Archive for September 21st, 2012

Today’s story on FaceBook making plans to allow younger people to sign up for accounts is full of cross-opinion.

Think of other issues that the YCISL participants may relate to differently because of their age.

This entry is about a personal peeve that has flared me up numerous times in the past, and has done so once again this evening. The worst prime examples I have come across are just about every California Math textbook I have seen. Previously, it was the Scott Foresman series and today it is the Prentice Hall edition. With bad textbooks like these, how can anyone not explain the struggles that students have learning and teachers have teaching? Grades and scores don’t measure proficiency, they reflect the results of a sporting competition (ie, could be one result on a particular day, and another on the next). Here are the specifics…

In one Scott Foresman California Math textbook, there was a word problem involving calculating the number of tiles needed to tile a bath. Now just how many kids have tiled a bath? Then there are the problems involving building a picket fence and taking connecting buses to reach a destination. How hard is it to know these are hardly contextual across the scope of the students? How could the editors be so negligent in their responsibility to create a functional learning platform?

To today’s case with the Prentice Hall Practice book. There are several problems (section 2.2) about multi-step problem solving. The examples in the textbook show how to set up a single variable problem. Several of the word problems are actually two variable problems (and hence two equation problems). – just search for solutions to these problems on the Internet and you will find that all provide a multi-variable solution. And some of the word problems are also significantly out of audience context – Cell phone bill?! Vacation expenses?! – these are cases where adults are presenting adult problems for learning. This is SO WRONG.

So, one can expect a significant portion of students to not immerse themselves in the context (isn’t that the point of word problems?) and hence not to be able to solve the problem without help and hints. Even with help, these practice problems serve no useful purpose as applying the same logic to a similar problem mathematically is not possible because of un-relatable context. What a waste of time (oh yes, one of those Homework issues – where homework problems are extensions of classroom examples and not interwoven). But some may contend that this confusion and irrelevancy is intentional – aimed at creating scoring striations – you have to include some problems where a segment of students will almost certainly get wrong – that’s how we differentiate students and justify grade differences. These would be adults who are in the business of teaching, but not in the business of learning (teaching being the external phenomenon, and learning being an interfacial phenomenon). I got this cynical viewpoint from the time I read that the difficulty of SAT questions are periodically adjusted so that a  fairly smooth distribution of scores can be predicted and attained – to evenly distribute across percentiles. Great for assessment, loathsome for learning.

To relate to the YCISL format, our aim is to make our learning accessible to all participants. We attempt to accomplish this by using fun as a motivator and fun is mainly be derived by being within relatable context. With motivation and context, we can readily demonstrate empowerment and useful experience. To borrow from Daniel Pink’s “Drive,” in our program design we strive to set up exposure to Mastery, Autonomy and Purpose in YCISL. We enable mastery by not laying out traps intentionally to thin the herd; we set objectives then observe and answer questions to inculcate Autonomy and steer away from one-size-fits-all; and by encouraging user-generated youth context settings, we establish a Purpose that clarifies individual leadership ability and teamwork mindsets that present natural lifelong learning lessons and growth opportunities.