Battleground Schools

-
One of the things that made me stop and think was about how education and school are so inherently political. It can't be helped because education plays a big role in a country's future. Parents are also part of this political debate about education because it is their children who are being taught. Of course most (if not all), parents want their child's education to be relevant, and who can blame them? This big change in the way of progressive movement can be a very hard pill to swallow for parents who have experienced the traditional conservative method of learning math.

Today I had a school visit and I went to see a grade 8 math class. The teacher was great and all the students clearly liked her. But her background was from a science and she told me that she would have much preferred to teach science, but she was offered a good contract to teach math. A reason why a lot of math teachers are being taught by non-math background teachers might be because of the curriculum. She told me that it was common for new teachers to teach the courses that the other senior teachers did not want to teach, such as math 8/9. Could this be because of how the curriculum is structured for the lower math grades?

The third thing that made me stop was the topic of the Bourbaki group. I've never heard of this group and it sounded super interesting, it reminded me of the hacker group Anonymous. Both these groups had their own agenda and were changing the world in their own way. I wonder if the pseudonym Nicholas Bourbaki has any significance behind it, or if it was just a random name they thought of?

Comments

  1. Susan GerofskyOctober 9, 2019 at 11:34 AM

    Yes, education is always political - certainly since Plato’s Republic, and probably earlier! I think Boubaki was supposed to sound vaguely Greek, for some reason...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reflection on Math Art Project

-
Image
When we were first deciding on which art piece to choose we had everyone pick 2 of their favourites and we would pick one that everyone agreed on. Our decision led us to the piece by Margaret Kepner. Her spiral contained 400+ numbers and I didn't know how to recreate it without drawing it by hand. Fortunately, Kyle was able to write a code in LaTeX that made life much easier. Original At first, I thought the concept(prime numbers) behind the art was a little too simple. But there was much more to understand, such as the different types of numbers (happy, triangular, lucky, etc.). Also the Ulam Spiral, which was the inspiration for her piece, was very interesting to learn about. It was more complex than I expected! Replica When we were to put our own spin on the spiral, we had to think of 3 different types of numbers we could use instead of prime/happy/triangular numbers. We did some research on different types of numbers and ended up with going with prime/lucky/perfect...
Read more

The Dishes Problem

-
"How many guests are there?" said the official. "I don't know.", said the cook, "but every 2 used a dish of rice, every 3 used a dish of broth, and every 4 used a dish of meat between them".  There were 65 dishes in all.  How many guests were there? The first thing I thought of was lowest common multiples(LCM). So the LCM between 2,3, and 4 is 12. That means if we had a group of 12 people, there would be a set number of dishes. So if we had 12 people, there would need to be 6 rice dishes, 4 broth, and 3 meat. 12 People => 6 Rice + 4 Broth + 3 Meat = 13 Dishes So for 12 people we have 13 dishes in total. Now we just think how many groups of 13 dishes are in 65 dishes, which is 5 groups. So we need to count 5 groups of 12 people, which is 60 people. I think it's interesting to pose these puzzles from different cultures because it's neat to see how different cultures utilize math. But despite these different cultures, the basis of math...
Read more

Instrumental vs. Relational

-
Richard Skemp describes instrumental understanding as 'rules without reason'. When he was giving such examples in math, it made me think of my time as a student in high school. I remember learning trigonometric identities and using them to solve problems, but I didn't understand what  they truly meant. I did not understand where  they came from and why   we used them, I only understood how  to apply them. This is the main difference between what Skemp describes as relational vs. instrumental understanding. Relational understanding answers why,  whereas instrumental only answers  how . Skemp tells us of these mathematical mis-matches, where the student's goal is to understand instrumentally, while being taught by a teacher wants them to understand relationally. Up until grade 10, I was one of these students who only had a instrumental understanding of mathematics. I had an amazing teacher who taught us in this relational way of understanding. This teacher ...
Read more