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A school board in South Carolina has launched a pilot program to get rid of snow days and instead have students work from home when the weather turns treacherous. Beyond depriving schoolkids of the joys of weather-enforced truancy, the plan will exacerbate the region's digital divide for student who don't have internet access at home.
Anderson County School District Five will be the first region to participate in the pilot program this upcoming school year. In the past, Anderson County had makeup days tacked on to the end of the school year in lieu of days missed due to bad weather, but most kids ended up just skipping them, according to a local news report.
Students from grades 3 through 12 in the school board are already given Chromebooks to use at home, so in the event of a snow day or other inclement weather that causes a shutdown, kids will be expected to log on from home, communicate with teachers, and complete assignments.
Source: MotherBoard
(Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday August 04 2018, @08:46PM (15 children)
Not with competent teachers, no. Phillips Exeter for example dropped their textbooks... And all the busy work problems. And the artificial divisions in high school math between subject areas.
All the students get a teacher-produced set of around 1000 problems per year. Sparse explanations to be added to when necessary by teachers. Very little repetitive symbolic manipulation. Just a handful of varied problems each night for discussion the next day. Few repetitive algorithms. Lots of thinking.
Materials available free here [exeter.edu].
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @09:17PM (2 children)
Why did the man cross the road?
His screams of agony did nothing. How had this happened? Little Jimmy had just been walking to school when a certain figure came from across the road. Now, that figure was brutally raping and beating the boy, all the while chortling at his suffering. Yes, the word "mercy" was nowhere to be found in this monster's vocabulary.
Snap! Snap! Snap! Snap! Snap! One after another, Jimmy's bones snapped. They snapped even when he screamed. They snapped even when he bled. And they continued to break even when he himself was broken. The large figure sighed in satisfaction and returned to the other side of the road, to wait, to watch, and to smile.
I ask again: Why did the man - that obese, hideous, monstrous, and violent man - cross the road...?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @08:53AM
You're just not getting it, are you. The original guy had this down to an artform. You are a copycat. Not a very good one either. This sucked. Get up your game if you're going to try this.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @09:24PM
He was stapled to the fucking chicken.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @09:53PM (6 children)
I like the principle behind this, but the repetitive symbolic manipulation and stuff like it should not be so easily discounted. Math takes practice, just like a foreign language or learning music. You can spend a lot of time thinking and discussing noun declinations and sentence structure, but to really learn it you need to practice it. Same with being tortured by playing your scales.
I am a big proponent of keeping calculators and computers out of the hands of students for as long as practical for pretty much the same reasons. In the same manner, doing the calculations in one's head or by hand allows one to develop an intuitive understanding of numbers that is lost if one has only used a calculator as a crutch. There are trivial examples, such as the high school student who can't make simple change (a few days ago at a food truck my bill was $10.91 and I gave the young lady $11.01 to avoid getting back any pennies, and she had to confirm on her phone what my change was supposed to be), but I have this fear that as time goes on, we get less and less capable engineers and physical scientists who have lost physical and mathematical intuition because they've become overly-dependent upon their modeling and simulation code, for instance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @10:16PM (4 children)
What kind of practice? Mindlessly memorizing patterns and routines does not cause one to think like a mathematician (i.e. understand how and why everything works). It just helps with memorization. People like to pretend that rote memorization is under some huge threat, but our current school system is a rote memorizer's wet dream.
Also, how much practice? Some individuals learn faster than others, while others learn slower. We need to get rid of this idea that everyone needs to do 50 'Find the missing side of the triangle.' problems. One-size-fits-all approaches are horrendous, even if they are cheap and easy.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Saturday August 04 2018, @11:12PM (2 children)
The kind described by the link in this post. [soylentnews.org]
Mindlessly memorising scales doesn't make a musician - but some of it has to be done at some stage.
As much practice as needed and no more.
Agreed. Now we just need to fund all levels of education appropriately. I don't have any experience in the US education system, but it seems we have some problems in common.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @12:10AM (1 child)
Some memorization is necessary, so we agree on that. If you did not memorize anything, you'd have nothing to work with. Currently, however, there is so much focus on memorization that it impedes people's ability to understand the material.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Sunday August 05 2018, @04:19AM
On this side of the puddle one of the problems we have is the lack of specialised teachers, so that there are times that the nearest warm body in the staff room takes maths classes - in which case the teacher also doesn't really understand the material.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @05:16AM
Rote memorization is indeed of basically no value except in a few cases where you need to bootstrap something as declarative knowledge or where it just is what it is.
However, an ideal course would have portions of a module that are made of just learning the pattern as well as sections where you're playing with the patterns to see how they relate to each other and what they're properties are and how they work.
Which is the basic path that everybody that gets good at math goes through. They'll learn new methods and they'll play with the methods. Over time they'll have more intuition about what to try and they'll have the analytical skills necessary to identify when a technique is likely to fail as well as why it didn't work.
