Great article by Carl Clark…here are some of the highlights. While I have to admit to being terrible in mathematics, I was surprised that a mathematics educator has found that the Internet has made current teaching practices in his field obsolete. It should come as no surprise that mathematics teaching, like almost everything else, has great potential to be transformed by Internet access, yet math has always been so “black box”…unknowable without a spreadsheet to help.

When I started my administrative career as a coordinator for a $2.9 million dollar grant program to help 272 teachers across 4 districts and 8 private schools earn a Master’s degree in Curriculum & Instruction with Instructional Technology specialization, receiving a laptop and a CD-burner, I had to worry about a big budget. I started to put it into an Excel spreadsheet but then I noticed that one of my colleagues had created a database to manage the budget.

A database to manage a budget? It was an incredible idea at the time, and still is for some organizations, but it made managing the budget so much easier! I, of course, borrowed that Filemaker Pro database and customized it for my expansive budget then was able to provide up to date accounts, down to the last penny spending of funding that endeared me to the project director, my boss. It was a valuable lesson in how to manage budgets. Nothing in my school work as a child had prepared me for that experience.

I am convinced more and more that the essential experiences that shape us and the work we do are seldom “in school” and instead are outside of it. Is this too sweeping a generalization? Probably. But let me pick out some experiences from my past:

• Becoming a writer – learned by writing book reports in elementary school, 6-8th grade, while watching movie critic Bob Polunsky at home and imitating his “voice” while writing. It gave me a greater awareness for MY voice. But I suppose the real writing happened when I connected after-school to computer bulletin board services (BBS) to argue a variety of topics with others.
• Working with a spreadsheet – Since they didn’t have computers in my school until AFTER I left, I really learned to use spreadsheet programs (e.g. VisiCalc, AppleWorks) at home through experimentation. Same goes for databases. By the time “school” caught up to me in college, I had already explored spreadsheets, databases, and word processing (the most practical of all apps).
• Math computation – Not my favorite subject, mathematics was one I had to struggle with. I was one of those teens who wondered, aside from basic computation, what algebraic equations would do for me. Proportions and ratios was the most useful of what I learned, but I learned more from trying out various functions in a spreadsheet program or database…and that experience was more relevant to my learning than school work.
• Reading – Reading was definitely a chore in elementary school, as I learned two languages (Spanish and English). I failed second grade but my mother was a vigorous advocate for me and I was promoted to third grade on the condition that I spend a LOT of time in summer school…developmentally, as a premature child, I caught up that summer. But reading didn’t take off for me until 6th grade when I moved to the United States from Panama and found myself alone without friends, afraid to go outside because there were murders and kidnappings in the U.S. every day (that attitude took time to change). I ended up spending time at the local library, reading 10-20 books a week, which was amazing since I hadn’t been much of a reader in Panama.

As I reflect on these brief experiences, school doesn’t seem as important now as I thought it did. School provided some core experiences necessary for success, but doing MORE with the core, elaborating on the good stuff was critical. As a parent, I need to re-evaluate how I can enrich outside school experiences for my children, especially since in school experiences are enduring such turmoil and upheaval.

Should students be educated at home if the school experience is so limiting? School isn’t just about education…ah well. Time to go have breakfast. In the meantime, here are the points that jumped out from Carl’s article at ASCD Express:

• It’s Time for Change in Mathematics Education – ASCD Express 5.07
  • by Carl Clark
  • K–12 education in the United States is in the same position that buggy whip manufacturers were in at the beginning of the 20th century. That is, its days are numbered, and we can nearly count them on one hand. We can continue making metaphorical buggy whips, and become an oddity at first and then a nuisance later, or we can join the revolution and become productive again. Then, the revolution was industrial; today, it’s technological. In 1910, many wanted to resist the instant changes to society’s needs that the automobile brought, and in 2010, we face the same challenges of quickly adjusting to society’s ever-increasing dependence on technology.
  • The Texas Instrument Model 89 (TI-89) calculator eliminated the need to do any algebraic manipulation or consult tables of integration, but more than 10 years later, our curriculum is still mainly algebraic manipulation. The TI-89 calculator allows users to solve equations and arrive at exact answers (for example, v2 or p) instead of approximations, and will do any rote mathematics problem through graduate-level mathematics.
  • The proliferation of Internet sites and search engines with modern graphical interfaces made the TI-89 obsolete within 10 years of its 1998 release. Now the same programs available on the TI-89 calculator are available online. One simply researches a similar word problem, finds a model to use, and then locates the appropriate software application to arrive at a correct answer. This can all be done with logical, sequential thinking skills and not the least bit of knowledge of algebraic manipulation, but we continue to focus our curricula on skills that we no longer need.
  • for 90 percent of the population, we need to teach proper data mining and how to use that data to solve problems. We can’t quantify the skills we require from the next generation, and we can’t measure them by standardized tests, paper-and-pencil tests, or even “practicals”: we can only measure them by outcomes, which may be several years in the future.
  • Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. In order to save the world, the adults (that is, the education establishment) had to have children (albeit the very brightest) solve the problem, because the children had no knowledge of limits, whereas the educated adults were trapped “inside the box.”
  • We need to listen to students so that they can tell us what we can do to help them acquire the skills they will need to solve issues associated with climate change, diminishing renewable resources, overpopulation, infectious diseases, and problems we have yet to identify. Instead, we continue with the same instructional curricula, which was itself a half-century too late, that were developed for a post-agrarian society.
  • Albert Einstein said, “Most people see what is and never see what could be.” We need to completely discard our perception of K–12 education and start fresh. If we are to remain a highly educated society, we must design the new curricula that will prepare our children with the critical-thinking skills necessary to solve not only our current problems, but also the ones yet to come.