Author: David Wees (page 55 of 97)

Your instructor brings you a board. Before you can use the board and play with it yourself, she tells you how to properly line it up on your table. Next, you practice this over and over again with everyone in your class practicing the same number of times regardless of when they master the skill. When you line it up in creative or fun ways, you get scolded, and sometimes even have your board taken away from you. You look around the room and notice that everyone’s boards all look the same.

Finally, after you are considered to have mastered the skill of lining a board up, your instructor takes your board away and gives you a nail. She shows you for 10 minutes all of the various ways you can line up a nail, but never shows you how this relates to the board, or any other possible tools. You want a chance to practice lining up the nail properly, but your instructor says that time is up, and assigns it for homework, and takes away the nail. "You’ll have to find your own nail to do this for homework," she says. You wonder if that is fair for the students who don’t have nails at home.

The next day, your instructor checks to see that all of you have practiced lining up the nail. She then gives you a chance to practice with the nail for a few minutes, before she again takes away the nail and gives you a hammer. You spend some time learning about the history of the hammer, and finally you learn some of the possible uses of the hammer. You ask if you can play with the hammer, but your teacher says, "That’s much too dangerous for you now, you’ll learn more about hammers when you are older, and then you can use them."

You never get a chance to see how the board, the nail, and the hammer relate to each other before the unit finishes. You don’t really understand how to use a board, and you’ve forgotten how a nail works by the time the test is given and so you fail the final assessment. You want a chance to practice some more with these skills your teacher says are "vitally important" but she moves onto another unit.

"Okay class, in our next unit we are going to learn about sanding wood. Everyone take out their boards and practice lining them up again…"

At no point in your learning of carpentry do you ever find out why people might want to use carpentry, how beautiful some works of carpentry look, or how to put it all together and make your own buildings.

You might think that this would be a ridiculous way to teach, but this is exactly how we teach mathematics today. Each unit is separated from one another and the connections between the units, and often the lessons, are virtually never taught. Students almost never have the opportunity to play with mathematics, and never get a chance to use some mathematics once they have mastered it. If we even connect mathematics to the real world, we do it in arbitrary and often nonsensical ways. We teach mathematics as a bunch of discrete tools and not as a holistic study of patterns and our world. In fact, we don’t even really have a consensus as to what mathematics actually is!

It’s no wonder kids usually hate mathematics. They say, "Math makes no sense," and they are right.

This is a fabulous video of Kurt Vonnegutt talking about the shapes of stories. Notice the different types of graphs he produces? This is a fairly mathematical procedure, and I love both the idea of embedding everyday variables on the axis, and of representing the rise and fall of the fortunes of the protagonist in the graph. I remember my 11th grade English teacher sharing with us the common graphs of Shakespeare’s trajedy and comedies in an effort to help us understand the two distinct genres.

Wouldn’t this be an interesting activity to do with your students?

About 6 and a half years ago, I started a blog. The purpose of the blog was to provide updates for my family back home while my (new) wife and I were living abroad in London, England. At the time, Facebook was still a closed site for college students, and Myspace was too messy to share with my parents. I needed an electronic space to share pictures, thoughts, and stories from our lives.

As I was jumping into learning programming, and educational technology, I decided to switch from the free hosting offered by Blogspot to my own server. I first installed Movable Type, then WordPress, and finally settled on Drupal for my blog, learning each of the technologies as I transfered between them. My first choice of domains, "UnitOrganizer.com" was intended to be a place for teachers to share their ideas, in the form of unit plans. That never actually came together, and a couple of years later I switched to my own name for my domain.

During the past few years I’ve switched from blogging about my personal life, to blogging about my programming projects, to blogging as a form of eportfolio, to blogging about my interests in education almost exclusively. I’ve had more opportunities come to me than I can count through my blog including having the opportunity to write a textbook, be published in 3 different magazines, have a short series of articles in a newspaper, and to present at conferences all over the world.

