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: 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.