A long time friend of mine, whom I met when I worked in NYC many years ago, recently sent me, and all of her other teacher friends the following email.

Many of you know that I have been in the green card process now for about six years. It has been a long, expensive, and quite honestly, a grueling and anxiety filled six years during which I have not been able to see my family. Well, my lawyers now tell me that the INS is very close to my "priority number", which means that I would be receiving my green card in either June or July. I write "would be receiving", because I have to have a job to port the green card, and I do not at the moment. I was forced to leave my current teaching job in San Francisco and I am now unemployed. If I do not have a teaching job by the time the INS gets to my priority number I will have to leave the United States.

I have been applying for jobs full time, day and night, and I have been applying literally all over the world (in case I have to leave the U.S.), and I have not heard back from anywhere. I am beginning to panic and I do not know what to do.

I have even applied for tutoring jobs, because my job description must be at least 50% the same as the job that got me into the green card process, which was my teaching job in New York, teaching high school English Language Arts.

The reason I am writing you all is that I am running out of ideas, and welcome new and fresh ones. Any ideas on what I should do next?

Suggestions? She is willing to work anywhere in the US.

I have to admit, I’m a huge fan of Google’s education products. In particular, I use Google maps all the time. First, as a map to find my way around, but also as an interactive mapping tool with students. Here’s an example from our 8th grade social studies unit.

View A Region in Turmoil in a larger map

The purpose of this project was to take news stories about the protests happening in the Middle East, and map them to a location in the world, so that the students could tie media, news, and other information to actual locations. This map has now been viewed over 6000 times and was recently included in the NY Times Learning blog.

Tom Barrett, has also curated a presentation on Google Maps in the classroom, which is worth sharing here. 

Here, the tool is important, since you can do things with it that you really can’t do with a traditional paper map. When we examine educational technologies with our students, the best tools to use are the ones which give us pedagogical affordances we wouldn’t otherwise have, and which allow for our students to collaborate easily, and share their work authentically.

"The greatest thing, you’ll ever learn, is just to love, and be loved in return." ~ eben ahbez

I want to challenge the notion that the best things we learn in schools are the academic and job preparation skills, but instead the "soft" skills, all of those skills we supposedly learned in kindergarten.

There are areas where our society is in turmoil because these lessons have not been learned by everyone. Love each other is a very important concept, and one where we, as a society, need a lot of work. From Tea Partiers who believe that we should not fund education for everyone, to Internet trolls who post cruel and disgusting things on a 13 year old’s work, we see a lot of evidence of a lack of love in the world. We see it in how we distribute our "wealth" amongst our citizens, and how we prioritize funding for different programs, both in the Western world, and for aid programs abroad. If we lived in a world where "love thy neighbour" was actually followed by everyone, would we even need aid programs for the "under-developed" world?

While I am grateful for all of the scientific knowledge that we have, it seems that our ability to solve scientific (requiring academic skills) is vastly superior to our ability to solve even the simplest of social problems. Perhaps it is time for our society to focus on solving the social problems for a while? Maybe one of the roles of school should be to develop "good" citizens?

In the video below (which was a flash mob performance from our school Stratford Hall, in support of glocal issues around water), the young man who starts the dance off also choreographed the dance, organized the student practices, helped organize the actual event itself (with a fair bit of teacher input) and then took a huge risk and started the dance himself. That’s leadership.

How do you think this video will look on his future resume?

Some highlights from the video above (thanks to @smartinez for sharing it):

• Hardly anyone who teaches actually applies the scientific method to their teaching.
• Most students are stuck on the Aristolian perspective of how physics works, learning real physics is incredibly difficult.
• Disagrees strongly with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
• Our old theories of learning haven’t been updated in 50 years. "We just accept them."
• Lecture is the default teaching method at universities.
• If you are going to do lecture, at least do it right. Increase the scale of the lecture, improve the skill of the lecturer. At least do it right.
• If you have respect for the lecturer, your attention goes up, and your retention of what they say increases.
• Hundreds of thousands of kids go through awful lectures each year.
• Teachers ask too many pseudorhetorical questions, don’t give students enough time to respond, and students only ask an average of 2 questions a year.
• Socrates often bullied his students into accepting his view of the world so the Socratic method is not all it is cracked up to be.
• Lecture comes from "to read" as in reading a sacred text. "Preaching instead of teaching."
• Feynman discovered that in Brazil students could learn from the book, but knew no physics. "Teaching through lectures is a hopeless task." ~ Feynman
• "Data is not the plural of anecdote." ~ Eric Mazur
• "Lecture is the transfer of the notes of the lecturer to the notebook of the student without passing through either." ~ Eric Mazur
• Give the students the notes in advance. Seating arrangement matters. Lead your lectures through questions. Use feedback from your class to determine which way to go ahead. If majority of students are incorrect, have them discuss the ideas with each other.
• "I’m just going to give it to you once, you have to get it right the first time." Lectures should be recorded since students will need multiple times to learn it.
• What’s the point in recording lectures that were bad in the first place? Make sure the lectures are good.
• Attendance at lectures is horrible.
• Why don’t we worry about students not attending lectures? Why aren’t we doing something about it?
• 25 minutes tops for attention span.

