Help a Teacher: Be a Mentor!
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| ROSENBAUM |
If you spent any time this year volunteering at a low-performing high school—thank you! As a math and engineering teacher in such a school, I know how disorienting the experience can be. Teenagers can be all gas pedal and no brake. That's especially true for my students, many of whom are from families in which neither parent finished high school.
As disoriented as you may feel in a classroom in which most students score below or far below basic levels on state standardized tests—and too many still count on their fingers—you might consider how disenfranchised the students themselves feel. Most see no benefit to earning more than D's. Few of these students know anyone who ever worked in the corporate or professional world. My 1,500-student school near San Francisco even made national news this year after the principal locked all of its restrooms, except one, in order to limit drug use.
To motivate more students, schools like mine have turned to an academy model that incorporates project-based learning. We now have academies to prepare students for careers in hospitality, biomedical and digital media as well as in architecture, construction, manufacturing and engineering (ACME).
In my school's ACME academy, I teach a civil engineering and architecture course created by the non-profit group Project Lead the Way Inc. My school sent me to a two-week PLTW-sponsored seminar last summer at San Diego State University, where I relearned some basic engineering statics and beam design, in addition to Autodesk Revit software for building information modeling.
I have frequently stayed late after work this year, prepping for the upcoming week's engineering lessons. One lesson on wastewater management, for example, involved calculations to find the permissible slope of a pipe from a building to a sewer main.
However, I also had to teach my senior students—most of whom were taking precalculus—about the "order of operations," or how an algebraic expression is entered into a calculator with the correct grouping symbols. Unfortunately, of my seniors who took the SAT College Board test this year, most scored in the 1,200s out of a possible 2,400. Many critics blame us teachers for such low test scores.
‘Learned Helplessness’
Although formally evaluated this year as a "very strong teacher," I still struggle to help my "repeaters"—those taking Algebra 1 again and again—to recognize patterns. That difficulty at least partly results from what one psychologist has termed "learned helplessness."
In general the education we are exposed to is of extremely low quality and the viewpoint illustrates this point with its example of the "order of operations" example. There is no logic...
I well remember when I got an HP 35 calculator and learned of the logical way of entering numbers and operators. I believed that the "new math" programs and classroom calculators would incorporate this logical way of manipulating numbers, symbols and operators but no it was not to be -why make learning easier.
Thus for example instead of writing a,b + X meaning to the sum of a and b multiply by c, we write c(a+b) so we skip over c add and b than jump back and multiply by c. There is no need to "corral" numbers, no parenthesis needed if operations are carried out in the order in which they are encountered .
I was surprised to find that century old chemistry books correctly called what we misname as the "Periodic Table" the "Periodic Law" or the"Periodic Relationship" and this when the graphical presentation of the elements took on the form of a table unlike today's presentation where the "Table" looks like a gerrymanded political district.
I don't blame the teachers for the low quality of what is being taught in general. I blame the larger society which is not investing in education and for a too reactionary way of holding on to the bad old stuff Metric anybody?)
Much more than mentoring we need fundamental reform in education.
My example should be corrected as a,b+ cX<br/><br/>Additional examples of how we are cruelly "educating" students as as illustrated by making arbitrary learning more difficult by confu...
Additional examples of how we are cruelly "educating" students as as illustrated by making arbitrary learning more difficult by confusing and illogical orderings is the "spelling rule some of us were exposed to "put an i before e... " instead of gradually making spelling more rational,efforts at spelling reform having failed so now there is the widespread phenomena of E mails with no spelling mistakes and no sense illustrating a waste of technology as well as a much less serious mistake being replaced by a much more serious mistake with the elimination of sense.
Recently many 8 th graders flipped the formula for water some 30% of them giving water as having twice as many oxygen atoms as hydrogen, while 50% gave the correct answer. No doubt most of them could parrot the correct formula
H2O and since the students had to memorize that the number giving the number of atoms goes after the symbol for atom and not before and since by convention but not by logic, when a single atom is represented, blind custom omits the unit, "1", instead of writing the formula as H2O1, where it is instantly apparent that there is just one atom of oxygen in water, and the number follows the symbol, the student is unnecessarily forced to remember the arbitrary rule as well as sowing confusion between the concept of unit independent of the characteristics of what is represented by that unit. Hence in algebra we write x for 1x.
When schools are forced to introduce the unit in arithmetic they do so in the worse possible manner with the "decimal point" instead of pointing to the unit digit, the digit to the left of the "decimal point".
