I recently saw this image on a social media forum, and
it resonated with me because it echoed the sentiment of the students before me
who often ask, “Sir, but when will I ever use this?”.
It also left me with a few questions about my role as an educator, about the
expectations set out in the curriculum I teach, and about how effectively we
prepare our students for the realities of the world before them.
I don’t want to suggest that we fail to
prepare our students for real life… or maybe, do I? The curriculum has
been in place for years, and I am sure there is rhyme and reason behind its
every concept, many of which can be traced throughout the grades. BUT, what
about the struggling students that sit before us today? Will they ever need to
know how to calculate the area of a parallelogram? Could we be using our time
more meaningfully for them? These are the students in who still use their
fingers for basic addition and subtraction, the ones who have a blank stare
when asked what any number multiplied by zero equals, and the ones who are able
to use a calculator on their test, but don’t know how to make
sense of imputing the numbers and operations. Shouldn’t we spend more
time preparing them for real life scenarios that require math skills such as
understanding taxes, calculating how much interest they’ll owe when they
borrow money, and learning how to budget? Should they spend less time learning
how to calculate the hypotenuse of a triangle, how to make a tree diagram to
show all the possible combinations of outfits Johnny can pull from his closet,
and how to rotate the star 280 degrees counter clock-wise so that it lands in
quadrant three of the cartesian grid. As adults, an especially educators, we
now understand that learning math (like many other school disciplines) is more
about learning to reason, think critically, and solve problems. It is about
instilling in our students the skills for living in the 21st century - creativity, communication, collaboration and
critical thinking. We want all of our
student to arrive at the same understanding, but we also want to prepare them
for living in a world where numbers will matter to them, especially those
struggling students. There are of course math oriented careers, such as
architects, pharmacists, and accountants to name a few, which will use more
math than we can imagine, but how do we get the value of mathematics across to
those struggling students who cringe every morning at 9 o’clock
when it’s time for Math. How do we teach them that the area of a
parallelogram is important, not for it’s area, but because it helps develop
skills in problem solving, reasoning, proving, reflecting, connecting,
representing and communicating. So what do we do as educators? Do we just
suppress that voice in our heads that wants to reply to those inquisitive
students with, “Never…
you’ll probably never use this exactly.. but learn it anyways”.
Your post exactly reflects what the students in my classroom said about math (I discuss this in my post "Math Vision"). The grade 7 and 8 students mentioned that they want to learn about real world things such as how to do ones taxes and mortgages. Hearing this from 12 and 13 year olds really made me think about our current curriculum and also question how relevant it is to daily life. While, yes, a lot of the material can be used daily, for example for cooking, a significant amount will not be. This makes me wonder if simply telling our students that learning a certain topic will help them with their thinking skills is enough. What if we instead spend shorter amounts of time on more math topics? Perhaps that way we can cover math that other jobs would use and that might me more practical for everyday use later in life. However, this goes against the notion that it takes time to get good at something and that you must practice a skill for a long period in order to get good at it. Spending a shorter amount of time on a certain topic would make this difficult to achieve.
ReplyDeleteI assume that curriculum developers have been going through this struggle for years and I am interested to see how the curriculum will change in the following years or how the methods of teaching the curriculum will change; especially with the new Math Vision coming to effect.
I suppose I was a bit late to the blogging party but I found this article on twitter and wrote a similar post to this about the relevancy of our current math curriculum. The article is located here (http://blogs.wgbh.org/innovation-hub/2016/5/6/strogatz-math/) and basically states that reason secondary math looks the way it does is because as it was developed in the 50's and has not changed considerably (in terms of content) since then. During that time period much of the world was trying to get involved and succeed in the space race so they were trying to groom future engineers and astronauts.
ReplyDeleteSince we have moved on from this type of singular focus it is interesting that the core curriculum has not changed much. Maybe its time to rethink our strands and focus as a whole.