Choice Theory (34 page)

“Is your teacher doing anything to help you?”

“He’s trying. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays there is after-school tutoring, but I can’t go. I have a job every day after school and I need the money. It’s not just for me. I have to help out my mother; there isn’t enough for food if I don’t help. I have a little sister and brother, they have to eat.”

“You seem intelligent, why are you failing?”

“It’s
Macbeth,
it’s Shakespeare. They’re making me take Shakespeare, and I don’t understand it. I hate it. I used to try, but I got all mixed up and I flunked the tests so I’ve just given up. Why do I need Shakespeare? Why can’t I graduate if I don’t know Shakespeare?”

This is a good question. There is value in knowing Shakespeare, but is there enough value to flunk this hardworking intelligent girl because she doesn’t understand
Macbeth}
Even if she graduates, her chances of finding happiness are not that good. If she fails, she has even less chance to do whatever she wants to do with her life. To find happiness, she may have to pursue some more training, and without graduating she’ll be sour on school and there is less likelihood she will try to do so. I don’t think this girl should be failed, but she will be unless some exception is made. Because I believe that the core of English is to be able to read and write and understand what you have read and written, I asked her, “Would you be willing to read a book, write a report on it, and take a test on it if your teacher would let you?”

“Not if it’s Shakespeare. Besides, I don’t have time to read books. I have barely enough time to do what I’m doing to pass my other courses. Anyway my teacher wouldn’t let me do that. If he let me, the whole class would want to do it. They all hate
Macbeth.
”

Here you can see the difficulty with forcing culture. Do we chance ruining a student’s life for refusing to learn what may help her to succeed in our culture? I worry a lot more about students learning to read and write well than I do about Shakespeare.

“What do you like?”

“I like animals. I have a cat and I have a book on cats. I read that.”

“Would you be willing to read a good book on animals? It was a best-seller, and I have it at home. If I give it to you, would you read it for English and take a test on it? I think you could pass that test and I know you’d like the book.”

“What’s it called?”

“All Creatures Great and Small
by James Herriot.”

Should we punish a young woman for not understanding Shakespeare in a class filled with students who, like her, are hostile to Shakespeare and angry at being threatened with failure if they don’t want to make the effort to understand
Macbeth
? My claim is that she and the culture she lives in would be better off reading Herriot and writing and talking about what they read than they would be even if they managed to pass Shakespeare. I don’t say give her an A. Give her a C or if she does a great job a B. But don’t fail her. There is no sense in that. Given the conditions that exist in that all-too-typical class, I don’t know what else to suggest.

After the role-play, the teachers were divided. Some agreed with me but said they couldn’t do it because the administrators would not let them. They realized how destructive failing her and not letting her graduate with her class would be, but their hands were tied. However, other teachers said the girl was correct about one thing: If they made an exception for one student, many more would want the same thing. The fear of failure may be motivating, but it will never be motivating enough to make many of them appreciate Shakespeare. It is pure external control psychology that we should not change the system to accommodate this girl (and many others) who is willing to demonstrate that she can read and write well.

The teachers who wanted to fail her were saying that it would be right to sacrifice her to preserve the coercive system. My concern is that this right is creating a large group of intellectual have-nots who hate the haves and hate to learn in school. This hate makes a large contribution to the flat line of human progress graphed in the first chapter. The choice theory right is to teach students the skills they need to succeed in our culture. Universal education must mean more than forcing students to attend school. It must mean that all are learning because they have school, teachers, schoolwork, and each other in their quality worlds.

At one teacher in-service training program, to kick off the 1995-96 school year, a school district invited me to make a daylong presentation to their K-12 teachers. After my morning presentation, I interviewed four eleventh- and twelfth-grade students. I asked them things about their school that would illustrate some points I made in my morning talk. One question I asked was if they had ever voluntarily read a book on their own that was not assigned in school. I was surprised to hear that not one of them had. When I asked if they thought they ever would, three said they seriously doubted it, and one, an eleventh grader, was adamant that he never would.

The students’ answers shocked and puzzled the teachers in the audience, and after the students left I continued our discussion. One of the elementary teachers stood up and sounded heartbroken when she said, “I taught that little boy in the third grade and he loved to read then. What happened?” Schooling is what happened. An important purpose of education is to nurture a love for lifelong learning in all students, not kill it. The system being used in that district, and almost all others across the nation, is killing students’ love of learning.

As much as the two practices of schooling stop useful learning in the nontechnical or soft subjects of school, they save their worst
horrors for math. With math, we destroy students’ lives by the thousands for no other purpose than to keep the right to school them intact. If you ask some average citizens, who may have taken math in school but do not use it in their lives, What is math? they will give you the schooling answer: Math is calculating. If you ask them for examples, they will say, the times tables.

If you asked all elementary teachers the same question, almost all of them would give you the same answer. If you asked all secondary teachers and college teachers, except those who teach math, as well as captains of industry, politicians, doctors, lawyers, and judges, the same question, almost all of them would agree.

All who believe math is calculation are wrong. Math never was and never will be calculation. Calculation in school, which means to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and do fractions, decimals, and percentages by hand, is exactly what its name says it is, calculation. It is a useful skill to learn, but once learned, it is not useful to repeat over and over as is now done in most schools. Repetitive calculation by hand, something no adult in the real world has done for almost fifty years, has made the lives of millions of children miserable and wasted millions of instructional hours and billions of instructional dollars in a country that desperately needs the more useful skills of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and problem solving, including, of course, mathematical and scientific problem solving.

