Since we use Aleks as well as Montessori materials to strengthen our students' knowledge of fundamentals, we are able to spend our Math lessons in school focusing on the really important and creative aspects of math.
Quote from our Math teacher:
What must be really boring to a lot of kids is that in math, unlike most other subjects, it pretty much never happens that a student asks a question and the teacher says "we don't really know the answer to that yet," or "different people have different opinions about that; we're not sure who's right." Any science class, by comparison, is full of unanswered questions, to say nothing of English and social studies. What's the fun of getting into a subject where everyone's already figured everything out? But if kids saw that there are still these very basic questions that no one's answered yet, that's the sort of thing that could be really make people want to be mathematicians.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Letting our kids be wrong - Wile E. Coyote
It is not how often we are right, but how frequently we dare to challenge ourselves and perhaps be wrong that makes it possible to allow true creativity to remain alive and well in our classrooms.
Kathryn Schulz shares an outstanding and really funny analogy in a TED talk about the power of being wrong. She makes the fine but essential distinction between 'being wrong' and 'realizing you are wrong'. To illustrate this difference she takes her audience back to a familiar scene from the 'Road Runner' cartoons. Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner off a cliff, close to catching him, runs quite securely through the air until he looks down and realizes the trouble he's gotten himself into.
Our young students are given the opportunity to be wrong without punishment, so that they are able to boldly explore the unfamiliar and arrive to actual discovery. Wile E. Coyote unfortunately was mentally unable to reflect on his failed experiments, so he was only able to accomplish half of what we can... on the positive side though, even his precipitous failures were unable to stop him from pursuing his delicious goal!
Kathryn Schulz shares an outstanding and really funny analogy in a TED talk about the power of being wrong. She makes the fine but essential distinction between 'being wrong' and 'realizing you are wrong'. To illustrate this difference she takes her audience back to a familiar scene from the 'Road Runner' cartoons. Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner off a cliff, close to catching him, runs quite securely through the air until he looks down and realizes the trouble he's gotten himself into.
Our young students are given the opportunity to be wrong without punishment, so that they are able to boldly explore the unfamiliar and arrive to actual discovery. Wile E. Coyote unfortunately was mentally unable to reflect on his failed experiments, so he was only able to accomplish half of what we can... on the positive side though, even his precipitous failures were unable to stop him from pursuing his delicious goal!
Monday, May 2, 2011
Creativity Unleashed - Aleks
As we allow our students the independence and environment required to follow whatever passion they imagine, we realize that strong fundamentals make every intellectual enterprise more enjoyable and easy to accomplish. Technological resources have been incredible allies, helping us keep track of our students' progress through math content.
One specific ally has been Aleks, (Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces) a web-based math tool that records progress, teaches through online lessons, and provides comprehensive data on where our students are in the math curriculum. It is an incredible tool that schools, parents and tutors should check out for their students.
By ensuring our students are constantly progressing in their math facts and strengthening their fundamentals, Aleks allows us to use our instruction time to do what we're ultimately interested in doing with our math program. Enjoying, exploring, and allowing our students to discover their own world of mathematics, their own solutions to the questions that arise from observing numbers, problems and patterns in the world.
One specific ally has been Aleks, (Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces) a web-based math tool that records progress, teaches through online lessons, and provides comprehensive data on where our students are in the math curriculum. It is an incredible tool that schools, parents and tutors should check out for their students.
By ensuring our students are constantly progressing in their math facts and strengthening their fundamentals, Aleks allows us to use our instruction time to do what we're ultimately interested in doing with our math program. Enjoying, exploring, and allowing our students to discover their own world of mathematics, their own solutions to the questions that arise from observing numbers, problems and patterns in the world.
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