SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.