Recent studies have found that fourth graders do well on math and science tests but that there is a huge drop-off when eighth graders are tested in the same subjects. In chapter 3, I attributed this drop-off to the students taking these subjects out of their quality worlds. But calculation, which makes sense to first through third graders, makes less sense to fourth through eighth graders. Students in these grades in places like Singapore are busy doing real math and science, while our students are stuck senselessly doing repetitive calculations by hand and memorizing science. In an effort to be right, we are dumbing down the curriculum with schooling and then wondering why our students are doing poorly.

The math books are getting better. My sixth-grade granddaughter’s text has a lot of useful math in it but also a lot of useless calculation, which she told me she had learned to do by the third grade. As good as parts of the book are, the authors do not distinguish between this real math and calculation. They could have and they should have.

Math in the real world is only one thing: solving story problems. If you look around you no matter how far you travel, almost everything you see that is human-made had a story problem or problems involved in its making. In a quality school, students learn math starting in kindergarten and continue to learn it until they leave the school. In the early grades, they hand-calculate to get the sense of the processes and to appreciate the power of numbers. But as they get into the third grade and can demonstrate competent hand calculation, they are offered calculators.

Anyone who does math in the real world—anyone who solves a story problem, from totaling a restaurant check to sending a spacecraft to Mars—uses a calculator or computer. Math is getting the problem to where calculation is needed, and that only a human being can do. Calculators can’t set up the problems; their only use is to do the calculation at the end.

Calculators are cheap, available, and accurate. If your life depended on an engineer dividing 23,682 by 5,033 and doing it in a hurry, would you rather he did it by hand or used a calculator? If your life depended on that same engineer knowing how to set up the story problem that required that calculation, would you rather he had studied math or spent a lot of time doing long division by hand? Engineers, and I have a degree in chemical engineering, use calculators and computers. We had to study math so we could learn how to get the story problem to the place where we knew what to calculate.

But in most schools, calculation rules the roost in the early grades. It is necessary, but it should not be the priority. Story problems should be introduced immediately, so students can see the relationship between math and calculation. However, by the fourth grade, story problems should predominate and students
should be introduced to hard problems that require algebra and calculus and shown how this more powerful math was created to make hard problems easy, not the other way around.

Then by the time they are ready to tackle problems, such as where the trains met or how long it took the boat to go upstream against the current, they will have learned the algebra that makes it easy. If they don’t learn the algebra, they cannot do these problems no matter how well they can calculate. If they can do the algebra, the calculations are so simple that most people can do them in their heads. But also remember that even if you couldn’t solve these difficult story problems, you still passed algebra. You passed by doing a lot of algebraic exercises and manipulations that, like calculations, have nothing to do with solving story problems.

This avoidance of story problems continues in higher math and even makes up a large part of all college math. Schooling is diminished, but even in the smaller role it plays, it is alive and well in college math. But if you do math in the real world, you don’t
school,
you do story problems. The sad part is that most of us ended up both fearing and hating math when most of us didn’t even do it. But if we came from homes that supported education, we managed to pass our mandatory schooling in hand calculation and non-problem-solving higher math.

I’ve worked a lot with students who, because of schooling, took schoolwork and school teachers out of their quality worlds and didn’t get through school. And what they were told they had to do, and punished for not doing, were calculations they were told were math. Our prisons are filled with young men, disproportionally African American and Hispanic, who wouldn’t memorize useless facts or learn Shakespeare and who certainly wouldn’t do repetitive long division, the most punishing and worthless calculation of all. When they flunked school, they were on the fast track to prison. This failure has led to a great deal of violence, drug use, and nonloving sex and has compounded the problems of child neglect and abuse when they father children. It is the children who were themselves abused and neglected who are the most vulnerable to the depredations of schooling.

If we were short of mathematicians to do real work, which we are not, anyone who was forced to learn math would not be anywhere near good enough to do it when it had to be done. Instead of insisting that all students go on to algebra and geometry, we should focus on teaching them to solve the nonalgebraic story problems that most of us run into in the real world. All students can learn this arithmetic if we are patient and do not fail them. But so few of us can even do arithmetic because we were turned off by too much calculation or later by the mysteries of “higher math.”

If we stopped the forced schooling represented by the torture of hand calculating and really taught the arithmetic we can all use that few of us know now, many more students would be interested in going further into real math. By spending much less money than we spend now, we could use our present math teachers to teach these voluntary, interested students in small classes, and by the time they finished high school, they would have completed the undergraduate math of most colleges.

In the end, we would have many more and much better-educated mathematicians than we have now. These would be happy classes. The interested students who want to learn real math are harmed by being taught with reluctant students who are forced to be there. The argument that math teaches thinking skills may be correct, but only to the students who want to learn it. It does not teach thinking to many students who are forced to take it. All you get from coercion is resistance, no matter where it is used.

Before I leave this discussion of math and how it is destroyed by schooling, I want to offer an example of a simple, nonalgebraic story problem that I don’t believe more than a few people in the country who aren’t mathematicians can solve:
Should I buy or lease a car}
Most people who lease cars would be better off to the tune of up to $100 a month if they bought cars. But they can’t do the math, so they are prey to car salesmen (most of whom can’t do the math either) who have been told to lease cars because the dealers make more money that way. If the dealers make more, lessees lose that money. Read car advertisements, and you will see
that the prices of the cars are rarely advertised, only the monthly costs of leasing them. And look for what is called an
acquisition fee,
only a totally nonmath person would ever be gullible enough to go for that scam.