Changes in Education
posted in Frenzied Daddy |
Finished This Book is OverDue on the train recently. I liked what it had to say about librarians as being guides / technological sherpas even in this century. I like librarians; some of my best friends are librarians. And I learned that there are a bunch of niche research libraries, on small topics like “dogs.” — A library on Dogs (where it might be three shelves in your neighborhood library.
But something it touched a glancing blow on was education. Specifically, the chapter had to do with how this particular program in Rome is teaching third world people to be cyber librarians. In a long conversation about ALA formats and a site they recommend for storing your references so you can switch formats easily, and how these people from all these different countries were working together, was a passage that really made me think about something I worry about anyway.
What’s the point in making my kids learn to do graphing and visualizing a graph from an equation when we have great sites like wolfram alpha to do it for them? How can I repeat my father’s lessons of “you do it until you don’t need the calculator and then you can use the calculator?” (which I believe formed a lot of my personality), but in the 21st century? I do worry about this- why else would Miss B’s seven times math tables be so weak?
The glancing blow in this chapter was something along the lines of “If you imagine that teaching now is the teacher at the front of the room laying out information for the students to remember and regurgitate, you’ve already failed. Education these days revolves around collaboration and creation.” (paraphrased because I’ve taken the library book back to the library). This was very reassuring to me because I do imagine, especially with math, this older format of learning. I can totally see someone (maybe Miss B) doing five to seven parabola graphs, then a group of students doing 30 or 40 in wolframalpha of them to see if they can start recognizing patterns. And it’s reassuring to me that she ( and they ) could actually learn this way.
(why yes, that is an affiliate link for that book. Go to Amazon.com if you disagree). It was an interesting book but doesn’t really talk about this topic).
