Part two of a three-part series called “Breaking my silence on social-emotional learning.” You can find part one, “I am not a therapist,” here.
Photo by Eren Li In my previous post I explained how, as a teacher, I am not qualified to run a social-emotional or restorative circle and hinted at the idea that even if I was, I still shouldn’t run them in my classroom. I promise to flesh out that point in the next post, however, as I was writing I realized another problematic aspect of this needs to be addressed – confidentiality.
Part one of a three-part series called “Breaking my silence on social-emotional learning”
Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko I’ve been suspicious of “social-emotional circles” since I learned about them several years ago. My first concern was how to fit this practice into a curriculum in which two snow days can mean I have to cut content. However, my second and more substantive concern, was that, put simply, I am not a therapist and am not equipped to lead an exercise like this.
The ability to explain things clearly is a necessary condition for being a good math teacher.
Many conversations in some circles are around creating activities that help students construct knowledge and understand concepts more deeply. This is great!
But young teachers need to know that explaining concepts clearly is foundational to those activities.
Not that I’m in a position to do it much, but when I talk to young teachers I tell them to teach primarily with direct instruction/guided practice/independent practice/formative assessment their first couple of years.
Photo by meriç tuna on Unsplash When you learn about confirmation bias two things are usually explicitly stated. Confirmation bias is inescapable and that we should do everything we can to escape it. This is like saying it’s impossible to escape gravity but you should do everything you can to try to escape it.
Is it possible to hack our bias to confirm our beliefs in such a way that we don’t need to feel like we’re constantly fighting gravity?
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash I’ve been working on this post for the better part of a week, trying to decide if it was worth posting. Then yesterday a New York Times headline came across my phone and it nudged me to hit “Publish.”
“India’s Lost Generation: Lengthy pandemic shutdowns have led to young people leaving school altogether, dimming the prospects for the country’s economic future”
As some epidemiologists, who I’ll come back to later, warned us about in fall of 2020, lockdown policies have have had a devastating impact on young people and it’s time to take that policy decision, school closures due to Covid, off the table.
Image credit: https://dilbert.com/strip/2012-06-22 A few years ago I read Jo Boaler’s book, “Mathematical Mindsets” and I thought it contained some good ideas. There were a few things that I thought were not realistic or would be difficult to scale, but overall I found the book useful. Our department read it together, and I remember a colleague pointing out that Boaler often cited her own research. That revelation made me more skeptical of her work, especially when she provided citations.
A few years ago, I noticed that the words diversity, equity, and inclusion were steadily gaining in popularity, especially in K-12 education. At first, I couldn’t see a problem with the concepts. But as I dug deeper I discovered that much of the movement behind these words, although advanced by people with the best of intentions, was contradictory, illogical, and somewhat unethical. Take the defining of every action as either “racist” or “anti-racist, for example.
In our textbook slope fields come during the differential equations unit, which for the last 8 years made sense to me. But every year there were groans from students and comments about how “pointless” they are.
Well, here’s why students think they’re pointless.
They already know antiderivatives. So they can take many differential equations and find the family of functions whose derivative is given. Many of the basic slope field problems can be somewhat easily antiderived, especially once students know about separation of variables.
I have a couple concerns regarding “Social Justice Math” that I don’t think I’ve seen addressed. (If they have been, please let me know.)
From what I’ve read SJM is billed as a way to bring real world problems into the classroom with a “justice” lens. Problems related to climate change, economic inequality, racial equity, etc., would be used in class as frameworks for learning different math concepts. (Read more on that here.