Thursday, October 4, 2007

It's education day on Evil Line. The other day I told my conscientious, hard-working roommates that spending a lot of time grading was worthless, so I've paid my penance by reading several education articles.

Robert Frank is talking about economics education, but what he says echoes the thoughts of Carl Wieman on teaching physics. It's also similar to what my department is starting to do with the calculus sequence: less material, more slowly, with an emphasis on explaining verbally what you're doing rather than procedural fluency in doing it. Also see Keith Devlin on what we mean by "conceptual understanding."

That's all about college education. For high school and below, we have arguments that school choice doesn't work and that school integration doesn't help. So what does work?
by at

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

for high School I recommend manual labor....forget trying to teach anything at all.

Actually my highschool experience was this: since I watched PBS and read books through middle School I learned almost nothing in High School.

Thus I think that taking the boys out and teaching them how to do carpentry or welding would be 100 times more beneficial.

I agree with the college teaching style of slower and more in depth. My Calculus class was 4 classes instead of 3 with a focus on understanding not fluency with technique. It was very enjoyable!

And thus CU Applied Mathematics was a shock to my system :-)

11:17 AM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)