For the past week I have been reliving elementary school.
My inspiration was this TED lecture from Salmon Khan of Khan Academy.
As a concept, Khan's idea is at once important, brilliant and frightening.
Important—because he is part of a growing movement to put education within reach of everyone. Well, everyone with access to an Internet connection, anyway.
Brilliant—because he turns school upside down. The teacher does not introduce the material; that's done via an online lecture, assigned for homework. Class time, then, becomes available for what is traditionally thought of as homework—working problems, writing essays—and discussion. Thus anyone who is confused or needs help has immediately at hand both the teacher and his fellow students. The teacher's time is allocated more efficiently, being spent on those who need help rather than those who don't. The time of the struggling student is also used more efficiently, because he can get problems cleared up on Exercise 1 rather than struggling uselessly through 2 - 20 or just giving up. Potentially, this system also helps other students, who find the work easy, to advance quickly to work that challenges them. Although experience has taught me that the last is not high amongst most schools' priorities, this system might make them more amenable to the idea.
Brilliant, also, is his insistence that everyone should be expected to master the material. I never did understand why any grade less than A is considered passing. In almost no subject in which I received an A did I feel I had mastered the material—how much worse is it for someone who earns a C? Perhaps in some subjects it doesn't matter much, but if you "pass" a child with a C in reading, or in math, you handicap him for life.
Frightening—because the system Khan has developed, at least when applied to the classroom, strips the student of privacy in yet one more area of his already over-exposed life. The teacher knows what videos he watches, what online exercises he has worked on, how he is spending his time, and where he is apparently struggling. All with good intent, of course, but the potential for abuse is there.
But back to my elementary school revisit.
Khan Academy has videos available on subjects wide and varied, but practice exercises are currently limited to mathematics. So just for fun I decided to try them out. (Yeah, I know. I have a weird idea of fun.) Here's what I discovered. Remember, I have done the exercises but not watched the videos, so this is not a fair review of the whole process.
- The exercises are pretty good, but do not exhibit much variety, and favor people with good test-taking skills. The program is cluttered with annoying "rewards" of the sticker-and-gold star type, which shouldn't be attractive to anyone over eight and which can have a negative long-term impact on learning. Nonetheless, I found the exercises very helpful for reviewing old concepts and drilling in my areas of weakness. Which brings me to
- Now I remember why I hated math until eighth grade, when I finally discovered algebra. Elementary school math is replete with the kind of exercises I loathe, such as multiplying and dividing large numbers with lots of decimal places, in which my propensity for understanding the concept but making careless errors is my undoing. Addition mistakes, transposed numbers, and sloppy handwriting are disastrous when you must get 10 correct answers in a row before moving on to the next lesson. I can't tell you how many times I completed nine problems correctly only to be reset to zero through a careless error on the tenth. However, I have more tenacity and patience than I did 50 years ago, or even at college, when I would trudge through the snow on a midwinter's night to have access to the Wang calculators available in the physics department, rather than do my lab calculations by hand. I made it through, not only the exercises that were supposed to show I could do such calculations, but the ones that anyone in his right mind would have used a calculator for, such as, An alien spaceship travels at 490,000,000 inches per second. How many miles does it travel in one hour? I did it, and my brain is better for it—but I have new sympathy for my grandson, who is currently finding math tedious.
Arithmetic : mathematics :: practicing scales : playing a Bach concerto.
I plow on. The exercises continue through the very beginnings of calculus. I find doing a few math exercises (even arithmetic exercises) to be a mind-refreshing break when other work gets frustrating. (See weirdness, above.)
And I love the idea of a mild-mannered nerd who leverages tutoring his cousins into changing the world.
I agree with your analogy, but both relationships are more complicated than many would want to believe. Surely you're more likely to put up with scales (and actually practice them effectively) if you know, love, and wish to play a Bach concerto. Does it makes sense to lock someone up and make him play scales when he has no idea what music is?
Very true. And music instruction used to be a lot like that. I believe this was Shinichi Suzuki's main point: to get kids playing real music that they can relate to because they've heard it many, many times. It may not always work out like that with Suzuki teachers who either de-emphasize listening or over-emphasize technique for its own sake, but I think the idea is sound.
So how do we do the same for math?
"So how do we do the same for math?"
This is where our math curriculum shines, I believe. (Right Start Mathematics) Their answer is, "games". They say games should be played a lot before giving the worksheets. When you visit, Mom, we will play Corners (and others!) with you. It is fun for kids and grown-ups alike.
So today in school, I gave Jonathan a worksheet, and when he completed the twenty questions, he said, "That was sort of fun." !! Can I tell you how amazing that was for me to hear? A month ago, a year ago, he would have whined for two hours about having to do five problems, let alone twenty.
