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Making Science and Math Kid Friendly?
mtspim asks: "I work for a non-profit organization that creates interactive math and science curriculum materials for kids and their instructors. Even though we have seen kids learn difficult topic more easily by using a computational approach to learning, most instructors are reluctant to introduce these new ways of thinking into their curriculum. What do Slashdot users think are the best ways to help revitalize math and science programs in our schools, or should we stick to the old conventional methods to learning?"
It's always about making *science* and *math* kid-friendly.
Has anyone ever tried making the *kids* science and math-friendly?
Are you sure this is the right question to be asking Slashdotters, many of whom found both topics plenty kid friendly already?
I honestly think that the more different teaching concepts that are used within the same classroom, the better chance a student will connect with at least one that actually makes them grasp the concept.
It's instructors who rely on only one presentation technique all year who connect with only the students who respond to that technique, and end up having no way to bring the ones who get lost back into the fold.
The first thing that needs to be done to revitalize math and science learning is to remove the stigmas associated with it. These stigmas were not present to the degree they are today in the 50's and 60's. This is one of the reasons that we were able to pull of some amazing feats (such as the space program in the 60's and the microprocessors in the 70's) during those times. Being labeled a 'geek' and being ostracized by other students does little to make other 'normal' students want to learn science and math. The sad thing is that it starts young (8 years old).
When I was in public schools, I had the benefit of being identified in the high-performer category because I had actually learned a lot from of math from watching PBS programs such as Square One Television, and my mother had taught me to read before my first day of kindergarden unlike any other member of my class.
As more and more resources are being allocated to "special ed" for those who underperform because such spending is mandatory under various laws, I notice that the programs for the overperformers are being cut back repeatedly because they are strictly optional. I wonder how many future whiz-kids we're losing to the fact that they're getting bored in too-dumb-for-them mainstream classes and therefore goofing off with their extra time instead of being given work that's at their actual mental level rather than their age's level.
I'm in highschool right now. At my highschool, and when I was in middle school, they were introducting a lot of the classes "hands on" learning programs. I learn nothing from these, they are basically busy work that you do without writing anything. The best way to learn something is just to read it out of the book. Someday, once we have created a society of idiots,MAYBE we'll see the mistake in these new BS methods of learning. But some how, I doubt it...
Usually when we teach or do stuff we try to be as efficient and simple as possible yet with math this is not the case. We currently teach math as "problem solving". We teach it by having people solve pointless problems which they will never face and never remember the solutions for unless they are one of the rare people who actually enjoy solving problems and who actually enjoy working through calculations.
I enjoy computer work, but if I were to teach computers assuming everyone who uses one enjoys it as much as I do, I'd make everyone learn C, everyone learn the linux commandline, and everyone learn what every single component in the computer does.
Look, we all can't like the same things and in my opinion schools should focus more on the math that matters in life. Statistics, Addition and Subtraction, perhaps even some logic and discrete math. All which are more useful to the common man than calculus, algebra, geometry (perhaps some people do need geometry)
Basic math and basic english should be the primary goals of school. The other classes are simply a complete waste of time and only harm a person by preventing them from doing as well as they would have done if they focused on the basics.
The math we actually use in life should not be decided by the math experts, it should be decided by surveys which the government should conduct. Once we find out the math people use most in daily life that should be what we teach in school. If we want to learn any other math then we specialize in math and learn it in college or in AP math.
The problem with the school system is we expect a jack of all trades, as if a human can be good at every subject. In reality only several thousand go to Harvard, Yale or MIT, the rest go state schools, community college, or they never go to college at all. The majority of people simply don't need the math and never will go to a college or have a job which requires it. Statistics, working with money, and logic are the only types of math people use. Discrete math may also be useful for scientific or technical fields involving computers.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
...to visualize as much as possible. When I teach math (I tutor college level math) I find it helpful to keep the attention of the student as keep them interested to visually verify any concept I can. For example when teaching solving triangles I visually measure off the angles and demonstrate that they all add to 180 degrees. Also teaching the pythagorean(sp?) theorum is helped by getting out a ruler and proving that in fact A^2 + B^2 = C^2 without just saying it's so.
My $.02
SW
I am confused by this topic as well. when i was a kid in the70's i routinely watched PBS and saw all the science and math shows that were on and they were readily understandable. even though they were advanced topics.
I think if the teacher actually cares about the students as individuals, cares about the math and science, and cares about whether the students learn it, then the teacher will do a good job and find a way to get the students to learn.
