Last week I went on Facebook with math-geek news that 2014 has the prime factorization 2x19x53, which, since that has no repeated primes, means that 2014 is what we mathematicians call a “square-free” number or “quadratfreie Zahl.” Then I said that “we all know” that 60.79-plus percent of all numbers are square-free because 6/π2 has powerful magic, and one of my friends immediately complained that I had made her brain freeze.
Because I freeze friends’ brains that way, it’s assumed I have strong opinions about how mathematics is taught to our kids in public schools. My main opinion: All my teachers and all my books sucked. I had to learn it myself walking five miles each afternoon uphill both ways in the snow to the downtown library where I studied out of proper books. So just tell me how much tax you want me to pay for the kids today to learn math, I’ll sign the check, you “teach” them any way you like, and we’ll see in 20 years if it makes a heap of difference, my way or yours.
Seriously, don’t even teach it. Tell them it’s too good for them. Tell them mathematics causes hives, blindness, prurience, dropsy, ring-around-the-collar, obsessive-compulsive rocking, snorting, jaundice, pink eye, purple toes and excessive belly button lint. Ban math books from your homes, forbid math on computers. Tell them it’s worse than the horrid music they play.
My philosophy of teaching is not popular among governing types. People who love to govern hate to let things take their own course. The way I learned numbers, really, was I got my hands on boxes of poker chips and bags of marbles, and used them till I figured out how sums, ratios, proportions and products of proportions worked. Then I moved on to studying patterns made by different arrangements.
Never mind that. George Bush had a vision of No Child Left Behind, that somehow relied upon an educational system that combined reading and writing and ’rithmetic with the holy rapture. Because there can be no satanic children in our school system, it was determined that exactly 100 percent of all of schools’ children had to attain provable proficiency in those areas. Of course provable in this context means testable, and the federal government would decide what tests would be satisfactory. I can’t say it too often: George Bush, George Bush, George Bush: You utter fool.
The law was passed. Not only was George Bush a fool, other people were fools. Who’d have thunk it? Congress-people, senators: Fools. So many that back in those days I said we needed a No Politician Left Behind program. Our politicians are coming to work unprepared to do reasoning.
Eventually, with Bush gone, Washington state asked for a waiver from meeting various requirements of the law, and in exchange the state had to tie students’ scores to teachers’ evaluations.
But we just lost the waiver because our state legislature decided 28-19 that students’ performances on state standardized tests should not be part of teacher evaluations.
All this comes at an odd time because last month, the state supreme court decided that our legislature has violated the state constitution by not arranging for the proper funding of public schools. I wouldn’t want to be a state legislator right now. I’d want to get out and look for work in the insurance business.
Here’s the good news! The estimate of how much money the state has to raise to keep the public school system constitutional is around $4 billion. The fix has to happen by the end of the 2015 legislative session. If the legislature can raise that much money by then, it can certainly raise enough money to cover any cuts the feds might impose on us for having lost our voucher, say $60 million or so. Just turn a 100 percent effort into a 101.5 percent effort, team! That extra bit is tiddly-piddles.
Fix the $4-billion problem better than just good enough, and the $60-million problem will vanish.