Please Stop Saying it, part 6

Things we really need you to stop saying, part 6.

Fun Fact:
"What you get out of it depends on what you put into it."

I'm their teacher, not their counselor. I agree that I can't be an asshole, but I'm here to teach and they're here to listen, learn, practice, contribute.

Otherwise, don't go to college.

"They won't care how much you know until they know how much you care."

We really need you to stop saying that.

Things We're really going to Need you to Stop Saying, 5b

part 5, update:

It's a goddam supercomputer. Why don't you just put it to use?

• Look things up.
• Calculator. If you turn the calculator sideways, it becomes a scientific calculator.
• Desmos.
• WolframAlpha.com
• Formative Quizzes.

Then, they can put it aside and you can be a normal teacher with your worksheets. (I'm not being sarcastic. There's nothing wrong with worksheets for practicing a skill in isolation.)

The phone is just a TOOL. Use it for a purpose. Students need to experience when to use a TOOL and when not to. 

Things We're Going to Need You To Stop Saying, part 5

False Dichotomy, aka. Twitter Broadside

Education seems to be full of these things, but perhaps they're in every business and I'm only paying attention to education. You see them often, pithy statements that fit into 140 characters by eliminating all the gray area and reducing everything to black or white extremes of "The Right Way" vs "What You're Doing". Often well-meaning but ultimately harmful:

If your exam questions can be googled, then you're asking the wrong questions.

Google is useful for information, less so for understanding. Googling the answer doesn't "show your work" and, given the nature of the Internet, isn't particularly trustworthy.

If kids in your class are more engaged by a fidget spinner than they are by your lesson, the spinner isn't the problem. Your lesson is.

Learning is hard. Kids fidget. Fads come, then go. Your lesson doesn't suck simply because two kids out of 25 are fiddling with this thing.

If your exam questions are multiple choice, then you aren't asking the right questions in the right way.

There's always a place for quick, multiple choice questions, even on summative assessments.

If your exam questions only use integers then they aren't Real World^(tm) Questions.
If your exam questions require a calculator, then you're asking the wrong questions.

Integral answers allow students to show their work, are useful to the learning process because the arithmetic is secondary to the learning. Integral answers can also encourage students to search for different solution methods. Decimal answers that require a calculator are great for Real-World data but Real-World data is often confusing and isn't usually appropriate during the learning process. Learn first, then use the learning. Calculators make guessing too easy and encourage kids to waste time with it.

If you are asking questions at all, then your students aren't agents of their own education. 

This is just silly. Teachers are there to teach. Sometimes the students "lead" the class down the carefully prepared road through the weeds ... but the teacher has laid the groundwork for that.


I am really tired of this nonsense. These blanket statements that reduce the complex world we teach in to just two colors (what you're doing and the right way) are unnecessarily reductive. It encourages simple-minded extremist fads that wither away after a couple of years of damage to children's education.

It's a false dichotomy and we're really going to need you to stop saying it.

Things we need you to stop saying 4

I'm scheduled for a Tech conference.  This is one of the offerings:

Really?

I find this amazing, sad, depressing, and it pisses me off.

I find it amazing that any teacher doesn't know more about technology than students; decent and cheap personal computers that can play video and music and run Office software and play games, have been around for 20 something years now.  More basic machines like the TRS-80 and the PDP8 (with punch tape reader!) since the seventies.  The Internet has been a thing since '95 and smartphones since 2007.

What teacher doesn't know tech at this point? Are there really people that backwards and stupid who don't know Office, and video games and .... a concept of programming whether it's macros in word, Windows script, basic, html, php, javascript, excel .... Anything? Something? Do I know any of these people?

Yes, yes I do. And they're teachers.  That's the sad part. Sad because it seems like MOST of the teachers I deal with are technidiots. (Like that? I just made the word up.)

It's 2015 and this conference is charging $200 a day and this is the title of one hour's workshop and the title isn't considered odd or demeaning or out-of-place. That's depressing but not surprising.

Far too many teachers are STILL tech illiterate, even by comparison with their students.

Yes, I said it. The students are not "digital natives" endowed with magical tech-fu. They are mostly clueless about useful tech of all kinds. They're great at plugging in the computer and playing a video game, or installing Candy crush on their phones and mindlessly playing for hours, but that's not tech literate.  Sure, there are some who know more than I do, but not very many, and I'm not setting a particularly high bar.

So what pisses me off?

This:

Holy shit!  I've been told that I can't teach unless I have certifications and continuing education in all forms of my field. I'm supposed to have lesson plans ready and write curriculum and proficiency based standards and differentiate my teaching.

Programming, apparently, doesn't require any of that.

Programming doesn't need expertise.

Programming is something the smart kid can teach for you.

Students helped with instruction and debugging. They addressed multiple languages and "no one knows the entire curriculum" and "all learn basics together".

What is this, an after school program at the Boys and Girls Club?

Teachers: Stop being idiots. Go learn how to program. Do your budget on Excel. Figure out how to center your words both vertically and horizontally in a Word document.

PD Leaders: Stop encouraging the technidiots.  It's not cute. It's not helpful, and we really need you to stop saying it.

Things We Need you to Stop Saying, part 3

"We're trying to protect the children."

