Year: 2013 (page 13 of 15)

I don’t think we are doing a good enough job of preparing high school students for the university experience. We need to do more!

• We should increase class sizes in high school up to 500, so that students get the experience of being in a large lecture hall. We may want to ease students into this experience, so we should gradually increase up to 500 students per class, perhaps at 20 students a year. Working backwards, this would mean we should start with kindergarten class sizes of 260 students.
   
• We should make high schools larger. No more measly 2,000-student high schools. They should have 20,000 to 40,000 students at least!
   
• We should hire mostly teachers who have little formal training in teaching and are mostly interested in pursuing their own research. The lowest level classes in the school should be taught by graduate students with little to no teaching experience.
   
• We should reduce summative assessment in our schools to two exams per semester and use little to no formative assessment. If the students do not understand, they need to study more.
   
• If our students are struggling, we should just keep putting them into remedial courses until they drop out. Why would we offer them any support? They will be on their own in university!
   
• We should charge students ever increasing amounts for tuition and force students to take out gigantic student loans in order to complete high school if they cannot afford to pay.
   
• We should drop all of the ‘soft’ courses from our schools. Students do not need to take home economics, planning 10, or shop class. We should also make physical education optional. After all, our job is to prepare students minds for academia, not prepare them for life.
   
• We need to teach students how to navigate depersonalized bureacracy. Therefore we should make high school as depersonalized and bureacratic as possible.
   
• We should encourage our high school students to drink, so that we can replicate the drinking cultures prevalent on many university campuses.

(Or maybe we should stop backwards designing from university and instead focus on building effective practice, whether or not it "prepares students for university"?)

"We seem to think that education is a thing—like a vaccine—that can be designed from afar and simply injected into our children." ~ Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr

This is a quote from the State of the State address by the Governor of California, and it is one of my new favourite quotes on education. Thanks to Scott Mcleod for spotting it.

It’s a pretty interesting analogy. I wonder how many parents, students, teachers, administrators, and education policy makers believe that education is like a vaccination against ignorance. I see education as something developed within a community, by a community, for their community.

The challenge I see here is when a community begins to trample on the rights of its community members, neglects its duty to ensure everyone has equal access to happiness and opportunity, and therefore creates an education system which does not serve everyone in their community. In this case, I think the state should be able to intercede, but otherwise (unless they are coordinating projects between communities where scale matters) the state should stay out of the way.

Some alternate definitions of common technology:

1. Email:

   A technology through which anyone in the world can add to your to-do list.
    

2. Smartphone:

   A device designed to interrupt your thinking on a semi-periodic but slightly random basis with a buzzing or ringing sound, making completing lengthy tasks requiring significant concentration nearly impossible. Users can even customize the sound with which they will be interrupted! Added bonus: discourages face-to-face conversations when in use.
    

3. E-book:

   A lot like a regular book except it requires an expensive electronic device to be viewed, can’t be shared, and can be potentially removed from your ownership by the book seller without warning. Oh, and if your electronic device for reading the e-book has a dead battery, you can’t read the e-book.
    

4. Television:

   An electronic baby sitter for your children that can potentially introduce your children to all sorts of unacceptable behaviours.
    

5. Computer:

   The most powerful computational device ever constructed by humans. Mostly used for finding and sharing pictures of LOL cats and music videos.
    

6. Air conditioner:

   This machine cools down people’s houses, which results in people spending less time on their front porch getting to know their neighbours.
    

7. Digital camera:

   Now everyone can take bad photos of places they have been, which they then share once on Facebook and then never look at again.

I’ve been thinking about what I think a truly great mathematics education website would look like. Dan and David have produced some awesome mock-ups of the future of mathematics textbooks, and I love their work, but I can think of more features I would add.

1. There should be space available for students to ask and answer questions, just like MathOverflow. It would probably need to be moderated, and perhaps seeded with people with some knowledge of mathematics willing to attempt to anwer questions, but I suspect many of the interactions would be peer to peer. The level of mathematics discussed on MathOverflow and the sometimes snarky responses to people who ask lower-level questions lead me to believe that this type of discussion space should be have a different community standard – one that expects children to be participating in it.
    
2. There should be a mixture of styles of problems from the directed-style problems with embedded, mediated peer to peer interactions that Dan and David are dreaming up  to open-ended problems and/or puzzles wherein students choose what tools they want to use to try and solve the problems.
    
3. There should be a library of exploration spaces available for students. I’m thinking Logo, origami, and other types of similar resources would be available here, along with discussion space to share any discoveries and/or projects students develop.
    
4. At least part of the site should be dedicated to sharing some of the wonder of mathematics. Perhaps this looks like a blog where some of the most fascinating and elegant mathematical ideas through-out history could be shared. The primary purpose of this section of the site would be to inspire, not to teach.
    
5. The site could include a toolkit of different mathematical techniques students could use to solve mathematics problems. Alternatively, solving specific problems on the site opens up new tools in the toolkit. Students could also have a toolkit of skills they have developed themselves, and bookmarked to remember for later, much like programmers do as they build their own code libraries.

I can imagine that trying to introduce this all at once might be overwhelming or too challenging, so these features would have to be introduced over-time, but the ability for students to connect with each other to have discussions about mathematics would have to be front and centre from the very beginning.

What other features would you include?