So I'd say it's more-or-less hopeless in the current society with the current unionized system.
There's money to be made pretending to care though.
People need to realize that most kids don't have a desire to learn these things, and most teachers don't have a desire to teach. Kids go because it's publicly funded babysitting, teachers go to get paid. At some point grades become relevant, and kids learn to do whatever it is they have to do to pass the classes. When it becomes necessary to accomplish some goal, the material will be learned.
If we did, for some reason, decide to make an point of 'teaching' our kids, by somehow giving them a real reason to learn and the teachers a real reason to teach, it'd be amazing the knowledge that could be imparted. I don't see any reason why a 10 year old cant do calculus, other than they're "not prepared yet."
Better "curriculum materials" aren't the answer. I don't know what the answer is, but it should somehow involve rewarding kids for learning and rewarding teachers for teaching, which just doesn't happen in our current system.
1) As they get older... there should be a math stream for kids who are good at math, a science stream for people who are good at science, and one of each for people who are just not good at either. Really, there are people like that, and putting them in the same class with the really smart kids just discourages them from continuing. Happens to grade 9s at my highschool all the time.
2) This is more the case for math, but there should be an emphasis on investigating real things out there. In some book somewhere the lesson on circumference of a circle is taught with an activity involving cookies. Showing kids how their math applies to real life (instead of a boring jumble of numbers and symbols) will help to keep them interested in it.
3)In Science: More labs and investigations. I don't know how this is with other school systems, but I find in mine we do a very limited number of labs and a lot of sitting and listening in science classes. This may work wonders for visual and auditory learners, but for people who learn by doing (I'm one of them), there's nothing I like more than breaking out the lab equipment and doing the lab. This also ties to my second point - you can see how these things apply in real life.
There are many more points, I'm sure, but these are just three quick ones off the top of my head.
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Sorry to say this, but as much as I appreciate the effort to make the teaching of subjects in school easier, and for that matter more cost effective, school systems are largely ignoring their own research into providing effective instruction.
Schools are attempting to save money by doing such things as making classes 2 or even 4 hours long, so that the teachers for those classes can do other things on days that they no longer need to teach that class (usually taking classes themselves, or using those days for "inservice" work.)
This flies in the face of several decades of research that shows that instruction should be provided in 15 min blocks, and classes should not be more than 60 min long without breaks. Additionally if a student is ill one day, they loose a minimum of a week's worth of instruction in that class if that four hour block is all that is held on that course for the week. Missing that much material can easily make the difference between an A and an F in a course.
Yes. All of this is being done as part of cost cutting measures, and with a goal of meeting the "No Child Left Behind" mandate. The effect however is closer to "No Child Able To Keep Up".
Standardized test scores are going down, schools are loosing funding as a result, and some are even being forced to close their doors. Granted when they close their doors, the cost of that school goes to Zero. Supposedly that was not the intent however.
-Rusty
You never know...
Children's Television Workshop, the producers of "Sesame Street", used to have other shows as well.
- "The Electric Company" was a spinoff for kids who had just outgrown the muppets of Seasame Street, but still had more to learn. It was basically the same kind of show, but leaned just a little older.
- "3-2-1 Contact" was the science spinoff for middle school students. It presented some grade-level appropriate documentaries, followed by The Bloodhound Gang using those concepts to solve mysteries.
- "Square One Televison" was the math spinoff, presenting skits, catoons, music videos, and games that all math concepts for grade school students.
However, all of those shows have since faded off of PBS, and CTW has now even taken on the name of Sesame Workshop which more-or-less indicates that they don't intend on ever expanding beyond Seasame Street again...
The entire PBS Kids lineup seems to have taken a turn for the younger, with babby-level shows like Teletubbies and Barney lining up with Seasame Street and still-timeless episodes of Mr. Rogers's Neighborhood. Shows aimed at middle schoolers have fallen off the board altogether... and I see that as a problem.
or maybe just a root...
...not the other way around.
Most math and science teachers (US Elementary & High School) do not have degrees in Math or Science.
The problem is that it is very tough to get talented teachers to remain teaching. Moving into the private sector is much more profitable.
We need to overhaul the system so that Mathematicians and Scientists want to be teachers...
Treat it as such.
Too often I see teacher after teacher who treats math with disdain and as something you can just memorize a few techniques and have down cold.
These are the kids I see shake with fear when they have to synthesize to answer a problem... in an Advanced Engineering Mathematics course in college.