I read through some of my earliest writing, and I can see a big difference between both the strength of my writing and the quality of the ideas behind the writing. My earliest writing on education is fairly naive sounding to me today. I wonder what I will think of my writing in 10 years.

To those of you considering a blog, I say go ahead and do it. The opportunity for reflection and personal growth have been tremendous.

I got paid the highest compliment one can get from a fellow teacher after my presentation at ISTE Unplugged.

"I know I’ll be changing some of my teaching decisions." Tom Grant

After reading many posts on standards based grading, it seems clear to me that I too need to change my assessment practices. I need to ensure that I have mastery from my students, rather than a superficial level of understanding. I also need to do more to engage my students with more problems which are relevant to their lives.

I need to rethink my practices. Hopefully, that will always be true. Keeping my teaching practices completely static in a changing world seems like a pretty foolish thing to do.

Here is a list of education jargon I don’t get for various reasons.

• Learning management system

  Learning management systems don’t manage learning. They manage resources which teachers and students use to facilitate learning experiences. Why use the phrase learning management anyway? Who should be managing the learning? Shouldn’t we hope that students should eventually be managing their own learning? Will using a system help them become better at self-organization and eventually directing their own learning?
   

• Mobile learning

  This implies that there is another type of learning which is equally satisfactory, but different, which we should call stationary learning. While I like the idea of moving learning activities from inside the classroom to outside of the classroom and I recognize the role mobile devices have, I’m not sure I appreciate the distinction this phrase offers.
   

• Professional development

  When we call it professional development, we imply first that it is a special kind of learning associated with our occupation, and that the control of the learning may not be in our control. This reminds me of those "terrific" algebra tile sessions I was "asked" to attend in NYC. I’m much more fond of the phrase professional learning instead. We must allow teachers more ownership over the professional learning they do, and that might mean ending professional development and finding a new paradigm. 
   

• Transform learning

  As I understand the process of learning, it is a building and pruning of neural pathways in our brain. As we learn more about something, we prune unnecessary connections, and we grow connections in our brain. Nothing we are doing now is changing this process, except possibly to accelerate it, or to occasionally change the part of the brain in which the learning is being manifest. In any case, we aren’t transforming learning, we are transforming the types of learning opportunities kids experience.
   

• Attention deficit disorder

  This is much too widely diagnosed in my opinion. If I had been tested as a child, I surely would have been diagnosed with ADHD. Unfortunately, the problem was that most of the time I was bored. The problem is that any child who struggles to pay attention to the teacher in a classroom runs the risk of being improperly diagnosed by the teacher, who then may improperly suggest counselling and medication. There are children who legitimately struggle with focus because of their brain chemistry, but most of them are just bored. I heard somewhere that 15 minutes a day in nature "cures" most cases of ADHD.
   

• <fill in the blank> literacy

  Literacies change over time as society evolves. Every time a new time of medium is introduced, the definition of what it means to be literate changes. The fact that our literacies now include digital media just means that the new definition of literacy itself now includes all of the new components of our interactive digital world. If we say that we want our children to be "digitally literate" then are we naturally demoting the other, still critically important types of literacy? If a school doesn’t teach digital literacy, then they aren’t really going to produce literate students. I’d much rather be clearer about how literacy is changing then let schools pick and choose which modes of literacy they are going to teach.
   

• 21st century learning

  First, this phrase is inherently denegrating to the types of learning opportunities which have been around for ages. It implies that the type of learning not characterized by the affordances of the 21st century (ie. computers) is out-dated. There is tremendous value in many non-21st century learning opportunities, like discussions for example, which have been around for eons. It also fails to recognize that much of what is described as 21st century learning is in fact in use from the 20th century by many excellent educators. Further, it lumps together two kinds of pedagogical practice, that of student centred learning, and technology based learning, which allows educators to reject both of these types of learning simultaneously.

What are some of your least favourite educational phrases?