A Republican lawmaker urged colleagues to adopt rigorous math and science high school graduation requirements Thursday – or watch Colorado youngsters lose a global race for high-paying tech jobs.
“The world is rapidly shifting to a technology-based economy, and if we don’t meet the challenge, our kids will be left behind,” Rep. Rob Witwer, R-Genessee, warned the House Education Committee.
“If we fail, future generations will correctly say that we were on the wrong side of history.”
Witwer and co-sponsor Sen. Josh Penry, R-Fruita, had attempted to gain support of skeptical Democrats by scaling back Senate Bill 131.
Instead of requiring four years of math to graduate, they asked for three years of math and science.
The bill also would have allowed sophomores who test well on those subjects to opt out of junior- and senior-year math and science courses.
Colorado is one of only six states without statewide math and science graduation standards, Witwer said.
But the committee killed the bill on a party-line 8-4 vote.
Committee Chairman Michael Merrifield, a former music teacher, opposed the bill, saying it would create an unbalanced educational system by robbing funding and students’ time for liberal arts instruction.
[…]
The Witwer plan, Merrifield said, would make students “more regimented and more lock-step (with) less ability to think outside the box.”
That’s right. Allow a child to excel at math and the terrorists have already won!
Math fascists. Neomathcons. WHO WANTS TO BE THE LAST ONE TO DIE FOR A DIFFERENTIAL EQUATION?
Witwer introduced written support from University of Colorado President Hank Brown, Colorado State University President Larry Edward Penley and testimony by a Lockheed Martin Corp. executive that said his firm needs workers skilled in math and science to build the next generation of rockets.
“You have the opportunity to impact the future of a child’s life, their standard of living and the knowledge they provide the next generation,” said Golden teacher, Deborah Piwonka, whose son is a Microsoft engineer.
“Set the bar higher and watch them rise to the occasion.”
Sure. But set the bar lower, and nearly any kid can clear it. Voila! Instant “equality”! And a whole new generation of Democratic voters, to boot!
It’s, like, win WIN, cowboys!
There is some good news, though. Despite the defeat of SB 131, HB 1118—which “would allow school districts to adopt guidelines for high school graduation as they and the community see fit”—made it through both the House and Senate Education committees.
The only downside is that for those kids stuck in, say, the Boulder School District, they’ll be undergoing “peace studies” and “the art of the political protest” while other kids in the state are learning civics. And tractor repair.
Well, they’re not my kids. If their parents don’t give a shit, why should we? The world needs ditch diggers.
Maybe, but more than likely they bet plenty of chances to think inside of the box, presumably a card board box and located under an overpass.
People like this ex-music teacher just don’t like subjects which have clear definitions of correct answers.
Sure 2 + 2 = 4, but in my heart I feel like it equals 5.
Plus if kids actually know math and science they’ll be able to call bullshit on Al Gore and the other eco-prophets of doom.
Merrifield thinks that math and science education doesn’t make students more creative and innovative? You gott’a be kidding me!
How does such a buffoon become a teacher in any subject?
Not necessarily. Science teaching is already politicized, and math teaching ain’t far behind.
tw: half85 = 42.5
Here is a better link to the article.
If only you really could legislate knowledge.
Doesn’t a PhD in atmospheric science already come with every American high school graduation diploma?
You’re right Attila, for a moment there I forgot what kind of educational environment we live in. It was a nice thought though, imagine a world where kids are tought facts and the actual scientific method. And through these the basics of logic and reasoning.
Never happen, then most liberal causes would fold up and die. And who knows, the little critters may even go on to learn something really dangerous, economics! Can’t have that, no way.
That guy what’s not too clever elaborates on his theories:
I think HB 1118 will, in the long run, help demonstrate the advantages of science and math education by allowing comparisons between students who do face requirements against those who don’t. If, in the long run, there’s anyone in Colorado who can do the statistics…
Alphie,
The point is that taking 3 yars of math and science would make one a better judge of the material presented. One of the first things you learn in any science class is that all hypotheses need to be questioned equally. As an extension of that a so-called consensus that is accepted at face value is meaningless. A rigorus scientific education encourages scientific debate. Which is exactly what “environmentalists” like Al Gore and the people currently running Greenpeace are trying to avoid.
