A few weeks ago, my physics teacher (an older gentleman) told my class about how millennials are very much lagging behind in areas such as critical thinking, problem solving skills, and mathematical ability (i.e. having a deeper understanding of the mathematical concepts said person is learning), and that he's seen the decline over the course of his teaching career. I decided to pay closer attention to this, to see if my peers and I disproved his statement, or if we were quintessential examples of it; it turned out that most of our behavior followed my teacher's hypothesis (myself included). So I decided to look online to see if it was only my school that seemed to follow this trend, or if this was a common occurrence. Again, it looked as if this were taking place everywhere: apparently, millennials are lagging in the aforementioned areas.
Now, most of my peers and I are in higher level classes and, at least I, so far, am doing very well. Therefore, I think this issue seems to be more of a difference between being book smart, able to memorize, and getting through school (us) vs. actual deep understand, comprehension, problem solving, and all that good stuff (not millennials). In school, I believe I have always tried to learn to understand, rather than for the grades, but my question is: can anything be done? Is there something I can practice/work on, or does my being in high school mean that I'm already too old to change my way of thinking and that I and other millennials who are willing to put in the work are a lost cause? Is there any type of book (or something of the sort) to learn this out of, or are you simply born with these abilities? Thank you in advance for any help you can offer!
Is this on level physics or AP physics?
Honours/AP physics
Most regular HS curricula don’t emphasize problem solving, critical thinking, or “out-of-the-box” problems enough, since public schools constrained to a set of curriculum requirements should adhere to them, and because one of the goals is to ensure everyone is prepared by NCLB. I’m not a school teacher myself, and I don’t know much about how curriculum standards here work, but I agree this is a major problem.
I’d seek opportunities outside the regular curriculum, whether it be after-school clubs, your city’s math circle, whatever you can find.
My son is a millenial, and he is a math whiz. He just “gets it” intuitively. I’m an engineer, but he surpassed my level of math a couple of years ago! He is studying applied math.
It sure seems like kids are taking more advanced math than we did in the 80s. Back then, taking one year of calculus in high school was considered very advanced. I know that’s not the case anymore.
hmm, there is one way… but you have to be very determined… only one person has done it so far. Climb the northern Himalayas and find the monk with a lizard tattoo. Say to him, “Wanyama Akinfenawa Tobu Yuku” and he will take you to a special place… known by CCers as Podunk University. Once you get there drink the holy water from the Yashubu fountain and you’ll magically turn smarter.
Or you can turn off your TV, your Netflix, your YouTube and put down your smart phone.
Nope. Your teacher just has rose-colored glasses. The evidence [points to the contrary](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect).
Here’s the issue I see as a high school teacher who has been in the classroom since 1980 and as the mom of 3 kids between 12 and 17. (And, yes, it will be a series of incredible generalizations, with lots and lots of kids who are exceptions.)
A lot of my students were handed a calculator in 3rd grade and never looked back. Their computational skills are incredibly weak.
How does that come into play? In a billion tiny little details. When they start factoring, they can’t come up with, for example, the factors of -36 that will add up to -9. If they’re doing a problem involving discounts, they can’t come up with a ballpark estimate of which number is most likely equal to 3% of a number, so they don’t recognize a grossly wrong answer when it pops out of their calculators. They’re simply not good with numbers. Not because of any intellectual issue, but because no one ever made them BECOME good with numbers.
Likewise, their writing skills can be less than we would hope. Too many of them were taught to worry first about the content of their writing, and that we would get to the nuts and bolts later-- but “later” never came. They have trouble with grammar. And probably more than that, they don’t see the difference between formal writing and informal writing. They think that the style of writing they use in a text to their friends is appropriate in emailing a teacher or, heaven forbid, a college or a job opportunity. Too many adults have let them assume that it was.
But I think that’s largely a product of circumstance. They know what they were taught, and the educational system let them think that this is all OK. If there are failings in these areas, I think that those making the decisions on curriculum have a lot to answer for.
On the other hand, I see no loss in critical thinking skills in the time I’ve been teaching. As a small example: two years ago I taught geometry to yesterday’s graduates. When graphing parabolas, one of my kids noticed a quirk-- that when the leading coefficient is 1, the difference in y values between the turning point and the point one unit to the right or left was also 1. He asked me about it, and said that it happened in every example we did.
I went home, proved it algebraically, and christened it “Raphael’s Theorem.”
Nope, he’s probably not the first person in history to realize it. And nope, it’s not going to make any difference in the big picture of graphing parabolas. But he was able to look at what we were doing, and analyze it. And, nope, he wasn’t one of the kids who won a math award at yesterday’s graduation. He was simply a bright, inquisitive kid, one of lots and lots of bright inquisitive kids. And we weren’t looking at a graph on a screen, he was plotting points on graph paper.
Millennials, like every generation before and after them, are a product of what they’ve been exposed to. If we ever choose to put an emphasis back on computation, critical thinking and problem solving, we’ll find that we have classrooms full of kids with abilities in those areas.
How does one measure critical thinking?
Because older generations have always thought the youngest generation isn’t as good as theirs.
