Arash, I agree with you! Especially the first point. What worries me the most is that we call the interaction with people in an online environment, socializing! While I can accept that online interaction is a form of socialization and has a culture in itself and things to learn, but it cannot an should not replace the real human interaction.

Last summer, I was one of the instructors of the Summer Bridge Program for students entering the College of Science majors. This three-week program is designed in a way to teach the problem solving and mathematical modeling solely through activities in a way that brings the examples and ideas from different sciences that use mathematics to students. Although, I admit that mathematics is not always a tool for science, up to certain level, teaching math in the context of science helps students make sense of it in a deeper way and also provides the opportunity of implementing the student-centered learning in a math course.

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Whitney,
Thanks for the link. I am interested in monarch butterflies.

I appreciated your openness and honesty in your reaction to the Obama’s quote regarding students dropping out due to lack of motivation and interest. Those type of students discussed definitely haven’t had the same struggles as other students from less privileged backgrounds and can take their experiences for granted much more than others. I am curious what most of those students do drop that have a privileged background wind up doing as they do have funds to possibly rely on more than other students. I will say it is good to see that it’s not all of the students from more privileged backgrounds as some do have more motivation or something to work towards as they don’t want to have to rely on their parents or family influence but make their own life.

I think you have made some great points, but I would like to challenge your point of fields like STEM only really “teaching to the test” as it’s a lot more than that. Even if they might be “teaching to the test,” the test might include the information about a specific design model that is essential for students to learn before going into the field and memorizing it is really the only way to approach the situation so the tests are designed for that. I know this is not the best way for all situations and the “banking” model/concept you introduced does apply to a lot of other situations related to classrooms with lecture style or “teaching to the test” classes.

I really enjoyed reading your blog post! I agree entirely that there are so many elements that are out of our control as educators. It’s hard to know the best practice to reach the most students and keep them engaged.

Your comments encouraged me to find out about the benefits of hands-on learning. Learning by doing (hands-on learning) was addressed in a study led by the University of Chicago. The study found that learning by doing contributed to improved performance on quizzes (Ingmire, 2015). “Brain scans showed that students who took a hands-on approach to learning had activation in sensory and motor-related parts of the brain when they later thought about concepts such as angular momentum and torque. Activation of these brain areas was associated with better quiz performance by college physics students who participated in the research” (Ingmire, 2015).

Ingmire, J. (2015, April 29). Learning by doing helps students perform better in science. UChicago News. Retrieved from https://news.uchicago.edu/article/2015/04/29/learning-doing-helps-students-perform-better-science

Yes to point no. 1: knowledge is contextual and contingent. And what we perceive as being “true” has everything to do with emotion and little to do with reason.

I find it very interesting that you said most of your teachers did not really know another way to teach the subjects than how they originally taught it so that when you asked for other help they felt lost. I’ve talked to my sister, who teaches fourth grade and some of the ways she has been “taught” to teach students makes no sense to me, but I can relate to exactly what you meant. A lot of times people are taught how to teach and don’t really know any other way, especially if our mind works differently than the people we are trying to teach. For example, I would always try to help people with math problems freshmen year, but the way I approached and solved the problems was very different from the people I was trying to help so it didn’t work too well sometimes.

Your post reminded me of elementary school in the nineties when they would roll in a tv on a stand so we could watch an educational video. That’s immediately what I thought of when you said you can’t just replace lecture with video of someone talking. It is interesting to see how we sort of fall into the same habits over and over when faced with new technologies.

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