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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: 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.