There is so much to unpack from this film so I’ll only touch on a few points. We see the fallibility of teachers, the cultural biases that they bring to class and the cultural disconnect the students have with the materials. We see the diversity of teacher perspectives on their students and we witness the students struggling to understand their place in the classroom and society and to navigate the power-dynamics of the classroom, school and community.
This wasn't interacting with one of my student's but rather interacting with one of my classmates who is a student but the outcome is similar. Learning to tackle this problem in a different way helped me to see a better way of illustrating some fundamental math principles (substitution, keeping an equation in balance).
It starts with the problem that our professor posed to the class:
Two tug-of-wars have occurred and resulted in ties.
Who will win when 1 dragon and 3 fairies go up against 4 frogs?
The class sat down to tackle this problem, largely individually. For me, the solution seemed fairly straight-forward. I would simply apply some standard mathematics substitutions. I didn't spend much time thinking about the best way to do it, I just used brute force because I felt fairly confident in my mathematics ability to solve the problem. I solved the problem but I wasn't actually very confident in my solution. So much for my confidence.
Presenter: Carol Bliese
Population Education (https://populationeducation.org/) is a program with a strong emphasis on curriculum resources and professional development for K-12 educators that focuses on human population issues. They offer curriculum resources and lesson plans connected with population.
This workshop covered several examples of the resources they make availble. It started off presenting a video of the history of population growth in the world presented in a compelling and graphical manner. http://worldpopulationhistory.org/map/1/mercator/1/0/25/#
That was the launching point for a number of interactive example lessons including; population riddles, Panther Hunt, and Who Polluted the River.
Another student mention an app named Urban World which is also interesting for investigating population in the world but it is only available on IOS devices.
Some people love statistics and some people hate statistics and few people seem indifferent to them but understanding statistics is important not only to critically evaluate the messages that we are bombarded with through advertising, media, election campaigns and other biased message sources but also to fully understand the world around us. Statistics are often used to cause fear but they can also be used to engender understanding and put fears to rest. Everyone should be literate in the use of statistics.
Rather than focus on one particular video, I’ve identified three related videos that help to demystify some misconceptions about the world we live in. They touch on different subjects and make different points but illustrate the importance of everyone being able to understand statistics. They are helpful for the general population to understand the world around us and, for teachers, they present some innovative ways to make intangible statistics strikingly visual and comprehensible.
I grew up with old-school math. I drilled on times tables until I became fluid with them. I wasn’t generally taught to have a fundamental understanding of the mathematics I was learning but learned to apply procedures which, when applied in the right situation, rendered a correct result. My depth of understanding grew as I progressed further into the study of mathematics to the point where I became very comfortable and arguably fluent with more advanced mathematics.
I have watched my two kids go through the “new math” approach to learning and watched them be utterly confused and unable to make sense of the questions or get the correct answers. They weren’t drilled on times tables in school and couldn’t do simple math in their heads and they weren’t getting the deep understanding of mathematics that the “new math” promises. They weren’t getting even a shallow understanding of mathematics. The “new math” approach was not working for them and this was the experience of most of my kids' friends who are otherwise capable students.