"My students had such a fierce passion and thirst for learning the material. The continuous stream of questions during classes was a testament to their refusal to be satisfied by mere knowledge and to their incomparable commitment to achieve true understanding."
Should be everyone's default position.
"If you treat inmates like students, they will become students — and often they will surprise you and even become
scholars. They will become inspiring agents of change
whom we want to see out in our society."
Bernard Stiegler's story has always fascinated me [1]:
"In 1987–88, with Catherine Counot, Stiegler commissioned an exhibition at the Centre Georges-Pompidou, entitled Mémoires du futur: bibliothèques et technologies. Stiegler defended his thesis at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1992. He has been a Director at the Collège international de philosophie, and a Professor at the Université de Technologie at Compiègne, as well as a visiting professor at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has held the positions of Director General at the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA), and Director General at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM)."
So in short, he has a PhD, became a professor, and ended being the director of a french research institute ("IRCAM is part of a consortium with Stanford's Center for Computer Research and Acoustics (CCRMA) and the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) in Berkeley, California." [2])
Before all of that:
"Between 1978 and 1983 Stiegler was incarcerated for armed robbery, first at the Prison Saint-Michel in Toulouse, and then at the Centre de détention in Muret. It was during this period that he became interested in philosophy, studying it by correspondence with Gérard Granel at the Université de Toulouse-Le-Mirail. His transformation in prison is recounted in his book, Passer à l'acte (2003; the English translation of this work is included in the 2009 volume, Acting Out)." [1]
Much (but not all) can be said for influence of one's environment and surroundings. Unfortunately, for most addicts and felons, there aren't enough resources in the world to give them all the opportunity for a fresh start. I'm all for second chances, but I would prefer spending time and money where it would be most effective, like early intervention and child care.
Note: The article is about the high-school math ("College Algebra" and "Finite Math", material covered in "Algebra II" and "Precalculus" in high school) that is taught in remedial classes in community colleges.
From my perspective as a tutor of several students (one who was a libarian, another in nursing school), it's a very popular but strage class to offer, as it's of no use to the nearly students who take it after high school -- it's too abstract for those students, which is why they didn't learn it the first time they saw it in high school, and aren't going to use it in their careers as nurses or office workers or other community-college careers.
"Business mathematics" and "personal finance" would probably be more helpful to these students.
Of course, it's not the OP's fault that community colleges demand these weeder courses.
It's probably the thinking in your antepenultimate paragraph reinforcing itself. Instead, abstract skills can offer a gateway to the application of more rigid rules, so to speak, because it shows that they are strong, but the applicability is flexible.
Math grad student lecturer of various university entry level to intermediate mathematics courses at UF and ASU here. Over 30 years ago, but the following anecdotage is still vivid in my mind:
I taught many hundreds of students quite a variety of courses ranging from 'Finite Math', entry level algebra, all the way up to honors calc and linear algebra. Unique among all the courses, 'Finite Math' was so entirely abstract I, the math grad student, could not understand the point of the exercises.
I only taught it once, but after two weeks the coursework was so incoherent I stated in class that I would teach them exactly how to solve the problems, and if they learned that, they'd pass (all they cared about). I explicitly stated I wouldn't try to teach them anything at all about why any of it was relevant to their external problems.
Exactly the opposite of my approach to every other course, all without fail entirely satisfying to teach. I loved teaching college math! I'd do it again for very little, but the absurd adjunct rates are strongly discouraging.
That is, I'd teach anything but these ridiculous stand ins for math courses like 'Finite Math'.
OTOH, there's a deep beauty in real math starting with calculus and I dunno I find it calming and even though abstract and not really applicable to the external world these days it might be useful for some prisoners' mental health. There are a lot of stories of the prison library opening up some otherwise hopeless cases.
> I taught many hundreds of students quite a variety of courses ranging from 'Finite Math', entry level algebra, all the way up to honors calc and linear algebra. Unique among all the courses, 'Finite Math' was so entirely abstract I, the math grad student, could not understand the point of the exercises.
Yup. The stuff we teach in trig and precalc provides some preparation for calculus, but it seems pretty broken.
Even early calc instruction tends to be broken-- we make things complicated over various historical analytic crises, but then we take enough shortcuts in explanation that we still need to relearn half of everything when we take an actual analysis class.
I have a 5th grader who's taking Algebra I now and will rapidly run out of math classes he can take while in middle school. I'm hoping I can find him a better path for preparation for calc.
I have a 5th grader who's taking Algebra I now and will rapidly run out of math classes
Have you tried giving him more challenging problems based on his existing math level? Work on his problem solving skills could benefit him a lot. Most high school math is just repeating the example solution with different numbers.
