementary school teacher who gave Alex the ability to later string together nonsense and call it fact.  An elementary school teacher taught him to identify letters, sounds, words, the parts of a book, how to punctuate a sentence.  Ditto on the median salary here too, Alex.

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2: Social Work – Yeah, not important.  Of the billions of photos one can easily pull from a Google Search, Alex chooses to punctuate this bullet point with one of a nurse helping an elderly man.  Screw old people, right Alex?  Gotta get dat money, son!  He even adds that “the field is projected to add to its numbers at a faster clip than the national average (161,200 new social workers will be needed by 2020).”  So if job security was not a consideration here, what was?  Is Alex’s definition of a good career choice one that helps as few people as possible?

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1: Child and Family Studies – We all want our kids to take school seriously and graduate.  It’s been shown that being a part of a Head Start program as a small child is directly linked to the student’s high school attendance.  This paper by the Baltimore Education Research Consortium is a compilation of the data.  Head Start programs don’t run themselves, Head Start teachers do.  They inspire our kids to be the best they can be.

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At the very end of Alex’s article is link for a “free”, “shockingly true” retirement report.  Sell out much?  There’s nothing worse than a 25 year old working every day for his future retirement.  But since he baited me to go there, I will.  While it’s true that a teacher will never get the opportunity to make $150k per year, it all averages out in the end.  Every two weeks, 11% of my paycheck goes into a little closed-system thing called a pension fund.  Once I hit 60 years old, I can walk away from teaching and continue to collect 80% of the average of my best three years for the rest of my Life.

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Write about that one, Alex!

Math Around the World…. June 20, 2010

 

US vs A+ Nations

The file above is a chart (pasted into Microsoft Word, alternatively you can click the picture below) that shows the differences in topics covered in math throughout the world.  Really, it’s just a comparison of math topics covered in the US and in countries where math seems to come second nature to students. 

 

What’s striking is how MANY topics we cover each year in the US and how much overlap there is between grades.  In Flemish Belgium, for example, 3 topics are covered in first grade as compared to the 14 that are covered by US first grade teachers.  How is it possible to completely cover 14 topics a year?   It’s not possible.  The chart explains a lot.   

 

YouTube… BLOCKED. Learning Today… BLOCKED! June 6, 2010

 

Sure, there are a lot of videos on YouTube that we don’t want kids watching at school.  But there are a countless videos on the site that can teach in 3 minutes what it would take a teacher a week to teach.  Our kids are visual learners, learning through video is most effective.  

 

For teachers like me who use their LCD projectors extensively to reach our visual learners, having access to YouTube in school would be extremely helpful.  This year, I could have shown videos on solving systems of equations, finding the equations of circles, solving triangles with the trigonometric ratios, and this says nothing of how much I used YouTube myself to get through my graduate Java and Calculus classes! 

 

But because someone made the executive decision that all of YouTube should be banned from everyone within the walls of BPS, I have to hope that TeacherTube- the ungroomed toenail of YouTube- has a video on the topic I am looking for, and moreover, has their search feature organized in way that a search for “algebra” doesn’t bring up “Mrs. Valentine’s Kindergarten field trip to the Museum of Science”.  TeacherTube is not YouTube, it never will be, and it’s a real shame that teachers in BPS cannot log into YouTube to access its wide range of useful educational videos. 

 

In any case, I have posted videos on TeacherTube at the ridiculously long address: http://www.teachertube.com/members/viewProfile.php?user=Shanadonohue

 

They can be watched in school, even if they take 5 minutes to load.  There’s also one other option that[sometimes] allows you to convert YouTube videos to video files to save onto your computer and then show in class.  I stress, though, that it SOMETIMES works:  http://www.forinside.com/  In fact, it’s not even working now.  Blah!  Maybe this one works: http://www.zamzar.com/url/

 

UNBLOCK YouTube!!!  Please!!

 

 

 

Webpage blocked! [possibly] May 25, 2010

 

I found a great video at http://adgonzalezmath.wordpress.com/ in the “February 2010 archives” that lead to what could [possibly] be the greatest collection of math videos on all of the interweb superhighway: http://justmathtutoring.com/  I say “possibly” because, like many things that could be useful to students, the site is blocked here at school!

 

So I’ll check it out at home.  My bet is, based on the video I saw on adgonzalezmath’s page, the videos are going to be nice.  So if you know how to save videos from the internet onto your computer, I’d love to hear from you.  I know of one site that may [possibly] do this, but it’s blocked here.  Though even if it weren’t, I’d have nothing to upload!