Oh, and don’t try the canard that since some of the research going against the doomsday scenario of Al’s movie is funded by energy companies, it’s worthless. If you have a beef with these studies argue the findings they contain.
Evacuate the public schools.
Burn them to the ground.
Bulldoze the rubble flat.
Sow the ground with salt.
Cesspits for breeding mental diseases like urban legends, political correctness, ignorance, entitlement, oppositional defiance, and all manner of bad behavior.
Hey, I’m all for kids being creative, and playing, and having fun, and learning all sorts of new and interesting things, and heck, I’m even for a supportive and nurturing environment (though challenges must increase as time goes on).
It’s just that public schools have a piss poor record of being able to do any of that consistently and some of it at all.
And as long as it’s bureaucratically driven and ruled by political ideologies, that will continue.
Is there an easy answer? Oh Hell no. But there are answers, at least most of the time. The teacher’s unions need to be broken before most of them can happen, however, because you cannot make good political decisions about education when one of the more powerful lobby groups in Washington has a goal of maintaining a literal lock on education, in policy and practice.
Somebody, probably a president, is going to have to gut the national education system like a deer, and hope at least some of the states follow suit.
There may be a possibility of some manner of half-assed reform of the current system, but it’s on a geological time scale and kids don’t grow up on that kind of schedule.
Unfortunately, like taxation, a huge number of politically active people are dependent on (or think they’re dependent on) that system, and will put up a hell of a fight to protect it. They’ll make up all manner of excuses about it, they’ll lie and say it works, they’ll blame everyone else, they’ll kick and scream…
It will be ugly. Or, we could skip the ugly part and just continue to shovel manure into our kids’ heads and leave governing and running businesses to the private school and homeschool kids.
I would think that Mr. Merrifield would want students with a strong grounding in basic subjects. Can you be all that creative if you cannot read? How can you innovate if you cannot handle simple mathematics? How do you help progress in the very-correct fields of alternative fuels, and any other number of green favorites if you do not even know what the scientific method is, much less are able to apply it?
The districts that do adopt the voluntary measures will simply evidence the desire to have their children better prepared. Those that do not – will be supported by the former, later in life.
Bah.
A “PhD in Atmospheric Science”?
That’s a new one. And here I thought the discipline was known as “Climatology”…
Anything like “Peace Studies”?
SB: dead66
Cool, man!
Shouldn’t students be free to study what interests them in high school?
Shouldn’t “libertarians” be against forcing students to study subjects they have little desire to learn?
Dumping a bunch of money into teaching kids to mimic what a $5 calculator can do seems like a waste of time and money to me.
Nope, those come out of Cracker Jack boxes. And if you’re really lucky, the box also contains a certificate good for a job at NASA where you don’t have to do any pesky actual work at all, just pass out propaganda via radio interviews.
How do you think that $5 calculator came about, Alphie? Did it fall as manna from heaven? Or did somebody who understood math invent it?
Dumping a bunch of money into teaching kids to mimic what a $5 calculator can do seems like a waste of time and money to me.
Of all the comments you have typed, this is the most stupid. Good grief.
Or millions of Chinese and Indian math and science graduates willing to work for $5 an hour for that matter, RWS.
What will America’s comparative advantage in the global economy be this century?
It sure ain’t gonna be churning out math and science drones.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
— R.A.H.
To crunch the numbers Americans don’t want to crunch. Because they’re too crunchy.
Alphie wouldn’t know libertarianism if it bit him on the ass.
Always liked this one:
The Pragmatics of Patriotism (1973)
Quotations from Robert A. Heinlein’s address at the U.S. Naval Academy (5 April 1973)
* I now define “moral behavior” as “behavior that tends toward survival.” I won’t argue with philosophers or theologians who choose to use the word “moral” to mean something else, but I do not think anyone can define “behavior that tends toward extinction” as being “moral” without stretching the word “moral” all out of shape.
* Selfishness is the bedrock on which all moral behavior starts and it can be immoral only when it conflicts with a higher moral imperative. An animal so poor in spirit that he won’t even fight on his own behalf is already an evolutionary dead end; the best he can do for his breed is to crawl off and die, and not pass on his defective genes.
* The next higher level is to work, fight, and sometimes die for your own immediate family. This is the level at which six pounds of mother cat can be so fierce that she’ll drive off a police dog. It is the level at which a father takes a moonlighting job to keep his kids in college  and the level at which a mother or father dives into a flood to save a drowning child… and it is still moral behavior even when it fails.
