Today, a thought about math education, parents, and
the camel's back. The University of Houston's
College of Engineering presents this series about
the machines that make our civilization run, and
the people whose ingenuity created them.
Crises don't reach us
step-by-step. They arrive all at once. The camel
seems comfortable under his load until we add just
one straw too many. Writer Malcom Gladwell talks
about tipping points in human affairs. A heavy kid
sits on one end of a teeter-totter. He holds a
skinny kid hostage at the other end -- up in the
air. As the skinny kid's friends hand him one brick
at a time, nothing happens. Finally one last brick
and the heavy kid rises helplessly. The tipping
point has been reached. It's his turn to be a
hostage.
The math we learned in school prepared us to expect
linear behavior in the world around us. We expect
things to be proportional to one another. Hand the
skinny kid one brick and the heavy kid should rise
an inch, shouldn't he? Well, that's not how life
is.
Look at disease, says Gladwell. Imagine a 24-hour
flu going around. There's one chance in 50 a sick
person will transmit it when he meets a well
person. If he meets 45 people a day the disease
dies out. But at Christmastime our sick person
meets 55 people a day -- on the bus and in the
malls. Now we face an epidemic.
Gladwell's most startling example is crime in New
York City. Not too many years ago, many people
thought the city was doomed. Crime rates were
alarmingly high. Today, in a short time, violent
crime in New York City has dropped to number 36
among major American cities. It's now on a level
with Boise, Idaho. What happened?
Chief of Police William Bratton made a few
seemingly small changes. He put a few more foot
police in bad neighborhoods, cracked down on minor
dope peddlers, rousted loiterers. He recognized
what crime has in common with disease. Both are
contagious.
A Stanford psychologist did a telling experiment.
He parked two cars in a bad neighborhood: one in
good condition, the other with no plates and the
hood open. Soon everything of value had been stolen
from the ratty car. The clean car was untouched.
Ratty environments evoke ratty behavior. Crime
really is contagious. To achieve remission Bratton
reduced contact with the disease.
We face our own tipping point in education. Public
school students come to universities with poorer
and poorer math preparation. In math-based colleges
like engineering, science, and business we've
suddenly reached a point were we must choose
between an alarmingly high failure rate or an
alarming lowering of standards.
Maybe in this case we can recognize a nonlinear
tipping point and do something about it. The
tipping point is parental interest. Gladwell quotes
more data: at a certain point, a tiny decrease in
the number of parents who value education can cause
education in a school to suffer terribly. Parents
tip the balance in our schools. To empower our
children with a knowledge of math and science we
must convince just a few parents. It takes only a
few to tip the balance, and do great good.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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