Here are ten fairly good points from his talk:

1. Why are lectures 1 hour long?
   We based the length of lectures on scheduling, rather than on the attention span of the learner. 1 hour is itself based on the Babylonian time-system, and is extremely arbitrary as a result.
    
2. Tyranny of time
   We have lots of ways of sharing our lectures whenever students want to access them, why do we force them to access them one time from a lecture hall?
    
3. Tyranny of location
   Why do force people to attend something in person when they can’t interact anyway? If students could be involved in the discussion, then having them physically present makes sense, but otherwise, there is no particular reason they should have to come to the lecture hall itself.
    
4. Psychological attention span
   People can’t focus for very long, particularly after a few days of lectures. We subject learners to class after class after class, when in fact their attention span cannot handle that much information to process.
    
5. Cognitive overload
   Lecture crams too much information into a small amount of time. Students are forced to handle more information than they can handle, which is absolutely debilitating for learning.
    
6. Episodic and semantic memory
   The mind doesn’t cope very well with the mixture of semantic (the processing of the content of the lecture) and episodic (from the processing of the visual) information you are receiving.
    
7. Learn by doing
   Nothing in lecture gives students opportunity to engage with the material themselves. People learn loads from actually applying their knowledge.
    
8. Spaced practice
   People need repeated practice over time, rather than one-off lectures. Lectures tend to give information and assume the learner will go and practice the information themselves, rather than allowing time for the learner to practice using the new knowledge immediately.
    
9. Not collaborative
   Lecture isn’t at all collaborative. It’s probably not intended to be, but collaboration is an extremely effective way to learn, given the feedback you receive from your peers.
    
10. Personality problems
    Teaching should not be the secondary job of a researcher. This is not a problem experienced in most K to 12 institutions, but is a serious problem at higher levels of education.

These are some pretty serious problems. What could you do to modify your practice? Should you lecture for an hour? I don’t think so. Instead, I recommend that you cut your lecture to only 10 minutes, on a small amount of material, and then give your students time to practice and engage with the material immediately.

I’ve created a simulation, which vastly over-simplifes classroom dynamics and information flow, in an attempt to look at some of the differences between a lecture style classroom and a cooperative learning classroom.

View this simulation here if you are having trouble seeing it above.

• In a standard strict-lecture style classroom, the teacher does all of the talking, and the students listen. Each student independently tries to come to grips with the material, and there is a chance that they don’t understand it in the same way the teacher indends them. This corresponds to a student transmission level of 0 above, and any teacher transmission level.
   
• In a mixed lecture and discussion setting, the teacher transmits most of the knowledge, but part of it is co-constructed with the kids in the form of a two way discussion about the material, wherein the students get clarification of what they don’t understand, and can ask questions. In this case, the students have a low transmission level, and the teacher transmission level is at any stage.
   
• In a cooperative classroom, the students have a high transmission level, as they are free to mix and mingle with each other. What is not yet represented above (but will be as I work on this simulation) and I admit this is a problem, is the issue of students occasionally introducing misconceptions to each other, rather than the version of the truth that the teacher is hoping they will find. This corresponds to relatively high transmission rates for students and the teacher both (note: 50% is fairly high, given that this is intended to include a variety of factors).
• The simulation also lets one choose a "flat" classroom where every student has the same ability, a normally distributed classroom, and either a skewed classroom toward a weaker or a stronger class. This choice affects both student transmission ability, and student "learning" ability.

Other than the obvious "you can’t simplify learning that much" comments, please give me some feedback on this system, and what other potential variables should be included. Please also play around with this simulation and explore the differences between the different classroom styles that you see.

In his commencement speech ( story shared by @monsoon0 ) to a Memphis graduating class, President Obama said:

Through education, you can also better yourselves in other ways. You learn how to learn – how to think critically and find solutions to unexpected challenges. I remember we used to ask our teachers, “When am I going to need algebra?” Well, you may not have to solve for x to get a good job or be a good parent. That’s true. But you will need to think through tough problems. You will need to think on your feet. So, math teachers, you can tell your students that the President says they need algebra.

I really don’t get how solving for x in 3x + 17 = 5x + 2 will "help students think through tough problems [in life]" and "think on their feet." I see algebra skills as useful, but not out of context of the types of problems they help us solve. Instead of students learning an algorithm for which almost none of our students will ever get to see a real application; what if we taught students areas of mathematics which had direct application in their lives, and which actually helped them think?

I think that we do need some people who learn algebra in a really deep way, but the type of algebra that people use in their day to day lives is fairly simple, and doesn’t take very long to teach, especially if students see the value in what they are learning. Too long people have learned math because someone said they should. 

Well Mr. President, I don’t think that telling my students that just because you think it is useful will mean they will want to learn it. I’m going to keep focusing on presenting the mathematics I teach in the context of the lives of my students instead, thank you.

Today I talked on the radio with Bill Good on CKNW, announced that George Abbott, British Columbia’s Minister of Education will chat with us on Twitter, and chatted with Alan Papert and a bunch of other amazing math educators about ways to make mathematics more engaging and rooted in the "real world."

Yeah, I agree, social media is useless. You don’t need to use it. #sarcasm