Teachers, leave them kids alone

On my home planet, everyone learns basic algebra. Earth seems to be different.

People are actually discussing whether to remove algebra requirements from community college curricula. They don’t seem to be discussing the elimination of basic reading and writing skills, at least not yet. It seems to me, though, that passing algebra ought to be a really low hurdle to leap, but apparently it isn’t.

Algebra is one of the biggest hurdles to getting a high school or college degree — particularly for students of color and first-generation undergrads.

It is also the single most failed course in community colleges across the country. So if you’re not a STEM major (science, technology, engineering, math), why even study algebra?

I was a first generation undergrad. I didn’t take algebra in college…because I took it in high school. If you were on the college track, you took it early, because in your junior or senior year you’d take trigonometry/pre-calc. If you were an advanced math student (I wasn’t), you got calculus done right there in public school. 16 year olds can learn algebra. It really isn’t that daunting.

“Why even study algebra?” is a stupid question. If you’re not a history major, why study history? If you’re not an English major, why do you need to learn to write good? If you’re an American, why bother learning a foreign language? Algebra is a kind of minimum standard for elementary numeracy.

This interview with Eloy Ortiz Oakley is appalling in many ways.

You are facing pressure to increase graduation rates — only 48 percent graduate from California community colleges with an associate’s degree or transfer to a four-year institution within six years. As we’ve said, passing college algebra is a major barrier to graduation. But is this the easy way out? Just strike the algebra requirement to increase graduation rates instead of teaching math more effectively?

I hear that a lot and unfortunately nothing could be farther from the truth. Somewhere along the lines, since the 1950s, we decided that the only measure of a student’s ability to reason or to do some sort of quantitative measure is algebra. What we’re saying is we want as rigorous a course as possible to determine a student’s ability to succeed, but it should be relevant to their course of study. There are other math courses that we could introduce that tell us a lot more about our students.

No one decided that it was the only measure. People looked at the progression of math concepts that were taught — algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus — and set the standard on the most introductory of the math skills. Students who come into college not knowing algebra are totally screwed if they want to enter any STEM field, but even if they’re doing a non-STEM major, I’d argue that everyone ought to have that minimal level of math literacy.

I don’t see the problem here. If “relevance to their course of study” is the standard, I could see biology majors insisting that they don’t need to know psychology or literature (they’d be wrong). A college degree should not be a narrow certificate that says you’ve been exposed to a thin slice of knowledge, but here we are, arguing that it’s all about getting a job.

A lot of students in California community colleges are hoping to prepare for a four-year college. What are you hearing from the four-year institutions? Are they at ease with you dropping the requirement? Or would they then make the students take the same algebra course they’re not taking at community college?

This question is being raised at all levels of higher education — the university level as well as the community college level. There’s a great body of research that’s informing this discussion, much of it coming from some of our top universities, like the Dana Center at the University of Texas, or the Carnegie Foundation. So there’s a lot of research behind this and I think more and more of our public and private university partners are delving into this question of what is the right level of math depending on which major a student is pursuing.

Look. We get transfer students from community colleges at my university all the time. They do not and should not get a free pass on courses that our full four year students have to take — we don’t set standards arbitrarily. They need to take certain lower level courses because they’ll need those skills in upper level courses. If the community colleges set lower standards, it just means that they’ll have wasted two years as the four year colleges tell all those students entering in their third year that sorry, you have to go back and take all these courses your CC decided were unnecessary.

In a perfect world, students would learn algebra in high school; students who struggled or were not mature enough to engage in disciplined learning (which is a real problem) would attend a CC to get the prep they missed in high school, and the four year colleges would be able to assume a basic skill set on all entering students. If CCs are going to punt, what next? Do we just get unprepared students who enter college with 60 credits of unchallenging courses that do not prepare them all for the major curriculum?

And there are people writing about concepts of numeracy that may be different from what people have been teaching all this time. Do you have in mind a curriculum that would be more useful than intermediate algebra?

We are piloting different math pathways within our community colleges. We’re working with our university partners at CSU and the UC, trying to ensure that we can align these courses to best prepare our students to succeed in majors. And if you think about it, you think about the use of statistics not only for a social science major but for every U.S. citizen. This is a skill that we should have all of our students have with them because this affects them in their daily life.

I kind of agree with this — I would like to see more statistics-literacy in the general public. But this is a proposal to increase the amount of math students should know, and I don’t know how you teach statistics to students who can’t comprehend algebra. Again, there seems to be a relevance argument lurking here — if statistics awareness is good for every U.S. citizen, how can you suggest that art majors have no need of algebra? I want to see some minimal expectations for numeracy and literacy, and we don’t get there by trying to second-guess whether a student will ever find a particular fundamental skill “useful”. You just don’t know.

It’s another fermented fish sauce!

