Making Something boring Interesting

Today an email from a colleage was roundly taken the piss out of because he sent links of these videos:

Flying Bread

22 Bricks

and suggested they could be used to teach estimating and accuracy. Other than being a little annoyed at the maths department for taking the mick out of something well meaning I was also thought that the email itself was rubbish.

'How about this for teaching accuracy and estimation'

He should know he audience, we are all incredibly busy people with better things to do than interpret what someone might do. The mian reason why maths teaching is so poor in primary schools is simply because the message isn't tailored to the audience (women of child bearing age since you ask), if the bloke who sent the clips to the teachers had also included a message bout how he had used them and if they worked well in his previous classes then people would have been a lot more receptive to him.

I just need to work out how to use them myself now...there's the germ of a good idea there.

Yes

I'll post this in full because it's so right. From one of the best blogs about education I read.

Here is one of my private assumptions about education innovation that could use some public criticism:

If [x] is going to change teaching practice at scale, then [x] needs to be easy, fun, and free for both the teacher and her students. [x] needs to be all three of those things at the same time.
Realize that if you're a teacher and you're reading a blog post, you're automatically seeded in the top 10% of innovative educators. You'll try anything once. Let's also go with Jack Welch and assume that 10% of educators are hopelessly and/or willfully incompetent.

Convince yourself, then, that 80% of teachers exist on a sliding scale of innovation and are basically up for grabs. Those who don't want to try [x] aren't necessarily bad educators. They may have made a rational calculation that [x] isn't easy enough, fun enough, or free enough to adopt.

There are implications here, some obvious, some subtle:

"Good" doesn't matter. This is a little sad. But most of those 80% already have [y], which they consider "good enough." They won't pick up [x], however superior it is to [y], unless it is easier or more fun. This puts the burden on the reformer to make something easy, fun, and free that is also good. Good is the Trojan horse of education innovation.

You'll have to package [x] for Internet distribution. Because it's the only way to distribute at scale for (nearly) free.

Learning should always be fun, though I'm not talking about "fun" as it exists in "unlimited rides and deep-fried Oreos at Six Flags." Rather I'm talking about the profound sense of satisfaction and accomplishment inherent to good learning. Just to be clear.

Learning isn't always easy but learning tools should be. Just for instance, last week, I saw groups of students clicking the same download link over and over again in Safari not realizing that they had already downloaded the attachment. The download window was open but obscured by the browser. Anecdotes like this make me skeptical of Scott McLeod's argument that computers are to teachers what checkout registers are to grocers. Many of you have vastly overrated the ease of educational computing.

The field of easy, fun, and free innovations that are also good for students isn't exactly crowded but, for the record, I have bet on two horses. I expect these picks to strike certain readers as simultaneously naive, deranged, or self-obsessed but these innovations, more than any other I've used or observed, are ones that sell themselves:
Google Reader.
What Can You Do With This.

No further comment

Dispatches

I suppose it would be remiss of me not to comment on Dispatches on channel four. I thought the central premise of the show was sound.

• Primary children aren't very good at maths.

• If they're not good at maths at age ten, they'll have given up by they're fifteen.

• If they've given up by 15 they'll be poor when they become adults.

• This won't help them in the workplace.

• If they have children they won't be able to help them with maths, provide them with maths skills or encourage an enthusiasm for maths.

Simple, and it weren't so important it would be trite. But what I didn't feel the show did was take that premise on step further

• Adults become teachers.

• Teachers without maths skills or maths enthusiasm can't teach maths

• Teachers like this need to sort themselves out and they need help to sort themselves out
  

But how to help teachers become good teachers. This problem strikes me as quite simple but you have to firstly judge your audience-they's no reason becoming angry or self righteous about this issue, there's no reason why Primary teachers should be good at maths. If you leave school with a B in maths, go on and read English at University you can be a great teacher with poor maths skills.

Rightly or wrongly most of our teachers are working mothers, this is a simple fact. If we need to teach these professional working mothers better maths skills we need to make it easy for them. Currently we're not. They need to take six month long modules, often weekly or in the evening or at weekends so they're not being taken advantage of. The method of teaching needs to be in hour long chunks, ideally online so these can be learned when they want to be learned with clear links being made to methods of teaching and learning. These are professional earnest people who want to get better at their jobs, but they need help doing it and it needs to given to them in a way that's easy for them to digest or they'll carry on working hard in a pointless way misrepresenting a subject the children they care for need in the future for a good life.

It's complete madness it's not being made easy for primary teachers to learn maths and leaves another generation of children being exposed to poor maths teaching and leaves another generation of poorly trained teachers dreading the mandatory 50 minutes of numeracy each day.

And who on earth can engineer enjoyment in something they dread.