Podcasts and Videos, Essay Example

What I Learned About Teaching Math & Science

In listening to these podcasts and watching the videos of kids learning mathematics and science, I myself learned that the key to successful teaching of both these disciplines is to start the students as young as possible. This got me to thinking how young that should be. In both podcasts, the target age of students was given as pre-kindergarten. That, of course, is very young. I think what that means as a practical matter is that the teaching of mathematics and science must therefore begin before these two disciplines have separated. In other words, most children before kindergarten will not be able to learn and use them as distinct modes of thinking. Because that is how the children view their world, both must be taught as if they were one. Is this possible?

The answer, of course, is not new to preschool teachers. Although their children can be forced to learn simple rules of behavior, creative learning must be a taught as a form of play. The students must be tricked into the work of learning by turning the work into play, by making it enjoyable and (until nap time) effective. And as one of the math videos shows, that principle extends even into the middle-school years, where a class on the use of cosines may be turned into a hypothetical ride on a Ferris wheel, with its clockwise and counterclockwise movements turned into the undulating lines of a graph (Teaching Math). The early introduction of technology, both as a learning toy, tool, and instructional aid is stressed as well. (Apple Computer pioneered this concept with great success, introducing young students to personal computers and, importantly, the Apple brand of personal computers.) Today’s preschool students would, no doubt, be both bored and puzzled by a preschool of decades past. Or would they?

Although I accept the principle that very young students have a lot of hidden abilities that directly relate to math and science, I’m a bit skeptical of those abilities being put to practical use in the sense of using them to produce impressive test-scores that will justify future funding of whatever program that was used to produce those impressive test scores. My reasoning is based not only on my own memories of childhood, but on much more recent observations of children of preschool age, or in fact of children of any age. While it’s true that children (of any age) do indeed have impressive reasoning powers and an ability to learn and use them, they also have equally impressive abilities to use them only for their own, immediate purposes. It’s like too-early toilet training: the children train their parents, who then believe the program is working.

Also, I think that the skills of individual teachers might get overlooked in the drive to introduce math and science at ever-younger levels. Teaching remains very much a performance art (teachers are always on in classroom settings, and it is often a shock for students when they observe their beloved teacher in a backstage, off campus, weekend setting). Teachers, being paid professionals, must have their own agenda to create a classroom environment that works for them and (one hopes) their students. How much would a bold, new initiative, sold to the school-district by various quasi-governmental groups, upset the environment of a talented teacher who herself has no strong aptitude for math and science? One of the podcasts addresses this matter head on, and acknowledges that further teacher training will often be necessary (Ready, Steady, Science). That is going to change the entire professional dynamic of a lot of teachers.

We know that teachers aren’t all equal (Children and Math). But what about the students? Certainly at the preschool age, there is rarely a correlation between individuals’ playtime performance and their later development. It’s simply too early to expect to successfully link expectations with predicted achievement. This unpredictability can hold for years as students train their teachers to accept that all their efforts to teach them may show only limited results.

I think that the ideas broached by the podcasts and videos are valid, but I also think they are useful primarily in the discussion and debates they provoke than they are as specific guides.

References

Teaching Math. Annenberg Learner. Retrieved from http://www.learner.org/resources/series34.html

Children and Math. The National Academies Press. The Sounds of Science Podcasts. Retrieved from http://media.nap.edu/podcasts/ nax97childmath.mp3

Ready, Set, Science. The National Academies Press. The Sounds of Science Podcasts. Retrieved from http://media.nap.edu/podcasts/ nax42readysetsc.mp3