It’s amazing how often these ingredients come up in human cuisine. I have a couple of bottles of Asian fish sauces in my cupboard, it was a key element in Roman foods as garum, and what they all have in common is that they are made by taking large quantities of whole small fish and letting them ferment and liquefy into a spicy umami-rich sauce. Now I learn that Worcestershire sauce is also made by letting anchovies decay. I shouldn’t be surprised.

Although the story about how the original mixture that was made and tested is troubling. It tasted terrible, so they put the bottle away in the basement, and then years later, someone came along and decided to taste it again? When I find old leftovers I forgot in the refrigerator a few weeks before, I’m not tempted in the slightest. Maybe the problem is that I didn’t neglect them long enough, and I should let them a bit more tang, festering in the dark for a couple of years.

It’s Zebrafish Goldschläger!

Here’s a clever trick to thaw out frozen embryos: before you freeze them, you inject them with nanogold particles, and then you thaw them out by heating the scattered particles with a laser to prevent local formation of ice crystals.

(Before the cryogenics weirdos get all excited, this only works with transparent embryos, and requires the ability to microinject particles into all of the cells you want to protect.)

Orac’s on it

I’m just a cell and developmental biologist (whines faintly that cancer is a cell and developmental disease…), but Orac is a real, genuine, bona fide cancer doctor, and he agrees with me that Paul Davies’ atavism theory of cancer is full of crap. He leads you through Robert Weinberg’s authoritative papers on known causes of cancer to show that the idea that cancers are regressions to an ancestral state is nonsense.

I’ll add that I’ve taught a couple of classes on cancer biology and have gone over Weinberg’s The Biology of Cancer, and there’s a lot of developmental biology in there — every time he writes about transcription factors or signaling molecules, it’s all old familiar stuff from fish and fly development. When I see someone like Davies making analogies to evolution, though, I get a sense of deja vu. Once upon a time, people like Haeckel and other natural philosophers looked at how markers (in their case, morphological markers rather than molecules) changed during development and got all excited and claimed that they were recapitulating their evolutionary history. It took someone like Karl Ernst von Baer to come along and say, “You daft wankers, they’re repeating embryological patterns; this is what you see as you develop from the general form to the specific.”

It’s the same story here. Cancer is recycling genes and pathways that are retained because they’re developmentally significant, not because they’re a relic from greatgreatgreatgreat grandma, carefully preserved inside a secret nook in the genome in case we needed to re-adopt a single-celled lifestyle.

I’m not convinced that New Scientist gets it yet

Finally, they’ve come right out and said what we knew all along: most of our DNA has to be junk. I guess that’s progress, but they’re not doing a good job of explaining it.

After 20 years of biologists arguing that most of the human genome must have some kind of function, the study calculated that in fact the vast majority of our DNA has to be useless. It came to this conclusion by calculating that, because of the way evolution works, we’d each have to have a million children, and almost all of them would need to die, if most of our DNA had a purpose.

None of the biologists I know have been arguing for ubiquitous functionality, but I know they’re out there, so that’s kind of a strange opening: it’s as if the only way they know how to frame the story is as some kind of real conflict (see also every NS article about evolution vs. creationism). I don’t know where the 20 year timing comes from, either. JBS Haldane died 53 years ago, and he worked out this argument long before his death.

But worst of all, they just plop out this claim that we’d “each have to have a million children, and almost all of them would need to die, if most of our DNA had a purpose”. OK. Reading this as a naive layman, WHY? They present the conclusion with none of the evidence or logic behind it; there is no explanation here. The key part of the story that Dan Graur explained is that we know the mutation rate of human genes, and we can calculate the cost to the population of carrying around suboptimal genes, and we can estimate how many children you’d have to have to compensate for that load of mutations, and the load is going to depend on how many genes are present. It’s easy to put an upper bound on the number of genes we have, given our mutation rate and how many children an individual can have (hint: there’s no way you can have a million kids.)

The logic is clear and convincing, but you have to present it if you’re trying to communicate the science.

I feel like I’m grading an exam. Yes, you got the correct answer, but I’m not convinced that you understand how you arrived at it, and aren’t just regurgitating something you memorized.

Will no one think of the eels?

Tragic. A truck full of hagfish overturned in Oregon, and all anyone is wondering about is the car repair and the dry-cleaning bills. What about the poor wonderful dead beasties?

The best succinct summary of the wondrous hagfish is at Southern Fried Science.

Bees!

It’s sad that this has become a notable observation, but they’ve become so scarce that when I walked by the science building, which is surrounded by prairie grasses and flowers, I was surprised to see swarms of bumblebees everywhere. I had to take a picture.

I know it’s a bit blurry, but just think of it as like a photo of bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster — those are always out of focus, so I’m adding verisimilitude. Otherwise, when I’m dandling a grandchild on my knee 50 years from now, showing them this strange extinct insect on a strange extinct flower, they won’t believe me.