Girls have had to fight for so long to gain confidence and interest in math. There are programs and “girl-colored” tools to help them become more interested in math.
Someone has finally realized it’s now the boys’ turn, except this time the content area is reading. In trying to appeal to more girl readers, publishers have been making the books students would choose to read in their free time appear more girly. What teenage boy wants to read a book with a pink cover?
The article does note that some effort is being made to make some covers more gender-neutral, but it never really does a good job of explaining why the off-putting covers developed to begin with. If anything, they write it off to better sales and deliberately leave the boys out.
That sounds a bit too much like what happened to girls in math. “Oh, it’s okay if they don’t understand it. They’re just girls.”
“Oh, it’s okay if this book doesn’t appeal to boys. Boys don’t read anyway.” Maybe instead of dismissing this as a given, some effort should be put forth to help boys stay encouraged about reading by creating published materials that won’t make them afraid to pick up a book.
Encouraging stereotypes is never okay, especially if it hurts the group in question.
Posted by Rebecca as Current Affairs at 7:47 AM EDT
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A school in Michigan has decided to ban its students from having a MySpace account. Period. End of statement. They can’t access the site from school, and next year, they’ll be signing an agreement that they won’t access the site at home, either.
In this day of children being babysat by the television and the internet, I’m certain students will completely comply with the agreement.
I’m personally horrified by this decision. The school has decided that it has the right to control the students’ lives outside school. While their intention is good, the execution is going to prove much more than the school can handle.
If they really want to protect their students from the evils of MySpace (and the rest of the internet), the answer isn’t banning. It’s teaching. The first step is to teach children how to be safe online. The second is to teach them how to evaluate the people they meet online. (The third is how to evaluate the information they find online, but that’s an entirely different rant.)
When you arm someone with a reason, give them the capability to analyze situations for themselves, it’s amazing how often you can prevent most of what you were trying to block. Children feel less likely to rebel against what they feel are pointless rules, so teaching them gives them the concrete purposes for a rule and helps them understand why the boundary exists at all.
Children can be fairly rational, reasonable creatures when they’re given that opportunity. It’s actually part of how they grow into rational, reasonable adults.
Posted by Rebecca as Current Affairs, Reflective teaching at 8:27 AM EDT
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I’ve often felt, as many people do, that the correct way to protect children from online predators, identity thieves, and less-than-credible web sites is to educate them. It might just be my inner teacher talking, but information is often the best deterrent.
Think about it. As adults, we know we can make better decisions when we’re informed. It’s the same for children (defined for these purposes as those under the age of 18). If we explain to them why giving any of their personal information to someone they just met is a bad idea, they have a better chance of making a good choice than they do if we just say, “Don’t ever give out personal information to someone you just met.” Children, by and large, actually have the capacity to understand reason, and many of tweens and teens actually appreciate it when you respect them enough to inform them rather than just impose rules that they see as pointless and in much need of being challenged.
What’s interesting is that there are more areas online that cater to helping parents teach their kids how to navigate the web safely. A couple of kid-friendly social media sites have recently appeared as another set of tools to help kids learn to balance sharing their life online without sharing too much of it.
Don’t block. Help them understand. It’s just like anything else. Children can excel at making good choices, but only if we arm them to understand what constitutes a good choice and what constitutes a bad choice.
Posted by Rebecca as Responsibility, Current Affairs at 8:13 AM EST
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It’s slowly becoming apparent that math education is failing our students across the country. This could be for any number of reasons- shorter school days, an overextended curriculum, fewer math teachers available to teach the material, the increasingly shorter attention span of students. The list goes on.
Out here where 60% of our high school students failed an exit exam with no fractions on it, we’re up against an interesting problem- a series of adopted curricula (YouTube video) that does little to address communicating actual math to our elementary students, leaving them ill-equipped to deal to a high school math program that leaves even experienced math teachers wondering.
Until a national math curriculum can be agreed upon and implemented, we have to figure out how to address this growing problem. Being weak in math is absolutely crippling. So much of what we do is based in math. Daily activities like shopping or cooking require some understanding of decimals and fractions. Many careers, especially those in any science, engineering, or business discipline, are heavily steeped in algebra and trigonometry.
Letting it go isn’t acceptable, but letting it stay in its current state is doing today’s students a disservice. These are kids who would much rather understand what they’re doing, despite their protests, than continue moving on to higher math levels because it will supposedly raise their self-esteem. I can tell you from experience, socially promoting these kids frustrates them. They know they were promoted to stay with their peers, and an unusually high number of them resent it because they know they don’t uderstand the new math they have to learn because they don’t understand what’s it’s built on.
