Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Why Do We Need This?!

The title is the question most often heard by math teachers (or any teacher).  I've sat through my fair share of courses and asked myself the same question.  Now looking back and having to learn more practical subject areas.  I pose the question, where are the courses that teach us how to be the tech savvy, money smart, politically involved, handymen (or handywomen) that we are expected to be when we graduate?

Does high school seem to be more of a formality than a staple where real meaningful learning takes place and students actually are prepared for the tough road ahead?

3 comments:

  1. I wish there was a course in high school that taught me how to be an adult. How to pay bills, what all the different types of insurance are for, how down payments and mortgages and loans and everything work. I think that THOSE are the types of lessons that need to be taught in high school, not how to calculate the area of a triangle. Because with all due respect to math classes, what's going to take you farther in life?

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  2. Well, I have to say I see both sides of the coin here, and I think this is one of those cases of how an individual chooses to either present, or accept material in any given subject area.

    Yes - I have often in the past sat there thinking, 'what is the purpose of what I'm supposedly "learning" right now,' and have come up short on the answer! Inevitably, not everything we are taught will have relevance or will resonate with every single person.

    However, that being said, there is still a lot of room to add extremely beneficial lessons/information into many subject areas. Jenna - let's take how you say, 'with all respect due to math, but....' and I get where you're coming from. Not all mathematical applications will have practical implications in everyone's lives. But now, we hear the term 'financial literacy' being used so often - there is definitely room to tie many of our math lessons/concepts to skills students will need to be financially literate in their futures. Who knew that learning how to solve algebraic expressions could actually help you determine an optimal or max number of guests you could budget for your wedding? Or that unit rate problems could actually help you when you have to do your own grocery shopping in the future? What we need to do, is as teachers - find ways to give these teachings meaningful context for our students, so they can see the practical applications they will have in their lives. (or at least we can keep on pointing this out to them!) For example, think "Application, or Thinking" questions in a math assessment! But this really could be said in virtually any area. Just food for thought!

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  3. Really interesting point, Laurie. I had never really thought about it in this way; I always thought that Pythagorean Theorem and quadratics and linear systems were kind of useless, I'll be honest. Maybe it's because I'm not fully out into the 'real world' yet haha but I'm glad you pointed these things out. It's interesting to see how these so called useless topics are ACTUALLY incorporated into the real world.

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