Word: math
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Critics award for his portrayal of the streetwise El Pachuco in Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit, he is being touted for an Oscar nomination for his riveting performance in Stand and Deliver. Based on a true story, the film depicts three years in the life of a Bolivian-born math teacher named Jaime Escalante, who in 1982 helped 18 of his students at East Los Angeles' gang-ridden Garfield High pass the Educational Testing Service's advanced placement test in calculus. After the ETS suggested that the students had cheated, Escalante protested. He was vindicated when all the students...
...Only 6% of 17-year-olds can handle algebra or multistep math problems...
...NAEP document notes that the average Japanese high schooler does better at math than the top 5% of Americans taking college-prep courses. It blasts U.S. math instruction as "dominated by paper-and-pencil drills on basic computation" and by rote explanations from teachers too dependent on set- piece texts. Innovative teaching, lab work and special projects "remain disappointingly rare...
Experts tend to agree on just who and what put them there. Mary Lindquist, professor of math education at Columbus College in Georgia and a co-author of the report, comes down hard on teaching methods. "We have taught kids to be little calculators, but they do not know why they do what they do," she says, adding, "They don't know what numbers mean." James Vasquez, superintendent of San Antonio's Edgewood school district, where 94% of the pupils are Hispanic, blames substandard preparation for teachers. He points out that Texas, like many other states, certifies elementary teachers...
...against the entire Soviet system," treated him abominably in a merciless nine-year effort to break him. He was confined for 403 days in freezing punishment cells, kept alive mostly on bread and warm water. He used various intellectual exercises to hold on. He solved in his head math puzzles he had read in a book by the American science writer Martin Gardner. Soaking up the water in his toilet with rags, then leaning deep into the bowl, he took lessons in Hebrew from a fellow prisoner stationed at his own bowl in an adjacent cell, who called...