Getting ready for the new year to start and this article actually kind of hit a nerve so RANT ON!
Frankly I have a cynical take that the NYTIMES article is fringe "blame the teachers" nonsense.
Oh if ONLY our teachers worked harder or did something different it would ALL be better.
Wishful thinking and pretending that the process is just "Teacher does A -> students learn 10%, Teacher does B -> students learn 90%"
Any classroom strategy will inevitably fail when confronted with a lack of personal motivation. Almost any (or even the lack of a) classroom strategy will work when sufficient motivation is present.
Sure, individual teachers can change things slightly through the personal charisma they have but frankly it is a small effect on the main driving factors here:
1) On the "I don't believe you front" 1/3 of a typical American classroom will reject evolution on religious grounds and who have been told that education is a form of elitism -- so right there you have a group of people who value dogma over reason and who will simply not excel at any kind of rigorous thinking.
2) On the "too cool for school" front, we have "math is hard" Barbie and you have "I didn't need it so why does my kid" parents. It's okay to struggle because they have been indoctrinated to believe it is irrelevant and won't matter after graduation.
3) On the "why work harder than we have to front": You have flat old intellectual laziness -- it's hard so avoid the pain and don't do it. Besides, the time can be spent on activities connected with actual aspirations like making it big as music or athletic stars and after you make it big who cares!
4) On the peer pressure front I have seen students who one-on-one show an intense driving interest who immediately fold up and repudiate it to avoid losing coolness with their peers who have already been lost through 1-3.
OTOH here is an example of absolutely NO classroom technique yielding results that put those of the article to shame:
A few years back I was reading a biography called "Battleship Sailor" about a guy who was a radioman at the end of World War II as the fleet cut literally thousands of radiomen while decommissioning a large fleet no longer needed. How did they determine who got to stay in the Navy? Grades from a series of classes. These twentysomethings badly wanted to keep those good jobs (most entered from poverty from the depression) but they came to understand that staying required the highest grades out of huge classes where the teachers didn't care if they passed or failed. The author talks about what kinds of math these high school educated kids were forced to do without acknowledging that he was describing 3rd year electrical engineering math for a group of kids who hadn't had the two years of calculus and vectors we'd normally expect in preparation. They did it too -- without tutors and without teachers. Motivation was enough to get them to perform THREE YEARS above their grade level.
It's all about motivation.
The article ignores this, and cynically I'd say it is because some drivers behind it would like to sell the solution. It ignores a far more likely explanation in that the Japanese students have been convinced that their future depends critically on their performance in math and the American students have been indoctrinated to believe that it doesn't matter in the end.
Once motivated the tactics sound superior, but the tactics are a second order effect here and I am completely sick of pretending that the first order effects don't exist.
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