What can we do? We can work to help these students become stronger in the basics. Even if all you do is get workbooks in various grade levels and help your student work through them, you’re giving them a much better chance at succeeding in math education. I’ve also recently started a math blog that tries to cover various topics to help students struggling with thie r homework (or parents struggling to help their students with their homework).
Do something. Take action. Your student will really appreciate it, even if they never say it out loud.
Posted by Rebecca as Responsibility, Current Affairs at 8:11 AM EST
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My current career involves me spending a lot of time with teenagers who truly believe they will die if they turn off their cell phone. I’ve had to confiscate phones because the student spent more time playing on their phone than getting their work done.
Some of them try to hide their phone use in the hopes I won’t notice, but I’m sitting right beside the students. It’s hard to miss them staring at their lap with one hand in their lap. It’s hard to miss them taking out and putting away the phones. It’s especially hard when they share the text message they just received with everyone else.
I guess one could accuse my teen students of being not terribly bright.
Some of them use their phones to listen to music while they work. As someone who needs some sort of background noise to work, I’m fine with that. Some of them use the calculator function on their phone. It’s amazing how many cell phone calculators don’t process PEMDAS correctly. (It’s also funny when the student expects to hide their phone use by claiming they’re using their phone as a calculator…but the assignment involves roots and squares, which aren’t on most of their calculators.)
My concern is the ones who are sitting there trying to text while taking their tests. To the best of our knowledge, none of them has actually thought to use their phone as a new method for cheating, but I have a bad feeling it’s coming.
How do you monitor that? How do you discourage students from doing it without breeding an atmosphere of distrust and resentment? They don’t have the self-control to not text when they should be working. Can we expect them to have it at more critical times?
Does anyone deal with this, and how do you do it?
Posted by Rebecca as Current Affairs at 8:07 AM EST
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I’ve come to two rather horrifying discoveries this week:
- Fractions were not covered on the state’s graduating exam.
- It’s acceptable for a seventh grader to have no grammar knowledge.
The first was perhaps the worst, because I confirmed it with three different students. This test is being prepared as the one that controls whether or not a student graduates from high school in this state, and there were no fractions on it. One of my colleagues suggested marching on the state capital in protest, and I had to agree with him wholeheartedly. Fractions are one of those things that you really can’t get by in life without knowing. Ranks right up there with proportions.
The second was a bit more tolerable, if only because I suspect, “No, they really never taught us what a noun is,” actually translates to, “I don’t pay attention in class, and never have.” I was actually confronted with a twelve year old who had no earthly idea what a noun was. He honestly thought an adjective was an action word. I almost started crying right there, and the student felt badly that he’d driven me to near tears. He never once said he’d been joking with me, which made it worse. (He’s the kind of kid who loves to pull silly pranks.)
I was actually furious after he walked out and I thought about our conversation. When I was twelve, I was diagramming sentences in both English and Latin. For those who have never known the sheer joy of diagramming a sentence in English, it involves putting words into a graphic organizer; the placement is determined by the part of speech. For Latin, we had to create a chart where each line had one word from the sentence, and we had to fill in the line with part of speech, case/tense, gender, number, and special notes, before we were allowed to translate the word.
I just really can’t wrap my mind around not having fractions on a high school exit test or being a junior high student with no clue about grammar.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized, Current Affairs at 8:57 AM EDT
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We spend time with our students in the center trying to educate them on why Wikipaedia should never be a primary resource in an academic paper. Actually, that’s not fair. We try to explain what Wikipaedia is and why it is not always a credible source, and therefore should never be the sole support for the research in an academic paper.
The kids fuss, and we expect that since we’ve just asked them to do some real work and to read what they’re finding critically.
Of course, the argument then becomes why we support an often out-of-date source, like the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, over a site that is edited frequently by people theorteically trying to improve the level of knowledge on the subject.
Again, the best we can do is try to educate them to read everything with a critical eye. We try to explain the inherent problems with completely trusting a source that is open to anybody editing it. We try to explain the need for other sources to help corrborate what they’re finding an Wikipaedia.
I use Wikipaedia very rarely, but when I do, you can bet I’m running around finding up to half a dozen other sources to supoort or correct what I’ve found there.
Posted by Rebecca as Components of Learning, Current Affairs at 7:38 AM EST
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Stephen Downes last week posted a link to this article from the Village Voice’s website on blogging in higher level academics.
It’s just a fascinating read, especially in light of the fact that blogs are not very widespread through academic researchers, but seem to be sprading through graduate student researchers.
Found via Stephen Downes
Posted by Rebecca as Current Affairs at 10:42 AM EDT
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