Teaching College-Level Mathematics in Prisons [pdf]
ams.org
ams.org
Should be everyone's default position.
"If you treat inmates like students, they will become students — and often they will surprise you and even become scholars. They will become inspiring agents of change whom we want to see out in our society."
An A+ for Annie Raymond.
"In 1987–88, with Catherine Counot, Stiegler commissioned an exhibition at the Centre Georges-Pompidou, entitled Mémoires du futur: bibliothèques et technologies. Stiegler defended his thesis at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1992. He has been a Director at the Collège international de philosophie, and a Professor at the Université de Technologie at Compiègne, as well as a visiting professor at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has held the positions of Director General at the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA), and Director General at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM)."
So in short, he has a PhD, became a professor, and ended being the director of a french research institute ("IRCAM is part of a consortium with Stanford's Center for Computer Research and Acoustics (CCRMA) and the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) in Berkeley, California." [2])
Before all of that:
"Between 1978 and 1983 Stiegler was incarcerated for armed robbery, first at the Prison Saint-Michel in Toulouse, and then at the Centre de détention in Muret. It was during this period that he became interested in philosophy, studying it by correspondence with Gérard Granel at the Université de Toulouse-Le-Mirail. His transformation in prison is recounted in his book, Passer à l'acte (2003; the English translation of this work is included in the 2009 volume, Acting Out)." [1]
I find this so inspiring.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Stiegler [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRCAM
From my perspective as a tutor of several students (one who was a libarian, another in nursing school), it's a very popular but strage class to offer, as it's of no use to the nearly students who take it after high school -- it's too abstract for those students, which is why they didn't learn it the first time they saw it in high school, and aren't going to use it in their careers as nurses or office workers or other community-college careers.
"Business mathematics" and "personal finance" would probably be more helpful to these students.
Of course, it's not the OP's fault that community colleges demand these weeder courses.
“Second paragraph” is a simpler way to put it.
I taught many hundreds of students quite a variety of courses ranging from 'Finite Math', entry level algebra, all the way up to honors calc and linear algebra. Unique among all the courses, 'Finite Math' was so entirely abstract I, the math grad student, could not understand the point of the exercises.
I only taught it once, but after two weeks the coursework was so incoherent I stated in class that I would teach them exactly how to solve the problems, and if they learned that, they'd pass (all they cared about). I explicitly stated I wouldn't try to teach them anything at all about why any of it was relevant to their external problems.
Exactly the opposite of my approach to every other course, all without fail entirely satisfying to teach. I loved teaching college math! I'd do it again for very little, but the absurd adjunct rates are strongly discouraging.
That is, I'd teach anything but these ridiculous stand ins for math courses like 'Finite Math'.
OTOH, there's a deep beauty in real math starting with calculus and I dunno I find it calming and even though abstract and not really applicable to the external world these days it might be useful for some prisoners' mental health. There are a lot of stories of the prison library opening up some otherwise hopeless cases.
Yup. The stuff we teach in trig and precalc provides some preparation for calculus, but it seems pretty broken.
Even early calc instruction tends to be broken-- we make things complicated over various historical analytic crises, but then we take enough shortcuts in explanation that we still need to relearn half of everything when we take an actual analysis class.
I have a 5th grader who's taking Algebra I now and will rapidly run out of math classes he can take while in middle school. I'm hoping I can find him a better path for preparation for calc.
Take a look at Calculus Made Easy. It's non-rigorous - it uses infinitesimals without the machinery of non-standard analysis, instead of limits - but it presents the material in a clear and concise way such that just about anyone who can do basic algebra and computations can learn the material and develop an intuition for how calculus works. Once the intimidation factor is gone, they can go back and learn about epsilon-delta etc.
Have you tried giving him more challenging problems based on his existing math level? Work on his problem solving skills could benefit him a lot. Most high school math is just repeating the example solution with different numbers.
One nice source of challenging problems is the past contest page of the CEMC [1] (disclosure: my university runs these contests and I have participated in grading for them). They have contests for a variety of grade levels and both the contest PDFs and the full solutions are available for download, entirely for free!
[1] https://www.cemc.uwaterloo.ca/contests/past_contests.html
He's doing well in the MOEMS Math Olympiad stuff and is going to be taking a class on inductive and deductive reasoning this summer.
To some extent, we have a different problem-- a lot of what "more challenging problems" tend to be is word problems with lots of distractors and often even vocabulary he doesn't know yet. He has great math intuition and ability to symbolically manipulate and spatially visualize problems, but he reads like a smart 10 year old, not a 13 year old.