I see it all the time on the Internet when old people complain about how millennials are so entitled, blah blah blah.
Wow, @bjkmom, giving a stellar response!
I think most of the problem is of the educational system that [millennials] are subject to. Especially in Math classes, we are taught to rinse and repeat a process for each type of problem. The teacher tells you how to do a certain type of problem, you follow her example and do every subsequent problem exactly as it was taught.
I did MathCounts in my middle school years, and we were taught to try to solve problems we didn’t know how to do. The only “tools” we had at our disposal were the ones taught in middle school math: basic algebra, geometry, and probability. After a lot of practice with a lot of different (and hard) problems, most kids in MathCounts had very good problem solving skills because they were able to utilize the math concepts that were taught to them, and understand them at a deeper level.
I recently had to tutor some kids for Algebra 1 Common Core, and many were on the crutches of their calculators, consulting it for problems like 16+11, and their mental math skills (especially with the quadratic thing that bjkmom was talking about) were lacking.It hindered them.
I’m really not sure how it goes for English, but critical thinking/problem solving ability is really a symptom of a larger issue, which is the failure of our school systems to emphasize problem solving (exposing kids to new challenges they don’t know how to do at first) and emphasize concepts.
@jaxcat, some are born with these skills, but they can be learned easily in a variety of forms. Programming(a real test of problem solving ability), Competition math, physics, any of these things are really just a medium for you to improve your problem solving skills. That’s why classes such as AP Calculus and AP Physics are so hard because problems are so difficult and they require a really good understanding of concepts and calculus, which public schools have failed to teach kids.
We need less positive reinforcement, imo.
I think it’s certainly possible to include lots of positive reinforcement in a lesson. The thing is: you’ve got to give them the skills that will enable them to get the answers correct. Then the positive reinforcement is appropriate-- they’ve done something worth reinforcing.
The evidence seems to be ambiguous. Standards are slipping by some metrics, and rising by others, but the media only seems to be interested in the former.
The top applicants for undergraduate and graduate programs are a lot more competitive now than they were fifty years ago, for example, and probably would destroy the latter if they were pooled together.
@RMIBstudent , when you say "The top applicants for undergraduate and graduate programs are a lot more competitive now than they were fifty years ago, for example, and probably would destroy the latter if they were pooled together. "-- what makes you say so?
If you take away their technology, using mostly slide rules and mainframe computers, are you so sure they could compete with the generation that sent a man to the moon and returned him safely to earth?
In my opinion, as someone who has taught math since 1980, (sorry, not quite the 50 years you mentioned) smart is still smart. The top pool of applicants hasn’t changed measurably over the years. What has changed is the skills that someone else chose to emphasize to those smart kids.
On the subject of English and critical thinking: in the past years, with the advent of the internet, students have turned less to their own brains and more to the internet for analysis. Since they have the resources at their fingertips, they think, why should they have to do it on their own? Many teachers are lax in cracking down on those who use outside sources to study, those who don’t even deign to read the book.
Grammar-wise, I agree with what @bjkmom said; it it hadn’t been for several good English teachers (specifically my seventh and ninth-grade teachers), my grammar would look the same as that of many other high school students: terrible. There are many rules that I have had to search up for myself whilst writing because I never learned them in school. In elementary school, you are told to have a topic sentence, but not how to write it. You are taught what different parts of a sentence are, but they are never mentioned again. You are not taught about flow, about grammar; simply that you are to have an introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Grammar becomes hardwired into brains at young ages; you can’t thrust the present perfect and the past participle at a student in ninth grade and expect them to learn it.
@bjkmom I’ve seen statistics on the record increases in GMAT scores for Harvard applicants, for example, as well as the number of AP courses being taken and other metrics, but I admit that I’m too lazy to bring them all here right now.
Yeah, they probably couldn’t do very well in the technological context of the 1980s…how is this a bad thing? People from your generation also probably wouldn’t do very well throwing javelins as Roman Legionaries. Technology advances, and unless if you want to prepare every scientist and engineer for a doomsday scenario where they have to calculate how to get us all to Mars by hand after the aliens destroyed all of our computers, I think it’s fine that we adjust our educational standards accordingly.
@topaz1116 it seems like this could cut both ways, because with the internet we also have access to a far greater wealth of information than we ever have before, and to a greater range of the socioeconomic strata as well. I’ve learned a lot on a variety of subjects through the internet that I would not have been as able to or motivated to learn from sifting through a library.
@RMIBstudent that is certainly true. I’ve learned a lot through the simple reading of Wikipedia, not to mention outside news sources that have broadened my perspectives on the world. Still, it annoys me that people manage to ace courses simply because they memorized the information on SparkNotes or Shmoop or something.
@topaz1116 I’d be a hypocrite for agreeing with you, but yes, this is true. I think that’s just a problem with the English curriculum at most schools though - they’re really, really bad at detecting BS.
I think we force them into this by:
Teaching to the test, and
Using varying teaching methods,
So they learn differently than we do.
I have also lately found that when I don’t tell my kids how to solve a problem, they usually still manage. So helicopters at fault too:)