Teach it as if it were a language--through immersion; by teaching fundamental concepts and then building on those (rather than our current backwards system); and teach the rules before you teach the exceptions, special cases, and other things of that nature (e.g., how did you learn how to take the determinate of a matrix?). Teach application--teaching them about matrices is pretty much worthless unless you talk to them about systems of linear equations. Force them to apply this language in situations outside of the ones that you have taught.
Deemphasize memorization and emphasize understanding--Don't make them memorize trigonometric rules, teach them Euler's Equation and about imaginary numbers.
Respect the students ability to learn mathematics. E. B. White said the following: "No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing." This is a fundamentally true statement that applies to teaching--if the teachers hate the subject and don't know it all that well themselves, then they aren't going to trust the students ability to learn it.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Steven Pinker had some interesting things to say about learning math in one of is books (probably The Blank Slate, but maybe How the Mind Works). I'll try to regurgitate what I remember.
Mathematics is not natural. Children are natural learners of language - they pick it up as easily as breathing. Mathematics is not like that - we didn't evolve an innate facility with complex math like we did with complex language. We have to work at it. (Well, 99% of us do). Teching math the same way as teaching English is not likely to work well. With math, you need repetition and lots of examples until the students feel comfortable with each concept.
Math is relentlessly cumulative. If you don't master arithmetic, you will struggle with algebra. If you didn't grasp algebra, you're going to be lost with calculus. And so on.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Throw away computers - bring back times-tables and logs - make people *think* again. Nick
On one hand, I agree with that, but there's a whole question of "marketing" math to kids.
Computers break the monotony of math classes, and that's essential as kids become more and more accustomed to high-stimulus activities like TV and video games.
The problem with math is that, before you get to anything interesting (like Calculus), you've already got to have a huge background knowledge. And, take it from me (6 university-level math courses later), the only way to do that is practice. Doing homework problems. Boring as sin, but essential - if you do all your homework, you should expect an A+ in the course.
So, what's needed is a way to make simple homework problems interesting, so that the student sticks with it.
That's a nearly impossible task.
I think math is one of those courses which requires a hugely good teacher or professor. A bad one will turn you right off the subject and make you dread doing the homework. A good teacher or professor will make the class interesting and be fun and friendly enough that you'll feel guilty if you don't do all your homework.
That was always the best motivator for me to get good math marks - liking the teacher enough that I wanted to do well for him.
Which is shit, because you're dependent on the quality of the teacher rather than internal motivation.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I would fully support such a move as being cruel to be kind. You shouldn't be using a computer or even a calculator until you have a good enough idea of how to use your own brain.
I was one of the last people to do the non-calculator version of the O-level mathematics exam, and we learned little tricks involving finding common factors and cancelling out that calculator users never need to bother with. I even used to add up order forms in my head when we used paper forms {I have since written some software to computerise it} and would never have dreamed of using a calculator.
All the computer is really good for is the last step of solving a mathematical problem. It can't ever manage the first step, which is actually expressing the problem in mathematical terms in the first place.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Force-feeding memorization is the quickest way to end the technological dominance of the United States. If you do not believe me, travel the world and ask "What country produces the best engineers?". (I said engineers, not computer scientists, there is a difference.) I'll promise you, over half the time the reponse will be the US. The reason for this? American students generally know how to think, but this is changing for the worse.
Over-Memorization will produce better test scores, but worse educated students. I can get any computer to memorize a log table, but I cannot teach a computer what it means. If I teach a personwhat a log table means, they can go look up the values when they need them, or they can generate one themselves.
Okay, I feel better now, flame away.
Simple. Make the information relevant.
For example, instead of teaching ratios in proportion, have students scale a cookie recipe to feed the entire class. Then have them make the cookies (off the top of my head; don't whinge about lilltle kids and hot ovens). Figure batting averages in gym class. Predict the max altitude of a water rocket.
From personal experience, I didn't appreciate algebra (polynomials in particular) until I studied calculus. Up until that point it didn't help me accomplish anything than arithmetic did.
I tend to think that someone should start at the goal of the task -- say, build a model rocket and predict its performance --and work backwards. Let the students build one without instruction in such a way that they are bound fail and the only way to succeed is to actually .... learn. I know, it's been done but it's often the exception rather than the rule. When was the last time you had several labs before your first lecture? Why bother with a dry boring lecture in the first place?
"Where's my other sock?" - A. Einstein
All of the best math professors I had at university no longer knew how to multiply numbers and had even forgotten basic algebra. They were still incredibly intelligent people with amazing math ability. Arithmetic has about as much to do with mathematics as carpentry has to do with physics. You will find people who don't know their multiplication tables in the lower, middle, and upper sections of every class.