I'm sort of assuming this will sort itself out as he gets older-- and he still got an A- in his pre-algebra class (which had enough shuffling of radicals, etc, that it was pretty decent fraction of Alg I).
(Also a little gripe about the online math class having a nominal 3 hour final... you can see his accuracy in the last half of the test was a fair bit lower than the first half).
I'm not sure how English is taught at your son's school, but I have the sense that a lot of schools give kids material at grade level. I think this is an unambitious approach. Reading to challenge yourself is the best way to get better, just as solving challenging math problems helps you get better at math.
Admittedly, it's hard if the kid is not interested in what you're getting him to read. I am a bit dismayed at what appears to be a broad decline in fiction reading among boys. I think there needs to be more emphasis on finding books that boys will enjoy reading while also challenging them.
What a depressing outlook to have for someone who has authority over these people.
I have a friend who worked in a prison as a psychologist, somewhere with a generally liberal attitude toward prison, and guards would deny inmates medication, therapy, or (bizarrely) suggest that a diagnosis was incorrect (and often deny the first or second based on their own "diagnosis").
In my experience, some people are just born this way. Stupid to the core, and cannot handle being in authority without doing weird stuff. More oversight is needed. This isn't just prisons: healthcare, police, law, etc. (weirdly, you find this behaviour everywhere, even in high-skill professions).
And politics, most of all. Explains so much.
Obviously, the corporate world is another important omission...most places in the world have good laws around protecting shareholders but do the boards of public companies really put the hammer down...almost never. Probably lots of other areas I missed.
Some of the people we knew, friends of friends, were cooking hard drugs, in their mid 30s etc. One of them, or many, "dating" my friends middle school sister.
It didn't take much to get a gun in your face just to emphasize the results of a debate. With this setting in mind my claim is that there are persons who are operating at their neutral/healthy. Not matter how many years of good behavior or words or programming or songs .. nothing per my experience removes the low bar option for gun in face.
So it's difficult for me. I know people turn things around. I have. I suppose it looks like a sort of spectrum with different gravities to good/bad behavior depending on so many factors.
Plenty of societies appear to do much better than the US at preventing recidivism and reforming criminals to productive members of society.
Well, America's violent crime rate is 10 times higher than Europe's violent crime rate, so make of that what you will.
Some are cultural bits in subpopulations that are resistant to change; we can work on it, but it's not clear how much of an effect any intervention will have.
There's some other structural ones that will be extremely difficult to change-- we have the some of the most dangerous places in the world next-door in Latin America.
I mean, you aren't going to build trust by treating people poorly.
There are of course some people who are so dangerous, so relentlessly violent, that they can never be released from prison. Does that mean we should be brutal to those people for all the years they're in prison? Why? What's that going to achieve? It doesn't stop them being violent, and it may well escalate their dangerous harmful behaviour in prison.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For example, suppose you knew that one inmate had repeatedly beaten his wife and child. While in prison he abused and threatened inmates and guards. You suspected he perpetrated the violent rape of multiple other inmates but can't prove it because the victims refuse to testify. You think he's in the class because he's bored.
In this hypothetical, would it be wrong for some correctional officers to believe the notional inmate didn't deserve the chance?
Not under the veil of ambiguity, nor pessimism.
Your strawman is a fallacy. Suppose an inmate had committed a logical fallacy. Should they thence be barred from reason (reasoning?)?
English isn't my first language, sorry.
PS: You might say the hypothetically notional inmate deserved the offer, but wasn't eligable to go, though one had to wonder why. You might also say it was morally imperative for the officer to bring up charges, if they were sufficiently convinced, to instate conditions that would isolate the culprit from maths education, social interactions in general, and probably any hope of correction.
There are possible worlds where the officers are justified or misunderstood and there are possible worlds where the officers hold incorrect beliefs. What evidence lets you know which possible world is more likely?
Being prejudiced against the officers strikes me as similar to the imagined (and possibly real) situation where the officers are prejudiced against the inmates. We, as readers, just don't know.
You are basically saying "we can't tell a thing about the officers, but we know the author is a jerk for castigating them".
Never mind that the author has all the things you want, the broader knowledge of the situation and so on.
Frankly, yes, IMO. It isn't their job, and it generally really doesn't accomplish anything to induce avoidable suffering in another entity. You're painting a picture of a person unwilling to change. That's fine, there are plenty such people. But what does it accomplish to deny them some trivial pleasure when they have already been denied the great majority of their freedoms? To do so seems pretty childish to me.
I'm not sure I deserve to know the difference.