Discovery Gone Bad

Coalition for a Republican-Free America: A...B...C...what?

An excerpt from the above posting:
As my teacher explained it, this new system put math into the hands of the students, rather than the instructor. The learning itself became more self-directed, with the teacher there as guide, should any problems or questions arise. We often worked in groups (yes, let’s take a bunch of sixteen-year-olds, put them in a group, and expect them to get any work done) and it was easy to let other, more math-oriented members do the work, while the rest sat by and wrote down answers. Not just answers, but paragraphs explaining why we got the answer we did. My friends and I now call it the “infamous Core math ‘explain.’” My math teacher further aggravated this problem by taking the term self-directed to mean, “I don’t have to teach, but rather, I can sit at my computer all hour and write email.”

Just so everyone is clear, I do not believe in this kind of learning. And if you ever catch me sitting at the computer emailing while my students are working, please fire me.