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You are downloading some torren and you have leeched 764 megabytes and seeded 432.
How many megabytes before it's even?
What are your leech/seed ratio?
As a 14-year-old boy, I think this subject is very interesting from several points of view. I have to admit I rather disagree when it is said kids are math- and science-friendly, but then as has been said it is not surprising that the situation has turned out this way when you consider the sad culture the moronic majority of the population is plunging the country into here in France -- having seen several previous comments, I see the situation is not so different in America either. For example, in my class, a lot of the children are drawn to the idiotic reality TV shows (we even have a Celebrity Farm, a show in which one is able to view celebrities living in a farm and vote one out each week) and the teenagers seem to find the boring lives of others more interesting than theirs ever could be. This truely is sad, but this said group of people is the same which doesn't bother working much at school. Now I have not done a psychology major so I am not in the best position to ponder on how this crash in TV quality has affected childrens' work so much, but I would think this is due to a generalisation and banalisation of this moronic culture, developing into a way of life: doing nothing while watching TV to see others doing nothing. I would say that this tendancy to slack off has affected how the said children tend to percieve other activities in life, schoolwork included. I am pretty sure if one was to exclude children from watching such trash on television, they would not have such a tendancy to do nothing and not use their brain actively as is happening now.
In my opinion, math and science are already kid-friendly. It is just a case of the children being voluntary to approach these subjects in an optimistic way, something which is becoming rarer and rarer these days as the kids are becoming progressively less math- and science-friendly, as I said in the first paragraph. Any child willing to enhance his or her knowledge on these topics can do so easily, as I think there are an infinite number of resources suited to their capabilities which are available to them. In my case, for example, I was pushed to improve my math skills when I got interested in more serious programming (as I have currently started learning C++, which I find somewhat more interesting than just placing controls on a form as I did with Delphi). Of course, I am not omitting the fact that the motivation of the teacher can change everything in the stance of children towards math, but if we cannot change much, let alone anything, in the educational system, then the responsibility of changing the childrens' stance towards these topics rests in the hands of the parents; the latter can do so much more to get their children to be motivated in the instruction of math and science, and for example a good start is to raise the children in the omission of the wave of "crap" television -- but without an excess of tendancy towards elitism, which could get the children rejected at school. I believe parents should show the children at the youngest age how fun math and science can be, how vast these topics are and how important they are later on.
Math and science are already kid-friendly -- I think the balance has to reside on the other side, by having the children be math- and science-friendly; I believe that for this, kids have to understand the value of these subjects as soon as they can, and for the most part I should think the responsibility of having the children understand this is first and foremost in the parents' hands.
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect" -- Linus Torval
I think the topic you are dancing around is:
Stop glamorizing the politican, sports player and musician, on orders of magnitude over the scientist, engineer and general tinkerer.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
The problem is, kids today think the world owes them something. Teachers aren't people who are trying to educate them and motivate them and prepare them for the real world; they're people who are trying to hold them back and 'cramp their style'. When a student is told that doing something is wrong, and then the student gets punished for doing it, it's never a matter of 'oh, shoot, i did something wrong and i got caught doing it' -- it's always 'ugh, this fucking sucks, this is bull shit, i don't have to put up with this'.
I hate to sound like a fascist or something, but rewards don't work with kids today. They're too 'punk' for rewards. What schools need is discipline. I don't mean dress codes and other 'pre-emptive' kinds of discipline that everybody seems to like -- those just hurt the people who aren't jerks. I mean real-world, reactionary discipline. When you do something wrong in the real world, you're generally get punished by being fired or fined or jailed. School should be the same way. When you call a teacher a 'fucking retard', you shouldn't just get an unexcused absence for that period. You should get a detention, and if you don't serve that detention, you should get suspended. If you destroy school property, you should be fully expected to pay for every last dime of it. Et cetera. :/
There are many groups out there looking for ways to integrate technology into the classroom to grab the students attention. I work for The Concord Consortium, a non profit company that supports a number of NSF and DOE projects that find different ways to help students learn. We have written opensource java software to help students visualize genetics, molecules, and math; we study HOW students learn; we spawned off an OnLine Virtaul HighSchool which is now it's own organization with 6000 students; and we are always looking forward for new ways to keep students interested and learning.
We are working with PBS on a professional development project aimed at improving Algebra content knowledge and teaching practices.
