This guy is apparently a widely cited education scholar not an extremist Marxist or whatever: “You Can’t Get There from Here” Johnstone 2010 [PDF]: https://sci-hub.se/10.1021/ed800026d

“capitalist competition makes us stronger and more innovative”

sorry radlibs but there’s a reason why 35% of students in your shitty designed STEM classes drop out, they aren’t stupid for getting bad grades. You’re the stupid one for being so ignorant that you’ve managed to fail to educate people for over 60 years. I take back everything I said about “western kids want to be Twitch streaming gamers lol they’re losers”, these families literally have not had access to a decent science education for three generations!

Are we still persisting in making our students sick of chemistry because “that is how chemistry is done here”? Who set the scene? How did it all come about?

The answer lies not with some malevolent group of people, but with a response made in the 1960s in the United States and throughout the Western world to combat the perceived threat of Russian scientific supremacy. ChemStudy and Chemical Bond Approach sprang up in the United States, Scottish Alternative Chemistry and Nuffield Chemistry appeared in the UK, and similar schemes were launched

the PMC class of finance imperialism educators are a malevolent group of people, Jeffrey Epstein was a NYC math teacher amber

his suggestions for improved chem curriculum

Begin with the idea of the filter that is driven by what the learners already know and by what interests them. There is no point in beginning a course in chemistry with a treatment of atomic electronic configuration or bonding because the anchorages in long-term memory are not there. Without attachments in long-term memory, a student can only learn by rote methods. An approach to chemistry through acids, bases, and salts is unlikely to stir students with enthusiasm. Apart from common table salt, how many salts are in place in long-term memory to provide relevance and reality for the learner? On the face of it, inorganic compounds are “simple”, but are they? So many wrong concepts are introduced by teachers or constructed by the learners in this area of chemistry. A glance at a book of chemical data will show the absurdity of suggesting that sodium (or any other metal) is “anxious” to lose electrons and chlorine is “desperate” to accept them. It is too soon to introduce lattice energy or hydration energy to provide a rational basis for compound formation. The octet rule, with all its pitfalls for later study, tends to raise its ugly head here as a sort of rationalization.

The model suggests that we should begin where students are, with their interests and experience, and lead them into discovering new ideas among the familiar. An obvious starting point is in organic chemistry, with gasoline, camping gas, food, clothing, plastics, and drinks and so much more that is familiar. I know that it has been the tradition to keep organic for later, but are we taking a “monkey” point of view? Let us consider some of the advantages in starting here.

The long-term memory already contains anchorages for what we want to teach and the filter is primed and ready to go. The working memory is not in danger of overload. We can go a long way into organic chemistry with only a few elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and possibly sulfur and phosphorus. Most of these are familiar (at least their names are) to the learner. By considering the spatial arrangement of the four electrons around a carbon, students, using their fingers, can see that a tetrahedral arrangement is likely. Never mind sp3 hybridization. It is a cobbling together of atomic orbitals (isolated atoms in the gas state) to produce a tetrahedron. This is using unreality to arrive at reality. Pasteur knew about the tetrahedral arrangement long before atomic orbitals were conceived.

Using the simple tetrahedral idea, we can do a lot of sound organic chemistry linked to what the students already know, avoiding overload of working memory. Only when we reach organic acids do we have to reconsider bonding, but this can now be linked to the simpler ideas of covalent bonding already established. Another advantage of beginning with organic is that there is no pressure to use balanced equations. Practicing organic chemists do not bother, so why should we?

The model has led us to select a starting point that fits what is already in a student’s long-term memory. The working memory is not overloaded because only a few elements are involved in making familiar compounds. The representation triangle can be used along its sides to build ideas of the relationship between the macro and familiar, with the molecular. The use of the representational is reduced, and no calculations are necessary. All of this provides a logical basis for an applications-led approach instead of a conceptual approach followed by a passing mention of uses and applications.

The troublesome mole can be rethought in the light of the model. It has been my sad experience to have graduate students who confessed their inability to do mole calculations. The very word “mole” left them uncomfortable. How could highly intelligent young people have such an aversion? They met the mole too soon, wrapped up in incomprehensible (and even totally irrelevant) calculations that flooded the working memory into a state of paralysis. In an earlier publication (4) I set out an analysis of a trivial (from my point of view) mole calculation. I saw it as a four-step procedure, which did not tax my working memory, because I already had tricks for grouping the processes, but students saw it as a ten-step task, which blew their working memory.

  • thebartermyth [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    31·
    1 year ago

    From Jeff Schmidt - Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look At Salaried Professionals And The Soul Battering System That Shapes Their Lives

    Chapter 12: NEUTRAL VOICES

    [Description of a 3-card-monte scam]

    For the operator of the game, getting the mark to go peacefully is a necessity, not an option, and so cooling out is not something that happens “after” the game. Cooling out is an integral part of the game.

    The U.S. socioeconomic system, like the hustler, makes false promises, the principal one being that social mobility is available to all who work hard. By its very nature, a hierarchical system cannot possibly keep such a promise. The number of positions at successively higher levels decreases very quickly and is always less than the number of hardworking people who want the positions. This structure sets many ambitious workers on a collision course with the reality of limited opportunity. When they are finally hit with the tragic disappointment, they may become angry or resentful, and so the hierarchical system must engage in widespread cooling out. It does this not only to protect its agents who stand at the gate and do the dirty work of exclusion, but also to make sure that those who have been disappointed do not become opponents of the hierarchical system itself and enemies of its power elite. It is vital to the system that the losers serve the hierarchy respectfully, and not sabotage it, when they find themselves with jobs that have lower social status than the society of “unlimited opportunity” had led them to expect. Cooling out is therefore an integral part of the socioeconomic system.

