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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 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.