On a different note, Maine a few years back initiated the Maine Laptop program, where every year every school in Maine gets laptop's for all of its 7th grade students. Technicaly in 5 years time all Middle and High School students will have computers.
-Ben
-=Down Syndrome in Maine
Exactly! Most of the comments in this thread talk about teaching methods, good/bad teachers, etc. Although good teachers a great, this ignores what I think is the fundamental problem -
It is the student's responsibility to learn.
Kids do not understand that they have to take responsibility for thier own education. If they don't understand something they blame the teacher, instead of taking the time to learn it. I know several teenage girls that think they are not very good at math. They get C's in high school level math classes and say its just because they aren't good at it. If they took half the time studying for math as they do shopping for clothes, they would understand the concepts ten times better and have As.
Standardized tests are bullshit and you know it, otherwise you wouldn't have mentioned problems that exist with the SAT.
The problem with test, test, test is that you wind up with children who don't know how to think, but how to memorize and regurgitate on command. Brains are not widgets that you can put together on an assembly line with a "one size fits all" curriculum.
Educate yourself. A great place to start is a book called "Insult To Intelligence" by Frank Smith. The ISBN on the book is 0877958270. Anyone who cares about the current sad state of education needs to take a look at it. It's out of print now but can still be found at used book sites and at Amazon Marketplace.
Actually there is some splendid information in the book about how not to write educational software. I suggest the fellow who wrote the initial question for "ask Slashdot" should give it a read.
I won't even dignify the rest of your post with any further comment, except to say that the lesson plans that teachers are forced to teach from nowadays in the US are imposed on them from On High (ultimately from the Department of Education) and are almost without exception soul-sucking programmatic crap that neither teaches nor enlightens nor fosters a love of reading. Google for Open Court Reading sometime. This is but one example of the shit that is being forced on school districts across America. Then consider yourself lucky that you are out of school now.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
As a college student now I'm going to respond to this. One of the "punishments" we had in junior high school was "in school suspension" which meant spending all day in basically detention. A lot of kids enjoyed it more than class, so that's not much of a punishment.
In my opinion, the problem is a) classes are boring for most kids (even me, someone who loves to learn). If you're gonna teach to the middle, the top will be bored out of the minds and the bottom will be confused as hell. I don't know if tracking works better but in elementary school I always LOVED my enrichment class because it was fun and challenging and all my friends in it loved it also. b) academic stuff isn't "cool". It's cool to know every sports statistic about your favorite team and watch every sports game, but it's not cool to know anything about physics/math theories. This is a societal problem, until it's acceptable for someone to be interested in math/science and not be labelled as a nerd/dork/dweeb there wont be much interest in math/science by normal kids. The only people from my high school who were actually openly into learning about math/science were people in my math research class who were also two-sport varsity ATHLETES and could get away w/ it w/out being made fun of and labelled a dork.
I think the biggest problem is a) though. The classes are really confusing for a lot of people and too easy for those who truly understand it. Not to sound like an ass but I spent the first month of my AP physics course beating Super Mario brothers on my calculator. Why? Because it was more interesting than listening to my prof drone on and on explaining something I had understood for over a week. I still managed to get 100 on more than half of the exams so there was no incentive for me to pay attention.
Laslty, (this should probably be c) most people see no need to know physics/abstract algebra/topology because they don't see how it's applied. They don't understand that they're being taught how to think and that that's what's most important. And honestly, it often has no use because (in my inexperienced opinion) we don't live in a world that often requires critical thinking. Many jobs are designed to require the list amount of thinking possible so as to be easily picked up by the largest number of people.
While I completely agree on a), I think your solution to b) isn't quite right. There's no reason why math/science needs to be made less nerdy, kids just need to realize there's NOTHING wrong with being a "nerd/dork/dweeb" - there are plenty of us around, so it isn't like they have to be all alone(Slashdot is certainly proof of that). The thing that's terrible about being a nerd for a high school student is that the people making fun of them have convinced them its a bad thing - all that's necessary is for the nerds to realize that their way of thinking and acting is no less valid than anyone else's. Once people realize the "geek" label just bounces off you (or can be taken as a compliment, even), they often stop using it and start thinking of you as a real person. To bring this back to the topic at hand, that also allows those who are only held back by the societal pressure (those who are intersted in math/science, but don't want anyone to know that they are) to "come out of the closet" as it were, because they see there's nothing bad about it.
B) There's no easy answer here. The best I can think of is to try to change the atmosphere one person at a time. My parents did this for me.
C) I have no idea. I liked Physics partly because it let us apply math to concrete things (like point masses ;-)).