Control Engineering

Peter Welander

Back to the skills gap, briefly
October 29, 2007

Yesterday afternoon, I was parked on a recliner watching TV. Not wanting to subject myself to the Bears performance against the Lions, I was flipping channels. At one point I came across a TV preacher who was getting off on a tangent and explaining how much he hated math as a junior high and high school student. He groused about having to learn all that algebra and said that he has never used it again in his adult life. (I'm afraid all that stuck with me from the sermon was his dislike of math.)

I confess that I didn't like math in junior high. I recovered somewhat in high school, but I've always had something of a mental block about it. I survived things like statistics and quality analysis in grad school, but math was always a weakness. Nonetheless, I have used math, and even algebra, as an adult, and not just in a work context.

So, I stopped sifting through the piles of press releases we receive when I ran across this interesting collection of math texts for middle schoolers (Whatever happened to junior high?) that presents "engineering" problems as teaching tools.

The press release had this description of the nature of the course:

"Created with support from the GE Foundation’s Math Excellence Program, the Building Math series includes a reproducible teacher book at each grade level with student handouts and teacher support materials, a poster of the design process, and a DVD of classroom implementation. Each title in the series has an engaging theme:

· Stranded! – On a remote South Pacific island, students design a shelter, a water collector, and a canoe loading plan to survive.

· Amazon Mission – To help people in Brazil cope with malaria, students design a carrier to insulate medicine against the heat, a water filter, and a plan to stop the spread of an influenza virus.

· Everest Trek – While scaling the world’s tallest peak, students must design a well-insulated coat, a bridge to cross a crevasse, and a zip-line transporter to descend Everest in an emergency."

Now if we'd had this kind of stuff when I was 13 years old, I might have had a better attitude. My problems are not genetic, at least. My daughter loves math and took all the advanced placement courses she could in high school, including statistics and calculus simultaneously during her senior year. Now she is in college studying music and complains that she doesn't have any math courses. Her friends think she's nuts, even those who aren't planning on seminary.

Posted by Peter Welander on October 29, 2007 | Comments (0)