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Interesting article from a Swedes perspective. We are failing pretty hard at math as well after switching once or twice to Brand New Revolutionary Systems(tm), and I certainly recognize some of the issues from my own time in school. I'd say we have something in the middle of the US/Japanese system, overheads were rare and whiteboards very common, but then the "you" followed were everyone were supposed to sit quietly and churn through a chapter of practice equations each lesson, followed possibly by a last 15 minutes of the teacher going through student questions or solving particularly hard questions together. The common conclusion to this method achieving poor results compared to say Finland, is that there's too few teachers per students, basically because the lone teacher got no way of really helping more than a handful of students during the long "everyone practice by themselves" part of the class. Critics have pointed out that we have a rather good teacher:student ratio, so perhaps the problem lies more in the structure of the class-session. I went through some optional classes for advanced math at high-school were we had a younger "savant" teacher who taught university prepatory math (planes/dimensional math, however you translate that) who used small study-groups a lot more, although old habits remained amongst the students. I found the later easier to approach than the old traditional sessions. The younger teachers I had were a lot more firebrand about using new methods, but I often had the feeling they didn't really know how to implement them, and fell back to the old methods. Likewise the older teachers were stuck in their old habits and the only thing that changed were the books (now with interesting historical tid-bits about famous mathematicians! Why, did you know that Sweden managed to kill René Descartes with our lovely weather and poor castle heating?  )Not really sure how easily this issue is to solve when you get down to it.
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Sep 6, 2014 17:30
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 10:45 |
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