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TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.
The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.
“No reason to force students to struggle with and fail in algebra”
In “Is Algebra Necessary?”, an opinion piece in the July 28, 2012 issue of The New York Times, an American emeritus professor of political science argues that high school and college students in the United States shouldn’t be subjected to the harrowing ordeal of struggling and failing in algebra. Andrew Hacker, co-author of the book Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — and What We Can Do About It, says that while it’s important for young people to learn to read and write and do long division, there’s really no reason to force them to grasp vectorial angles and discontinuous functions.
FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES
“It’s true that mathematics requires mental exertion,” Hacker points out, “(b)ut there’s no evidence that being able to prove (x² + y²)² = (x² - y²)² + (2xy)² leads to more credible political opinions or social analysis… Think of math as a huge boulder we make everyone pull, without assessing what all this pain achieves. So why require it, without alternatives or exceptions? Thus far I haven’t found a compelling answer.”
Hacker argues that demanding algebra across the board actually skews a student body, not necessarily for the better, and just puts a particularly lofty mathematics bar to potential poets and philosophers. “Instead of investing so much of our academic energy in a subject that blocks further attainment for much of our population,” he says, “I propose that we start thinking about alternatives. Thus mathematics teachers at every level could create exciting courses in what I call ‘citizen statistics.’ This would not be a backdoor version of algebra, as in the Advanced Placement syllabus. Nor would it focus on equations used by scholars when they write for one another. Instead, it would familiarize students with the kinds of numbers that describe and delineate our personal and public lives.”
Read Andrew Hacker’s ““Is Algebra Necessary?” in The New York Times now!
OTHER INTERESTING READINGS:
Trying to teach the unteachable. In “It’s good to be published, and better to be understood,” his review of Helen Sword’s Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard University Press, 240 pages) that came out in the September 3, 2012 issue of The Weekly Standard in the UK, author and critic Barton Swaim says that leaving aside Sword’s irritating use of the word “stylish,” the book contains superb counsel for academics who want to write with greater clarity and skill.
Swaim says though that like most if not all guides to writing, Sword’s book sometimes gives the impression of trying to teach the unteachable. He observes: “Sword suggests, for instance, that her readers can ‘bring intangible concepts to life by pairing abstract nouns with animating verbs.’ Her example, drawn from an actual academic article, is this sentence: ‘Substantive differences also lurk in this confusion.’ Well, okay. But while it’s probably true that ‘pairing abstract subjects with animating verbs’ can put life into an otherwise lifeless sentence, that’s the sort of thing a writer either knows without being told, or not at all.”
Fun reading that could dampen one’s libido. In Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (The Westbourne Press, 368 pages), writer, lawyer and journalist Eric Berkowitz maps out the story of Western civilization from the perspective of law and libido. Berkowitz chronicles how the baleful forces of law have continually reinterpreted such sexual aspects as incest, masturbation, bestiality, sex during menstruation, boring old adultery, prostitution, transvestism, pornography, and the cult of virginity.
In “Make Love, Not Law,” a review of Berkowitz’s book in The Literary Review of the UK, Sara Wheeler says that Sex and Punishment “is an excellently researched, almost scholarly book that draws on a wide range of sources from Herodotus to St. Augustine… and on to Pepys and Foucault. All are properly credited. By backing up his material and selecting sources wisely, Berkowitz has achieved a perfect balance between case study and analysis, and between narrative and reflection.” Wheeler makes this health warning, though: “350 pages of sex resulting in impalement or a barbed fish up the bottom may have a deleterious effect on the libido.”
Read Sara Wheeler’s “Make Love, Not Law” in The Literary Review of the UK now!