One nice source of challenging problems is the past contest page of the CEMC [1] (disclosure: my university runs these contests and I have participated in grading for them). They have contests for a variety of grade levels and both the contest PDFs and the full solutions are available for download, entirely for free!
He's doing well in the MOEMS Math Olympiad stuff and is going to be taking a class on inductive and deductive reasoning this summer.
To some extent, we have a different problem-- a lot of what "more challenging problems" tend to be is word problems with lots of distractors and often even vocabulary he doesn't know yet. He has great math intuition and ability to symbolically manipulate and spatially visualize problems, but he reads like a smart 10 year old, not a 13 year old.
I'm sort of assuming this will sort itself out as he gets older-- and he still got an A- in his pre-algebra class (which had enough shuffling of radicals, etc, that it was pretty decent fraction of Alg I).
(Also a little gripe about the online math class having a nominal 3 hour final... you can see his accuracy in the last half of the test was a fair bit lower than the first half).
Does he like to read fiction? When I was that age I excelled in math but I also loved to read fiction, mostly fantasy novels. I read Lord of the Rings at a very young age and it really expanded my vocabulary.
I'm not sure how English is taught at your son's school, but I have the sense that a lot of schools give kids material at grade level. I think this is an unambitious approach. Reading to challenge yourself is the best way to get better, just as solving challenging math problems helps you get better at math.
Admittedly, it's hard if the kid is not interested in what you're getting him to read. I am a bit dismayed at what appears to be a broad decline in fiction reading among boys. I think there needs to be more emphasis on finding books that boys will enjoy reading while also challenging them.
He's an OK reader and a bit over grade level, but not to the degree of math. Same for attention span and social skills.
I have two other boys that are much more well-rounded (further ahead in reading, better socially, but a bit less ahead in math).
I agree the decline of reading is a bummer. I read Tolkien pretty young, too, and even moved on to Homer. It's hard to even picture my kids doing this.
On the other hand, there's more high quality literature written explicitly for kids these days (a lot of what was read / is revered as good children's lit of the past is drivel).
That’s good to hear! When I was in elementary school our parents were asked to buy dictionaries for us kids. We learned how to use a dictionary and I found myself using mine all the time when I read challenging books.
Other things you might consider for your precocious son are puzzle and brain teaser books. I used to love doing challenging puzzles. The books by Martin Gardner can be very mathematically rich. I haven’t read them myself but they were recommended to me by a retired high school math teacher who taught the intro to math education class I took. I plan to eventually acquire a large library of these sorts of materials, once I’ve graduated and have more time, money, and space.
> Even early calc instruction tends to be broken-- we make things complicated over various historical analytic crises, but then we take enough shortcuts in explanation that we still need to relearn half of everything when we take an actual analysis class.
Take a look at Calculus Made Easy. It's non-rigorous - it uses infinitesimals without the machinery of non-standard analysis, instead of limits - but it presents the material in a clear and concise way such that just about anyone who can do basic algebra and computations can learn the material and develop an intuition for how calculus works. Once the intimidation factor is gone, they can go back and learn about epsilon-delta etc.
Thanks for the suggestion-- I'll pick it up! It looks like there's a recent revision with modern notation (though the reviser couldn't resist adding a chapter based on limits).
By that I did mean you should have called it the second or third sentence instead, not that antepenultimate means second from last. Doing otherwise in a four-paragraph passage (and nearly any other context, frankly) is absurd and makes most people think you’re trying to sound well-read, and you end up where it is unclear even to yourself what you said.
Would make sense to teach also the probability theory and, maybe, Python coding basics. To give them tools they can use after or even in the prison itself (in some cases).
I kind of understand it. From my experiences growing up around relatively hard stuff (first saw guns for sale in a backpack in 9th grade science class. This was my closest friend at the time, and didn't seem weird to me at all.)
Some of the people we knew, friends of friends, were cooking hard drugs, in their mid 30s etc. One of them, or many, "dating" my friends middle school sister.
It didn't take much to get a gun in your face just to emphasize the results of a debate. With this setting in mind my claim is that there are persons who are operating at their neutral/healthy. Not matter how many years of good behavior or words or programming or songs .. nothing per my experience removes the low bar option for gun in face.
So it's difficult for me. I know people turn things around. I have. I suppose it looks like a sort of spectrum with different gravities to good/bad behavior depending on so many factors.
I think this is what a lot of overly optimistic "rehabilitation" advocates miss. They seem to believe that if you provide just enough nurturing, opportunity, and understanding that people who act outside society's acceptable boundaries will be drawn back within them. They fail to recognize that you're not returning these people to something they deviated from, you have to create an entirely new worldview for them that they never had any experience with.
