One of the ongoing divides (no pun intended) in math education is what to do with calculators. One school holds that it’s senseless, in this age of microelectronics, to have kids engage in the effort required to memorize math facts when a calculator can do arithmetic for them. The other school decries this simplistic reform on the grounds that kids deprived of math facts are unable to access higher level math because they’ll have “no number sense”. In the interest of fairness, I’ll confess to being a member of the latter school.
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The way that public education is funded is part of the structural problem. If you define education as a service and students (or more correctly student’s parents) as the customers, here are the numbers from U.S. census data (2006). There are 74M customers (households with kids <18) and 114M households paying for the service. So something like a third of the people paying for this service don’t use it (anymore or yet). Read more
When I was a very young man I was entrusted with the care and feeding of some very complex electronic equipment that was designed to tell navigators their precise position at sea. The equipment filled a 20-foot wall from floor to ceiling, consisting of a series of drawers that pulled out to reveal thousands of feet of wire, vacuum tubes and other circuitry all interconnected to perform its mysterious task. The goal was to transmit a precise signal, which navigators could compare to a similar signal from another station to plot their position. Read more
Paroxynein is an old word, ancient really. You won’t find it in most current dictionaries. It’s a poor cousin to paroxysm. Anyway, from what I’ve been able to discern it means ‘to stimulate’ or ‘to provoke’. Historically, when folks wanted to break up a monopoly they used the law as provocation. Laws were passed that either broke up the beast directly or created such a hostile environment for it that it just failed. In either solution people, through their governments, ‘provoked’ the monsters into submission. Read more
Sometimes when you want to design something new, it’s useful to really let your mind go and pretend you live in a perfect world. Often this will provide a sort of stress on ‘what is’, that can pull you towards what ‘could be’. In this post I’m going to go part way towards that perfect world.
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There are two school’s of thought regarding the use of technology in the classroom. At the risk of oversimplification, these are the School of Panacea and the School of Humbug. Surely there are schools in between those poles but, in the interests of vigorous debate, let’s stick with these extremes.
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State mandated standards, curriculum maps, textbooks, and pedagogy all interact to drive curriculum. For critics, curriculum is like a festering sore that periodically erupts into math wars. For the acolytes of various products sold into the public system, curriculum is like the holy grail. If your product lines up well with the other curriculum components, your product goes to the front of the line. Read more
Teaching may well be the most intense communication environment there is. No other endeavor has, at its core, such multi-faceted, non-stop communication. Teachers communicate with their body language, written words, spoken words, artifacts, commentary, pictures, and at times even touch, taste and smell (hugs and cookies). And, this is relentless. All day. Every day. You don’t get to say (like a lot of other jobs get to say), “You know, I’m not feeling great today about all those kids so I’m just going to stay in my office and work on that report for Acme Corporation.” Yet, for all this intensity, I’m not aware that communication is a subject in ed schools. Help me out if it is. I just don’t know.
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Imagine you’re the manager of the Willy Wonka chocolate factory. You’re responsible for inserting raw ingredients into various spots on your assembly line in order to create wonderful confections. Each ingredient, to be effectively transformed, must have a specific chemical composition. The irony to your job is that you can only pick ingredients based upon how long they’ve been in the box and where they come from. You actually don’t attempt to find out the composition until after the ingredient is cooked. Read more
Did you ever see a job ad for a technical position, say, a software engineer? They usually have a big laundry list of skillsets required for the job. I always get a chuckle out of these because they demonstrate a horrible understanding of the probabilities involved in finding such a person. When your list gets to ten or so items, the chance of finding a candidate that has it all is near zero. Still the practice persists.