* Evolution is a process that never stops. Baboons who fail to exhibit moral behavior do not survive; they wind up as meat for leopards.
* The next level in moral behavior higher than that exhibited by the baboon is that in which duty and loyalty are shown toward a group of your own kind too large for an individual to know all of them. We have a name for that. It is called “patriotism.”
* Behaving on a still higher moral level were the astronauts who went to the Moon, for their actions tend toward the survival of the entire race of mankind.
* Men are expendable; women and children are not. A tribe or a nation can lose a high percentage of its men and still pick up the pieces and go on… as long as the women and children are saved. But if you fail to save the women and children, you’ve had it, you’re done, you’re through! You join Tyrannosaurus Rex, one more breed that bilged its final test.
* “Patriotism” is a way of saying “Women and children first.” And that no one can force a man to feel this way. Instead he must embrace it freely.
Sounds good, mojo.
Let’s use nostalgia, gut feelings and personal biases to argue that our kids should have logic jammed down their throats.
Maybe irony will be America’s comparative advantage this century?
If they don’t know math and science, I’m going to guess not much. How about dhimmis? How long do you think it’ll take those Indian and Chinese math graduates to figure out they can own the company, and what it produces and keep the profits?
The same thing is was the last few centuries: Laughing in the faces of the idiots who want income redistibution and making a profit with minimal government intervention.
alphie, you have reached new heights of absurdity.
But I’m on board if the notion that we shouldn’t bother to teach kids anything means we can shut down all the schools and I can keep my property tax money.
You know what? I used to figure alphie was just one of those on the left that had a poor time expressing his opinions (perhaps because he had a poor time grasping the concept of “facts”).
It is now bone-shatteringly obvious that either alphie is simply suffering from oppositional defiant disorder and gets an orgasm when it makes people angry because of its reflexive arguing, or alphie is just so stupid that it can’t survive on its own, and has developed a deep-seated resentment against everyone in the world because, after all, what breeds resentment faster than dependence?
I think I may have hit upon the cause for ODD, now that I think of it.
In any case, it’s been almost amusing. I remember, in the mists of time, complaining that Actus wasn’t as good as the old trolls.
It just keeps going downhill, doesn’t it?
The next “new thing” in trolls will probably just come in and post messages like “You’re a big old bed-wetting doody-head!”
So in the Alphie Unified School District, I would have been able to have “Elizabeth Ojeda’s Pefectly Filled Levis 101” as my homeroom class?
I can assure you that I would not have been alone in studying M. Tomkins’ “Funbags: Mine Are Denfinitely Built for Comfort”, H. Fath’s “Do My Breasts Look Better in Ribbed Turtlenecks or Oxford Button-downs?”, A. Atkinson’s “An Ass that Tastes Like French Vanilla Ice Cream: A Symposium.”
Much as I think Alphie is just here to get some recognition and some love that are otherwise missing in his flat affect, passive aggressive life, and generally fails miserably in the attempt, this post was actually quite funny.
Hmm.. No, new evidence suggests it’s something more environmentally friendly..
Obviously, just about anyone can become a Microsoft engineer, but have you tried to find a good tractor mechanic lately?
Also obvious that no one wasted any money on alphie nor jammed any logic down his throat..
When I was in high school, I learned crazy shit like the Pythagorean theorem, which I used only a couple of years ago to ensure that the corners of the concrete pad I poured for the hot tub were square. I also learned weird shit like the ideal gas law that helps me diagnose problems with my air conditioning.
Yep, no value at all in math and science education.
Let’s use nostalgia, gut feelings and personal biases to argue that our kids should have logic jammed down their throats.
Posted by alphie
Yeah. Hows that working out for you?
Many people who don’t ‘get’ math or logic cover up for their insecurity by claiming that calculators and emotion are perfectly good substitutes.
It’s important to expose kids to math instruction so that those that have talent in it can recognize it early and develop it before they become too old to learn. It’s importan to expose kids to literature, music, drama, etc., for the same reason. Do the teachers of colorado really not understand that?
Well,
Maybe I’m wrong to question the faith-based community’s newfound commitment to math and scientific thinking.
