Des Moines university
A fascinating article in the Des Moines Register on what would take for Iowa and the United States to have world-class schools. (Des Moines is the home town of Bill Bryson who rubbished it in his first major-selling book. It was amusing writing but totally misleading.)
One of the young profestionals invited to speak was Qi Shi, who has been a director/teacher at a Beijing high school and is studying for her master’s degree in school counseling at Drake University, where she’s also a graduate assistant.
Qi Shi said: ‘I’m applying for graduate school, and now I’m also applying for Ph.D. program, so I need to look at my GRE (Graduate Record Examinations) scores and comparing my GRE scores with American students. Now when applying for the Ph.D. program, one thing that is a huge difference is the math score. I can get a full score in math. . . . math is really, really important to doing research.
‘Verbal — I can communicate, I can read, I can write, and I’m improving, so I’m doing almost the same thing as my American classmates are doing in English, but in math, it’s a huge gap.
‘Math is basic. When I was learning in high school, it was what we had to learn, but here, like in college and graduate school, some of the students may not have a clear idea about what it is. I can really see from personal experience the difference. . . maybe math and science should be somewhere in that vision.
When asked whether students would like maths she said, ‘If you never try how a tomato tastes, you’ll never know you will like it. When you give the kids the opportunity to see what it looks like it, and maybe they’re going to try it and they’re going to go forward in it.’
Much more HERE.
Source: Des Moines Register