I talk with my cousin and favorite government school teacher, Trisha, regularly on the subject of pedagogy and traditional school politics. There is always drama and it is always interesting. Her current school leadership makes her situation way more interesting than it should be. It sounds like the school board is on top of it and is in the process of fixing some pretty serious stuff, but it takes way longer than it should and the kids and classroom teachers are the ones who suffer. Much emotional and bureaucratic effort is unnecessarily wasted on this drama that takes time from the teaching of the kids.
At any rate, Trisha got a highly deserved teaching award the other day (see the cool picture of the apple trophy). Her students regularly outperform their peers on standardized tests. Part of this is a result of Trisha’s hard work to find appropriate methods for each particular student and situation. She really knows how to teach the kids. Her biggest challenge in doing her job is the demands placed on her by government regulation, school management and by disruptive students in the classroom. It is interesting that the school board appears to be very much on her side, but through no fault of their own–again because of government restrictions–have to move at a glacial pace to fix bad stuff.
This was all in my mind when I read about a letter to the editor written by a parent in Seattle that was linked on the Sonlight blog. The author of the letter really nailed it with something that, in our experience, is very true. Schools have successfully taught math in some parts of the world for many years. The idea is to find the methods that work so well in these places and use them. That is precisely what we tried to do in our homeschool with some level of success, especially in Math. Here is the well stated salient point from the letter:
Math has been taught to children at least since ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt, and those kids grew up to use their mathematical skills to build the Parthenon, aqueducts and pyramids, which are still standing. The math taught in K-12 hasn’t really changed much since Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton invented calculus in the 1600s, so one would think that educators have had enough time to figure out how to teach it.
How about if educators stop experimenting with our kids, adopt whatever approach the Finnish or Singapore schools use, and get on with it?
Betty Blonde #317 – 10/02/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
Glad you enjoyed that [smile]. With all the talk these days about “big data” and the push to split test websites and whatnot, it’s sad that those flipping switches in education aren’t taking a few minutes here and there to see how their efforts are impacting students. If they did, I’d hope they’d go back to the “control” methods from 40ish years ago since the current methods are failing to help students find success. A friend shared John Oliver’s Standardized Testing bit which shows that all this testing has failed in its original objective… and offers one more example of how government and business getting into bed together simply isn’t a good thing. Just some of the recent stuff I’ve found interesting…
~Luke
Thanks for checking in again on this. Two things.
1. I love John Oliver. This will definitely be the subject of a blog post soon!
2. Are you blogging or writing someplace else? It seems like you have slowed your postings at Sonlight Blog.
Natalie
Math is not my best subject. And I mostly blame the way I was taught in elementary school. We used a program called Everyday Mathematics. http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywillingham/2013/12/10/is-everyday-math-the-worst-math-program-ever/
And a similar also criticized program “connected mathematics” in middle school. But the thing is I liked Math I even joined “math counts” in middle school.
If I were taught math and science differently in the younger grades, I might be on my way to a STEM degree right now. But math builds on what you know, so you can’t just jump into 300 or 400 level math classes if you weren’t taught the basics the correct way when you were younger.
Natalie — I thought of this post from a little over a year ago when you said “If I were taught math and science differently in the younger grades, I might be on my way to a STEM degree right now.” I think that is exactly right. It sounds like you are on a great path that is leading to good stuff now anyway, so you might not ever need to do more math. Still, it is obvious you are way smart enough to handle this and you can go back and pick more of it up if you ever decide you want or need to do that.
This is another great comment and I am definitely going to write about this in a later post.
Awww thanks Ken! Reading the above comments having a crappy curriculum is a curse! I am glad I work in a district where they now have that correct. Now it is on the Teachers to provide quality instruction.
I’ve been busy elsewhere in the company… and I haven’t read much recently that has inspired me to offer my own thoughts. I hope to get back into blogging regularly, but we’ll see.
~Luke