Last week we had this post that had the hypothesis that because “only” 15 US troops had been killed in combat in Baghdad during the first month of the surge, the surge must be a success.
Now the DoD reports that in the week since that reporting period, we have lost 15 US troops in combat in Baghdad. We’re actually loosing troops in Baghdad at a higher rate than before the surge.
Will we get a new post that states the old “surge is a success” hypothesis is now in doubt?
Anyone here know someone I can call to fix my tractor?
WHO WANTS TO BE THE LAST ONE TO DIE FOR A DIFFERENTIAL EQUATION?
Well, there is that….
Unfortunately, we’ve an incredibily lame GOP party in this state. I dont mind Ritter, but all you high-country-water-stealing, gun-outlawing, seat-belt forcing, SUV-(poorly)-driving wacko front-range freaks and your never-never-land-dewelling representitives (except for that racist-misogynist-latinophobe Tancredo and butt-ugly fascist Musgrave) are ruining the state for us west of the dividers.
Learning to do what a $5 calculator does gives you the tools to understand and evaluate situations we all run into in life. If nothing else you also learn statistics.
“Now the DoD reports that in the week since that reporting period, we have lost 15 US troops in combat in Baghdad. We’re actually loosing troops in Baghdad at a higher rate than before the surge.”
Pick a point and extrapulate it and see what you can prove. IE: if we lose 10 soldiers in a plane crash that took a minute, then we can demonstrate a death rate of 600 a hour or 14400 a day. That’s 5200000 military deaths a year. During the SURGE! And we dont have 5.2 million soldiers! In 10 years we will lose 52million people!!! There you go alphie. Proof the surge doesnt work.
Alphoid doesn’t approve of requiring kids to learn logic.
I’m shocked.
well, but, do I even remember Calculus? no. but I had to have four years o’ math. so wouldn’t a minimum course level be better than just number of years? or am I kinda drunk and missing something here?
Actually that sounds a lot like your sides program Altoid
If we wait until96 Alphie brings an actual arguement, we’ll never get anything done.
Yeah. Maggie. Anything is better than nothing. If for nothing else that they learn to make change. It’s perversly easy to take advantage of someone that doen’t have a clue as to how things work.
The lack of any grounding in the sciences is the reason people believe in UFOs, man made global warming, and efficient hydrogen vehicles.
Jesus H Christ, alphoid’s so stupid it’s no longer amusing.
The same ‘tard that lectured us about how AGW is “settled” and it’s the “consensus” doesn’t think teaching math and science is worthwhile. Apparently the idea of people having the tools to evaluate the claims of the international elite is anathema. Hell, I suspect the utter lack of education about economics and civics pleases him, too—the uneducated are easier to convince with flat-out lies and lies by omission, since they don’t have the knowledge base to assess the claims.
Then there’s his characterization of “math and science drones”. Yes, the same drones that wired the world, built the internet, built the food distribution system, built modern medicine and modern farming.
And, of course, someone with a working knowledge of math—and, particularly, the exposure to more complicated math that builds comfort with the basics—and science can better function in daily life. Interest rates, taxes, raises, sales, medical advice, home maintenance, car maintenance—a better understanding of math and science better equips you to deal with all of that.
Hell, Alton Brown has made a career teaching applied chemistry in the guise of a cooking show; I know I’ve learned a hell of a lot from it, and that learning has helped me understand what the hell I’m doing when I’m cooking.
For that matter, I’d credit 2/3rds of may weight loss the last two years to having an above-average comfort with math. I can glance at a nutrition label and tell how food fits into my diet. Whenever I’ve tried to pass along that knowledge the reaction is “Oh, there’s no way I could work that out in my head!”—despite it being simple arithmetic.
“doesn’t” damnit
I so rarely comment here I’m like the dodo, but…I mean, what kind of troll is this “alphie,” anyway? It doesn’t want kids to have to learn science and math and logic? It wants kids to learn what they only have an interest in?
I could hardly make my way through geometry, and the only part of science I liked was dissecting the frog, but geez! Not even a teenager, who’d rather study Justin Timberlake than anything else, could be so astonishingly full of dumbassedry as this alphie creature. If I had had my druthers, I would have only studied Nancy Drew, Shaun Cassidy, and the Bay City Rollers in 9th grade…fortunately, adults were in charge and I had to take algebra, American history, and Rudiments of English Grammar instead.
Word99.