PowerPoint seems to be a popular teaching aid. After all, it saves lots of messy writing on the board or the use of boring overhead projectors. And who doesn’t enjoy bulleted lists swooshing on screen complete with sound effects and little clipart stick figures?
I don’t.
Read more »
I spend quite a bit of my time helping high school students understand physics and mathematics concepts, so I’ve also spent some time wondering how I can better help them understand things. It’s a tough challenge, because I’ve never been like other people in terms of understanding — I’ve always been such a voracious reader that I can use my prior knowledge to make sense out of things.
I do not, however, see many other people doing the same.
Read more »
I’ve been active on the Internet for several years now and I’ve seen my fair share of teenagers and young ‘uns posting on the Internet. I’ve often read essays written by them, looked at school newspapers, and generally observed what they write. And I’ve come to a disturbing conclusion: a significant portion of teenagers (meaning “high school students”), despite their extensive English education, still can’t write more than a few cohesive sentences.
To me, this is the result of outdated thinking on the teachers’ part.
I’m often rather disturbed by how mathematics is taught in school. Take, for example, the way I was taught the following (important) equation:
Those of you familiar with calculus will immediately recognize what this means. Those of you who aren’t should know that the above set of squiggly lines means something very important in the upper levels of confusing math.
When I first was taught the equation I was taught it by being exposed to it exactly as I just exposed it to you: an equation. There were some words with it too, but they made just as much sense as the equation did at the time. A few moments later the teacher explained what the equation means: one can find the definite integral of an equation using its antiderivatives.
But we were never taught why that’s the case.
Labs are a great idea for teaching students chemistry, physics, and all the other assorted sciences. They allow students to learn for themselves just how various laws and theories work, and to hopefully discover various phenomena themselves.
Okay, correction: Labs would be a great idea if they were used for the above purpose. But they aren’t.
I have recently been reminded of the agony that is literary analysis — that is, the science of dissecting an author’s work and determining what rhetorical techniques he used and for what purpose he used them.
I say “agony” because it is agony — you can spend hours staring at a few paragraphs attempting to eke out hidden meanings that are supposedly there.
I have, however, become convinced that is mainly a farce.
global RSS feed.