Recently I received an email message that read roughly as follows:
Several of us in our college/university math department are trying to figure out how to undo the harm that is being done in our state by requiring Alg. 1, Geometry, Alg. 2, and some course based on the previous three courses, for ALL HS students.
For most of my professional career I have been advocating major changes in the school math curriculum to better reflect the changes being brought about by computers. In brief summary, much of our school math curriculum content focuses on helping students learn to do by hand the computations and symbol manipulations that computers can do much more rapidly and accurately.
This TED video provides a really neat summary of my thoughts:
"What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?"
--Henry David Thoreau
My wife Sharon Yoder had a fine undergraduate liberal arts education. Those of you who are involved in the field of computers in education will recognize her name as the author or co-author of a great many books. Initially she focused mainly on Logo, but then expanded her interests to a wide variety of other topics. Learn more about her at http://iae-pedia.org/Sharon_Yoder.
Many years ago, when I first became a faculty member in the University of Oregon College of Education, I heard about C.P. Snow and his ideas on Two Cultures. I didn’t read his material, but I agreed with his ideas of science versus non-science ways of viewing the world and as areas of scholarship. Although I had been sort of brainwashed by my mathematician father during my childhood to believe that Mathematics was not only the queen of the sciences but the queen of intellectualism, I was gradually coming to accept the idea that in every academic discipline there are a great many very smart people.
Recently I read C.P. Snow’s famous lecture (about 30 pages in length):
As you know, I read a lot. Recently I read the short book:
Wolcott, H.F. (2010). Ethnography Lessons: A Primer. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
