February 11, 2008

“Instead of learning rules and formulas, her son and his classmates were presented with problems and expected to invent their own ways of solving them.  “He was very frustrated,” McDaniel says.  “I’d say, ‘Look in the book, it will explain.’  He’d say, ‘Mom, there is not a book.” 

I took this quote from the excerpt on p.123 where Madalyn McDaniel was describing The Interactive Mathematics Program she signed her son up for.  She felt betrayed that the students were supposed to ‘think’ for themselves and devise solutions to mathematical equations on their own.  Isn’t that what we as educators are trying so hard to do now?  I think that society in general just has this mindset that teachers are there to give answers and that is how the students are supposed to learn because that is how they learned as a child.  I remember learning that way as well.  My teachers would sit at a stool in the front of the room, the desks all in neat little rows, teaching from the text about American History or Life Science.  There were correct and incorrect answers with no in between.  No hands on and no thinking for ourselves.  The questions at the end of each chapter were not based on comprehension but fact recall instead.  I can see how some people are comfortable with this type of learning, but isn’t that what Gatto called “Confusion” in his book Dumbing Us Down.  In our group discussion, I spoke about how when I read this in chapter one I agreed with Gatto in that at times we as teachers “teach confusion”.  It is impossible to make a connection with EVERYTHING that we teach.  Thus we teach some things in isolation where students never make that “real life” connection that they sometimes need to make sense of the material.  For example, I teach space in kindergarten as we talk about gravity and motion.  Can I ever make a “real life” connection with space?  Probably not.  I can show video, share non-fiction texts, but I can never bring in the real life connection that they might need.