There's a huge amount of memorization that goes into becoming good at math, but definitely not rote, and it takes a great deal of time to properly develop one's skills. I've been doing math professionally for years and there's still new stuff I learn and put together to deal with things that I hadn't previously done and I'm not even dealing with higher levels of math or necessarily different math problems.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday August 05 2018, @01:11AM
Out of curiosity, did you bother to look at the materials I linked to, or just criticized them without bothering to see how they work?
Because there is repetition. In fact, there is in some ways more repetition than in a typical math curriculum -- it's just that you circle back to topics periodically over several years rather than "Today we will learn a simplified algorithm to solve this symbolic kind of equation. Now go home and do 1-49 odd (which are all basically the same sort of problem)." And then you see that kind of equation on the next test, and then you may not see it again for three years.
Instead, you will get the algorithms reinforced over time, much more effectively (like language learning) with gapped repetitions. And you'll use those symbolic methods for actual application problems, rather than primarily abstract symbolic manipulation.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by requerdanos on Sunday August 05 2018, @12:24AM (4 children)
There are a few stages of learning something.
There's "I don't understand it", followed by "I understand the concept but don't see how to do it", then "I understand it when you show me an example" to "I am shaky at it but can get through some of the simpler examples" to "I can do it, but slowly" to "I have it mastered."
The two keys to this process are instruction and practice. A textbook isn't necessarily involved, but may help. But practice *is* involved, and doing a certain number of the problems on a freshly learned topic provides the practice that allows one to cycle through the stages of learning to the "mastered it" stage.
A teacher should know his students and assign as few or as many problems as he believes will accomplish this; their simply appearing in a textbook does not mean they are automatically assigned as homework if sanity is involved in the process anywhere.
TL;DR assigned problems are not "busy-work" unless the assignment is excessive.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday August 05 2018, @01:30AM (1 child)
The alternative perspective is that math is a sort of language with various solution strategies taking the place of communication strategies. You learn sentence forms and grammatical forms and vocabulary through dynamic use over time. That's the most effective way to learn a language, anyway.
So what if you did that to math? Your presuppositions about how math is SUPPOSED to work in practical problems is great -- but in practice what tends to happen is a teacher assigns a bunch of similar problems one night. The student who gets it right away is probably not learning a lot after a few of them. The student who doesn't get it likely struggles and gets most of them wrong, so they don't get the benefit of the supposed practice either. Then, many teachers tend to move onto the next topic, leaving some frustrated and behind and others who got it right away doing unnecessary busy work.
Yes, this is poor teaching (and could be handled better with traditional books), but it happens quite often.
The approach I linked to (which, I agree, is not the only way to structure a good curriculum) instead circles back regularly to problems that will require reinforcement, but with longer gaps between practice. Just like in language learning, encountering a vocabulary word once or twice per week for several weeks is likely a lot better for retention and learning than getting that word 25 times in an assignment one night and then never seeing it again for a year or more.
You run into a problem doing this in a traditional math curriculum though, because it tends to be pretty linear. You may not practice the same exact skills again next week, but if you didn't understand the principles, you may not be able to comprehend the new material at all. Exeter solved that problem partly by intermingling various separate subjects -- algebra, geometry, probability/stats, and various types of problems -- so you can cycle around in these various areas and revisit without running into the linearity problem as much.
It's certainly not perfect and takes the right sort of teacher. But it is a valid approach that I think spends more time in deeper applications and understanding rather than mindlessly repeating algorithms and abstractions inefficiently.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @05:22AM
One of the big aha moments I had in helping students learn was when I started to apply the lessons I'd learned about teaching English as a foreign language to working with math. Breaking everything down into individual steps with precisely one operation done per step. As controversial as Krashen is, he does have a point about comprehensible input even if it's difficult to prove or verify experimentally. But, if you do break everything down into simple bite sized chunks the brain will absorb a lot of it as well as possibly give the student the ability to improvise and efficiently compare different methods of doing things.
In my experience, a lot of the problems with math education, at least in the US, is that while there are better methods available for teaching, there isn't adequate focus on what the research says and there isn't sufficient focus on other methods of interacting with the subject. There aren't enough times for the students to explain what's going on and why. There's not enough opportunity for the students to play around with the math patterns that are being taught to get to know them. And students often aren't provided with adequate guidance in determining what to just memorize and what they really need to understand.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday August 05 2018, @01:37AM (1 child)
I should also note that this works at Exeter because math classes have ~10-15 students and ALL are expected to participate in constant discussion, presenting their work to the rest of the class, etc. So there's nowhere to hide. If you don't get something, your deficits and misunderstandings will be rapidly sorted out in class discussion.
With larger classes or without good teachers as discussion facilitators, this approach may not work as well.
(Score: 3, Touché) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Sunday August 05 2018, @04:27AM
You DO understand that several politicians' puppies died when you wrote that... that... heresy.
/sarcasm for the literal minded
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.