 

calculators KILL negatives! (uh, raised to even exponents, that is:) May 17, 2010

 

What’s negative 2 to the fourth power?  16?  -16?  If you put “-2^4″ into the TI-83, you get -16.  But we know that (-2)(-2) = 4 and (-2)(-2) = 4, and (4)(4) = 16.  So why does the calculator give us -16?

 

This post is no doubt for the high schooler and not for someone addicted to the )( buttons on the calculator like I am.  I parenthesize.  It comes from a fear that something will go negative that should be positive.  I have reminded my students more times than I can count to parenthesize, so many times, in fact, that I am more than sure that most tune me out as soon as they hear the first syllable.  But still the negative raised to an even number sneaks past the best of ‘em.

 

The evil negative base reared its ugly head again today when I graded papers on the geometric sequence an = a1 • r^(n-1) where:

an = the value of the nth term

a1 = first term’s value

r = ratio of change (ie “doubling” would be 2)

n = the terms placement (ie: 5th term would be n = 5)

 

“Find a7 if a1 = 5 and r = -2.”  The answer I or course got more than the correct answer was ” -320″.  What should the answer be?  “320″.  The problem should be written out first as: 5(-2)^(7-1) to make the process clear.

 

At least no one gave -1,000,000 as an answer.  There’s still hope!

 

overkilling negatives? May 8, 2010

 

I know the ruler seems a bit overkill for a simple subject like adding positives and negatives, but I teach 11th grade in Boston and it’s the biggest stumbling block for even my students taking my advanced algebra class.

 

The problem is that kids are taught a “noun-verb” way of solving problems like “-12 + 7″. They are told to find -12 (noun, static number) and count up 7 spaces (verb, movement) to the right to see what number they land on. This is fine in a classroom with a number line taped to the desk, but it doesn’t teach the kids how to think about the numbers and a lot of kids will get this problem, and ones like it, wrong. It only gets worse with “x + 12 = 7 (solve for x)” or “y + 12x = 7x + 3 (solve for y)”. It’s the same problem over and over again, just disguised.

 

The problem with the number line and the “noun-verb” way of solving is that it’s not the way we think. It’s not even the way we are taught in school to solve these problems. In the Boston 7th grade curriculum is a book called “Accentuate the Negative” where the very first page of text has a caption over a kid’s head that reads something along the lines of “I owe my dad $4. I have -$4″. So this business of “owing” comes into play very early.

 

If I owed you $12 (-12) and I only paid you back 7 (+7), how much would I still owe you? Asked like this, it’s a simple problem. You’d count up from 7 until you got to 12, knowing that the answer would be in “owe”, or negative. In school however, the kids are told to start at -12 and count up 7 spaces. This is completely backwards from how we think.

 

So to get to my ruler…. The ZeroSum ruler allows a kid to find -12, find 7, fold the ruler in half and count the space between the two numbers’ absolute values. This is what we do when we are finding out how much someone owes us, and this is really the way we think. In time, and to answer your question about what a kid would do with numbers beyond -25 and +25, a kid would start to see the relationship between positives and negatives and that if you “owe” more than you “pay” (if the negative is further away from break even (zero) than the positive) then the answer will take a negative sign. But it’s really the space between the absolute values we are counting.

 

 

So, how much do I owe you? April 19, 2010

 

You friend borrows $22 from you.  He pays you back $15 the next day.  How much does he still owe you?  Asked this way, it’s obvious he owes you $7.  But give a kid the problem -22 + 15, and the answer mysteriously becomes, well, mysterious.  

 

WHY?

  

My students can certainly tell me how much I would still owe if I borrowed $22 and paid just $15 back. Like us, they’d probably count up from 15 to get to 22. But give a student the problem “-22 + 15″, and all bets are off.

  

For this number sentence, we are taught in school to find “-22″ on a number line and count to the right 15 spaces to find the number we land on. But this is not what we do in real life to find out how much someone still owes. There is a huge disconnect here.  In real life, we count up from 15 to 22, keeping a tally on our fingers of how many numbers we pass by.  We would never count up 15 from -22 to find how much someone owes us!  It’s no wonder students have difficulty with negative numbers with the way we are taught!

  

To plug my product, the ZeroSum ruler allows a student to count the spaces from 15 to -22 by folding the ruler in half at the pivot and counting from 15 to +22. When the positives are aligned with their negatives, they’re essentially finding the difference between the absolute values of -22 and 15.  This is the way we think and therefore a more natural way to learn.