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Learning more about life than math…
At the risk of writing another critical post about math education, and potentially coming off like I think I know it all(grad school just teaches you how much you don’t know), I’m going to complain about mathematicians who think they have expertise to pass judgement on elementary curriculum. They have a bit more understanding of where the students will be going in college and can certainly decide if the books are mathematically correct, but do they know anything about how elementary kids think about math?
Have they read Les Steffe’s work on how students learn to count? It’s fascinating and amazing to learn how students schemes for multiplication and division are dependent on how well they can make groups of numbers and operate with them when they were counting. Something might make complete sense to a mathematician and no sense to a student who can’t yet understand multiplication as making…
Who is getting attention in math education right now? Khan Academy. Mathalicious. Dy/Dan. Flipped Classrooms. There are some reasons that each of these solutions to some of the issues math education faces are good things. 1. Khan-he has a BA in math from Harvard so he understand math better than most high school teachers. 2.…
read more »I went to a panel on Common Core Standards in DC this weekend led by Bill Schmidt at Michigan State University. He’s involved in Common Core assessment design and research on teacher’s implementation of Common Core. He was excited by the possibilities of collaboration around coherent standards but still the tone of the discussion he…
read more »Sometimes I curse my graduate professors for enabling me to see the issues in math education so clearly. It makes me feel a great weight of responsibility. Of course, most math educators believe that they see the issues clearly and their ideas are the solutions to the problem so I may just be deluded. But…
read more »I was just browsing through videos of teachers implementing the Common Core standards and found on one proportions that I thought was worth mentioning here. Some of the Calculus students I work with still struggle with proportions. When I say struggle, I don't mean that they don't know how to cross multiply, but that they…
read more »It’s amazing how right Vicki was all those years ago. I wish she was still around to share her good advice with the world. She wrote something on my post Exhaustion that I couldn’t have possibly understood until much later. This is what I’d written: I’m sitting in my classroom. There are many things to…
read more »When I was in college perfection meant getting A’s. It meant getting the jobs I applied for. It meant continually making progress at sports and getting my body to do what I wanted it to with not too much effort. In TFA I had to redefine perfection because my old definition was so hard to…
read more »The woman who took care of me when I was a baby and toddler died this week. My mom told me my nanny Vicki loved me as her own since she couldn’t have any children. Of course I can’t remember those years-all I can remember is the comments she left on my blog when I…
read more »Of course we should keep telling them, sure you can be a doctor, but isn’t it a lie when we know they can barely add fractions? Isn’t that what TFA does to us when it tells us we can be great when they know we don’t have mathematical knowledge for teaching?
read more »This post is about bike racing. But it’s not really. Cycling is my metaphor, my place where I ask the big questions about sacrifice and payoff. When do you sacrifice your life in pursuit of goals that require 100% commitment? When do you sacrifice your life by deciding that you couldn’t possibly reach those goals…
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