    As the avenues for getting ahead in this country have narrowed, the route of formal education has become dominant, so that today the pursuit of opportunity in the United States is to a large extent institutionalized in the colleges. As a result, the colleges have become one of the pyramidal system’s main tools for cooling out people’s “unrealistic” career ambitions. They do it on a massive scale, yet by necessity conceal the fact that that is what they are doing.

    [Pre-College description (SAT, etc)]

    [Context:] Each year, only about 5% of those enrolled in two-year colleges transfer to bachelors granting institutions, an astoundingly small fraction.

    Clark analyzed the process by which junior colleges change transfer students into terminal students. He considers as an example a student who wants to be an engineer but who is destined not to be one. What might be the sequence of experiences that cools him out? At many junior colleges these experiences start even before classes do, in the form of testing and counseling. Thus, after an enrollment examination in English and mathematics, our would-be engineer may find himself in remedial classes, which delay his eventual transfer to a four-year college and, more importantly, shake his self-image as a future engineer. At a required advising session, a counselor looks over his “counseling folder,” which contains transcripts from other schools, test scores, recommendations from teachers and so on. Although his file is thin, the counselor observes that high school grades and test scores such as these usually suggest a less ambitious program —’’but of course you are free to go ahead and try the pre-engineering program if you want—just remember that we have a lot of really good vocational programs here, too.”

    The student will face this folder again and again as the months go by and as grades and “need for improvement” notices from instructors accumulate. The file of impersonal, objective-looking data shadows him and, when it grows sufficiently strong, will stalk him. The counselors, skilled in handling the “overambitious” student, use the growing file to justify becoming more persistent with their advice. Advice given at previous counseling sessions is in the student’s folder and is now cited impersonally as part of the accumulating “evidence.” The counselors edge the student toward a vocational program, but they never countermand his choices, for the whole point of the protracted exercise is to avoid a personal, hard “No,” and to have the student make the “correct” choice on his own.

    Finally, the student is put on academic probation for receiving below average grades and must now submit to more than the usual amount of counseling. Students are allowed to stay on probation for a number of semesters or indefinitelv, depending on the school, so probation does not force many students out of junior college. Rather, it is designed to get the student to think about himself and admit to his thinking the possibility of reclassifying himself as a terminal student. Reclassification would allow him to receive the college’s two-year degree, Associate in Arts, by putting him in classes in which he would get grades high enough to bring his average up to the required level.

    He relents, at last, and reclassifies himself, marking a big change in his life. The college expedites changes of this sort by making them appear as small as possible: Our student will be an “engineering aide” instead of an “engineer.” There is a world of difference, of course, but on the surface things appear pretty much the same: He continues as a student (at least for the time being) and tells family and friends that he has decided to “start out” as an engineering aide.

    [Pivot to University education.]

    Many students who do get bachelor’s degrees want to work toward a professional credential, such as a law degree, medical degree or PhD. As we have seen, the criteria that determine who is permitted to do this include attitude, and in particular favor individuals who have the kind of uncritical attitude, or narrow focus, that makes them easy to direct. But it is not enough for the qualification system to give the best positions to those who will do the best job from the point of view of employers. It must also cool out the high educational and career expectations of those who are excluded, including those who would do the best job from other points of view, such as that of clients and the public. Professional qualifying examinations help to do both: Not only do they help identify those who would serve employers best, but they also help cool out the “failures.”

    The [standardized pre-professional qualifying] test’s nonpartisan look transforms it from a tool of the institution into an independent third party, allowing the institution to maintain a purely positive image: The institution is set up to produce successes: it is the test that forces denial. (“Modern personnel record-keeping, in general, has the function of documenting [for] denial,” notes Clark. 1 ") When faculty members judge a student negatively and crush the student’s hopes of becoming a professional in the field, they use the test to distance themselves emotionally from what they are doing and to avoid feeling personally responsible for their decision. Yes, the faculty members write the test, administer it, score it and report the results, but in doing each of these things, they see themselves as clerical workers, not as judges. It is the nonpartisan third party that judges the student. Faculty members are generally sympathetic, but detached, as the neutral third party snuffs out the student’s aspirations in a clean, mechanical, businesslike way.

    Qualification systems almost always allow for repeated attempts at success — and repeated occasion for failure. The student has the right to retake the qualifying examination even when the faculty doesn’t encourage the student to do so. This right to try again is always presented in terms of the opportunity it provides, not in terms of its main purpose, which is to let down the hopes of the unwanted slowly, rather than in one abrupt, alienating, and potentially explosive step. When students are failed for the first time, they begin to admit thoughts of revising their goals. By the time the exam comes around again, they are more prepared to accept its judgment of their ability to learn the tricks of the trade. The faculty is more persuasive this time, now that it is backed up by another piece of “objective evidence.” The facts get increasingly hard for the student to explain away.

    “Maybe the faculty is right and I’m just making excuses.”

    Sorry to make such a long post lol. I tried to summarize where I can.