That's true for some of them. There's also a very large number of people in prison who are legitimately good people, but made a mistake at some point or got pushed into a situation where they didn't have many good options. There are plenty of people who have no desire to commit any crime and won't once they're let out. A big problem is that prison is a black hole that's hard to return from, part of which is due to society's perception of everyone who gets locked up and the mental wasting away and lack of development once you're in there.
Half the point is that systemic differences contribute to different outcomes, so lets change the system. What a sad rejoinder to argue that the system is a force of nature.
Some bits of the system we can change with effort. Urban poverty, etc, can improve. We can have a better criminal justice system.
Some are cultural bits in subpopulations that are resistant to change; we can work on it, but it's not clear how much of an effect any intervention will have.
There's some other structural ones that will be extremely difficult to change-- we have the some of the most dangerous places in the world next-door in Latin America.
There's a lot more evidence for rehabilitation than there is for mass incarceration with brutal staff.
There are of course some people who are so dangerous, so relentlessly violent, that they can never be released from prison. Does that mean we should be brutal to those people for all the years they're in prison? Why? What's that going to achieve? It doesn't stop them being violent, and it may well escalate their dangerous harmful behaviour in prison.
Not to be even more pessimistic but you will find this happen everywhere you give humans authority over each other without full oversight.
I have a friend who worked in a prison as a psychologist, somewhere with a generally liberal attitude toward prison, and guards would deny inmates medication, therapy, or (bizarrely) suggest that a diagnosis was incorrect (and often deny the first or second based on their own "diagnosis").
In my experience, some people are just born this way. Stupid to the core, and cannot handle being in authority without doing weird stuff. More oversight is needed. This isn't just prisons: healthcare, police, law, etc. (weirdly, you find this behaviour everywhere, even in high-skill professions).
Where I am, there is a largely effective level of oversight within politics i.e. all lobbying/gifts disclosed, decent media coverage, public funding of political parties, etc. But yes, definitely an area where stuff can go very wrong.
Obviously, the corporate world is another important omission...most places in the world have good laws around protecting shareholders but do the boards of public companies really put the hammer down...almost never. Probably lots of other areas I missed.
Large corporations are ruled by internal politics anyway, not market mechanisms. It's a wonder that they manage to work as well as they do, despite that inherent source of dysfunction.
You could imagine circumstances where the officers outlook was justified or not justified. I think judging them based on only this off hand remark about someone's perception of them is not merited.
For example, suppose you knew that one inmate had repeatedly beaten his wife and child. While in prison he abused and threatened inmates and guards. You suspected he perpetrated the violent rape of multiple other inmates but can't prove it because the victims refuse to testify. You think he's in the class because he's bored.
In this hypothetical, would it be wrong for some correctional officers to believe the notional inmate didn't deserve the chance?
The point is, the officers did not deserve to make such claims.
Not under the veil of ambiguity, nor pessimism.
Your strawman is a fallacy. Suppose an inmate had committed a logical fallacy. Should they thence be barred from reason (reasoning?)?
English isn't my first language, sorry.
PS: You might say the hypothetically notional inmate deserved the offer, but wasn't eligable to go, though one had to wonder why. You might also say it was morally imperative for the officer to bring up charges, if they were sufficiently convinced, to instate conditions that would isolate the culprit from maths education, social interactions in general, and probably any hope of correction.
I don't understand your comment. My point is, because you don't know the officers, inmates, or the broader situation, you shouldn't comment as to whether the officers are right or wrong - because you don't know.
There are possible worlds where the officers are justified or misunderstood and there are possible worlds where the officers hold incorrect beliefs. What evidence lets you know which possible world is more likely?
Being prejudiced against the officers strikes me as similar to the imagined (and possibly real) situation where the officers are prejudiced against the inmates. We, as readers, just don't know.
>In this hypothetical, would it be wrong for some correctional officers to believe the notional inmate didn't deserve the chance?
Frankly, yes, IMO. It isn't their job, and it generally really doesn't accomplish anything to induce avoidable suffering in another entity. You're painting a picture of a person unwilling to change. That's fine, there are plenty such people. But what does it accomplish to deny them some trivial pleasure when they have already been denied the great majority of their freedoms? To do so seems pretty childish to me.
read "deserve" in any sense that is active in more than the grammatic sense. Maybe they thought the inmates didn't want to, or weren't able to learn. More likely, we think the wardens thought the inmates were criminals.
Should be everyone's default position.
"If you treat inmates like students, they will become students — and often they will surprise you and even become scholars. They will become inspiring agents of change whom we want to see out in our society."
An A+ for Annie Raymond.