MIT Open House - musings.

A local university held an information session specifically for those interested in a MIT (Master in Teaching) in Secondary Math and Science.

I was quite surprised how well it was attended. Probably close to 50 people showed up. (I wonder if this is related in anyway to application to AmeriCorp being up 200%). Even the organizers seemed surprised by the turnout.

The good part of the evening was that the School of Education had brought back three recent graduates from their MIT program to share their experiences.

Some random thoughts from that session.

1.
Sitting next to me was a lady who currently subs in high school math. She was complaining about a lack of arithmetic fluency among her students.

This reminded me about a slew of lay-articles a few years ago arguing for more cursive writing in high-school. (e.g. The Handwriting Is on the Wall). The SATs had just added an essay section, and only a small proportion of students wrote in cursive, but they tended to have higher scores. The logic being that if you have an appropriate vocabulary and an adequate writing speed, then the complexity of your expression goes up, and with that the complexity of the ideas you are talking about. A poor vocabulary and slow handwriting stunts your ideation. [Of course, hopefully the next generation will find voice-recognition ubiquitous, and the writing speed part of this may be moot. On the other hand, Twitter's successor may reduce all meaningful comment to 80 characters - a sort of modern Haiku.]

This got me wondering what the equivalent fluency in math was? All I could come up with was being able to do mental arithmetic without pencil and paper or a calculator.

Math is hardly only about numbers, but magnitudes are what make it tangible and concrete in most instances. To get to more complex ideas in math, as a child you need to be reasonably facile in numbers. In my upbringing, this meant that there was a certain body of computation that you could quickly do in your head.

As the curriculum bloats, and things get squeezed out, this might be another thing that goes.

2.
One of the faculty talked about Teaching being a Calling. I keep running into this time and again. And while I do agree to this to a large extent, I don't believe a so-called calling should in any way cover for a lack of competence. Other professions don't prefer candidates who are called over those who are better qualified. Deep down it seems to boil down to this - if you give up a potentially lucrative (or at least better-paying) vocation, then it must mean that you are motivated by some concept of social-justice. And the idea of social-justice seems to have extremely deep roots in education.

At the same time a 'good' education seems to be more and more expensive.

Or does it just seem that way because we are so used junk-food compared to locally grown, slow-cooked food?

3.
One of the graduates has been teaching two years after getting he MIT. She's a career-changer, having previously been a chemist. It struck me as strange have lonely she sounded.

I am still trying to get my head around this. But I really have been very surprised how individual the school teaching enterprise is. I am surprised how little I hear the word 'we' compared to 'I' when teachers talk about their work with students. It is not that they don't say "we," I just expected much more of it.

Part of this might be logistics - if you want to maximize a teachers contact time with students, then they are not going to have much time to collaborate. Plus classroom schedules don't allow any mixing and matching of student and teacher contact time.

I have run into rare examples of co-teaching. But that is rare. And even more rare is where more than 2 people are collectively responsible for a group of students.

Okay, so I expected more of a team attitude, and am not feeling it. But what is strange to me is that there is some much buzz these days about collaborative work. How children have to learn to work together, how learning is collaborative, etc. etc. There is a huge push away from a one-to-many delivery style of lecturing. At the same time, I don't see the teachers setting an example of this with their children.

It is like sitting through a 1 hour lecture about inquiry-based learning. 'Do as I say, not as I do.'

I need to explore this much more.

4.
The other two graduates had just finished a few weeks ago, and are currently subbing in local districts. One described himself as first-generation immigrant - his grandparents are from the part of British India that go divided into Pakistan and India. His parents grew up in Delhi.

He said he went into teaching math because it makes him so angry that the current culture makes it okay for adults to say things like "I can't do math."

As he puts it, "You'd be embarrassed to say in public 'I can't read.'

But you say that about arithmetic, and people pat you on the back and say 'Me too. Don't worry I turned out okay, so you can too.' "

He argues that it is a cultural thing, because in his upbringing it was unacceptable to have that attitude.

I really related to this. My version of this story is that parents (especially mothers, but that may be because men will never ever admit that they can't do anything), of 6-year olds feel absolute confident about teaching their child to read and write. And will read a lot to them. These same parents will clamp up when faced with math 'homework.' I hear things like "My husband does that. He's the one who is good at math in our house."

I mean, how hard is it to teach kindergarten math? You could rightly argue that the pedagogy is pretty sophisticated. But the same is true for reading. But that does not stop these parents from 'teaching' their child to read.