Lewis said that, so far, the district hasn't requested any passwords from students, but said that schools are in "the business of protecting kids."
"If there's a disruption to school, if there are threats or discrimination of any type that fall under bullying and harassment policies we have, we have to follow through and investigate," she said.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/illinois-says-students-have-to-give-up-facebook-passwords-or-face-prosecution

Things we Need You To Stop Saying, part two

"If we taught reading the way we have traditionally taught math, we would need to teach kids to read each individual book separately."

or

"A school board member said to me a while back:

Scott, I hear what you’re saying about active, hands-on, project-based learning. But I got to tell you, when I’m driving over a bridge, I want to have confidence that the people who designed and built it knew what they were doing. So if that takes a lot of practice on worksheets until students know their math and science, so be it.

I responded:

I agree that I don’t want the bridge collapsing under me either! If we want graduates who know how to build solid, long-lasting bridges, we absolutely can have them do a bunch of practice problems on worksheets until we think they know the math and science and we’ll hope that they will remember it later.
… (pause) …
Or we could have them build bridges.
… (pause) …
Who do you think will be better bridge builders?

How do we help our communities understand that authentic learning is possible?

from Scott MacLeod, http://dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2015/04/building-a-bridge.html.

I have to ask a couple of questions.

1. Are all of my students going to be building bridges? 
2. Do the specific techniques of building bridges really translate to all of the "not yet invented" jobs of the 21st Century? 
3. Isn't raw, pure math authentic, too?

The first two are silly questions, of course, because the setup and the response are in the form of a parable, never meant to be taken specifically ... usually. The third is something that far too many people refuse to acknowledge as true simply because they have little understanding of the topic.

Can I ever get specific in high school math?

Should my job be to provide the students with as broad a foundation as possible, with as few specifics as possible, or should I bring my engineering knowledge to the classroom and demand that everyone understand mathematics from the perspective of a mechanical engineer trained before the wide-spread and use of computers in classrooms, before the internet, before smartphones and smartboards, ... and if you ask some of my students, Before the Flood, too?


I am often reminded of this question when people tell me to bring the "RealWorld questions" into the classroom and the students, with varying degrees of certitude, tell me that "I'm never going to need to know that."

Things We Need You to Stop Saying, part 1

There are a couple of things we really need you to stop saying. The first:

"The right answer isn't important. It's knowing what you're doing."

No matter how you parse this, it's ridiculous. The right answer is the whole point of doing the problem ... has always been, is now, and will always be. The "knowing what you are doing part" leads to the right answer. If it doesn't, then you don't know what you are doing.

Variations on this include: "It's the concept that matters" and "We're putting the emphasis on the method." It shows up as sarcastic responses from Institute Professionals and college professors, too:

@MathCurmudgeon Good thing math is only about answer-getting, then! Phew!
— xxxx (@xxxx)

What we should be saying is "The right answer is vitally important ... so important that we also want students to explain the method and how we all know the answer is correct; they must be able to detect an error if it occurs and describe how to fix it so that the solution IS correct."

If you go to the trouble of having the students communicate, verbally or in writing, how they solved a problem, then you are focused on the right answer ... there would be no need to explain anything, or fix errors, if you didn't care about it. You'd take any randomly achieved answer as long as it was correct, and move on.

Just cancel the 6s.

Does anyone ... ANYONE ... seriously think that the right answer doesn't matter here? I don't consider this a "right answer" even though it looks like it.

I'm going with "No."

You'd take a wrong answer that looked like a right answer if you weren't paying attention.

Just cancel the x² from numerator and denominator.

One hallmark of mathematical understanding is the ability to justify, in a way appropriate to the student’s mathematical maturity, why a particular mathematical statement is true or where a mathematical rule comes from. There is a world of difference between a student who can summon a mnemonic device to expand a product such as (a + b)(x + y) and a student who can explain where the mnemonic comes from.

That is a far cry from "The right answer isn't important."

For example, mathematically proficient high school students analyze graphs of functions and solutions generated using a graphing calculator. They detect possible errors by strategically using estimation and other mathematical knowledge.

You can't detect errors unless you know the right answer, or at least have a sense of what that right answer should be.

Even the infamous "Letter to Jack" assumed that the kid could get the right answer, then could find the error made by the other kid ... the assignment went two steps beyond the right answer: explain the error to the other kid and help him fix it.

JD2718 banned FOIL, Dan Meyer used immediate feedback, countless teachers rearrange PEMDAS (as BEDMSA) to avoid this:

We need them to explain what and why.

I often "let them in on a secret" and share the mnemonics after they get the understanding ... especially if the mnemonics speed up computation so we can get on with what we are actually doing, but every teacher worth his salt knows that you have to periodically make sure that random, blind luck isn't at play.

The last reason that we need to stop saying "The right answer isn't as important as knowing what you're doing" is that too often we teachers are speaking to people who don't know that it is merely step 1, namely school boards, administrators and parents.

I watched a young teacher from another school give a presentation to her school board. Among other weird things, she came out with this statement ... immediately, board members latched onto it.

"What do you mean? Of course the right answer matters."
"I've been in business for forty years; every time, the right answer matters."

She doubled down ... "No, they need to know HOW they are solving the problem." No one was buying it, nor should they have. Whether she didn't understand their concerns herself or honestly didn't believe that the right answer was so vital, she certainly couldn't communicate her stance to the Board.

A blind acceptance and repetition of poorly-understood Twitter broadsides and mindless slogans is the rhetorical equivalent of canceling the sixes.

That makes us all look bad and we're gonna need you to stop saying it.