The two edublogs I commented on were
Dy/Dan by Dan Meyer who conveniently talked about the algebra op-ed article from the NYT that we discussed in Rachel's EDUC 606 class and Speaking of History by Eric Langhorst who laid out his goals for the upcoming school year. If any of my loyal, awesome, [insert more brown-nosing expressions here] and
Person of the Year worthy readers have the time and/or the desire to read more blogs I suggest giving both a look over (if you are one such person I envy you as I find myself with less than no free time this week).
Dan is a math teacher and unsurprisingly he was not pleased with how the NYT op-ed decided that algebra was not a worthwhile subject. He did pose an interesting question though "How should we define Algebra in 2012 and how should we teach it?" Sadly, I do not quite know how to answer this question, but it is definitely one worth asking. One of the commenters spoke of computer programming and science and how they relate to equation manipulation, which got me thinking about how much computer-related activities should be implemented in math classrooms. It also made me wonder if we schools should begin requiring students to take a technology or computer focused class in high school. After all computers have invaded most aspects of our lives these days and are probably more applicable than most subject material so should we not try and promote an increase in student competency and mastery in students' computer skills if they will be using them nearly everyday of their lives? I know personally Word, PowerPoint and the limited few other programs I was taught in high school were all only briefly grazed over so that students could do enough to submit an assignment or make a presentation (excluding the Electronic Arts I class I took, by choice, in high school to fulfill my art requirement as I doubt that is an experience common to most students).
Eric's piece was interesting to me because one of his goals for the year is to make his class paperless or close thereto. With 170 students this is not a surprising goal as that is a ton of work to be carrying around regularly but whether access to the technology needed to produce an effective paperless classroom is something we can expect from students I am not quite sure. Though he works in the Liberty School District which looked like a pretty affluent community if I found the right one on Google. What intrigued me most was how would one go about implementing this. It seems like it might make certain types of assignments more difficult to grade. Also how would testing take place in this environment? Would you have to go to a computer lab every time? Is that possible? Any thoughts (easy comment possibility for EDUC 504 students aka all my readers ;) )?
Now to the real reason you read my blog (aside from it be required and all)...
Smorgasbord Fun Fact: Based on current population statistics you are more likely to become President of the United States of America if you were born in Vermont than any other state with a 1 in 323,215 chance compared to 1 in 10 million for
any US citizen. Our two Presidents were
Chester A. Arthur (1881) of Fairfield and
Calvin Coolidge of Plymouth.
Title answer: It was the chicken's day off!
In an ideal world, I'd have a paperless classrooom. But I don't think that's achievable yet with high school kids (and frankly as an adult, I still have issues with it at times. I want to hand in a copy of a paper to someone still!). There's still a percentage of kids without email addresses, so that would make emailing or submitting papers more then a little difficult. There's also the fact that for me, commenting on a paper using the edit function on Word isn't hard or time consuming. It's hard and time consuming to ensure that kids actually read the comments and suggestions I make.
ReplyDeleteAs for the NYT op/ed piece about whether we still need algebra in 2012, I just rolled my eyes at that. I see the point the author was trying to make--seriously, I do--but the idea of not teaching students the basic of higher level math because "you're not going to use it" is complete and utter crap. You use algebra everyday. In the 10 years since I've been out of high school (insert me sighing over how old I am right here), I've yet to really find an occasion where I've needed to use calculus to solve an everyday daily life problem. But algebra and geometry? Almost everyday. You just don't realize you're doing it, but you are and you're doing it often. Even if we lived in a world where we didn't, it's still important to have that ability to think on a higher level and do complex problem solving just to survive in the real world.