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Re: What's the Meaning of 'Direct Instruction'?
Posted:
Mar 19, 2012 4:49 PM
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Top high school students go to our good four year institutions, and I would
bet are fairly good with creativity, critical thinking, all these new
demands. They are, after all, creating, running, and staffing companies like
google, Facebook etc and are developing private sector space travel.
We in community colleges get the weaker ones (I am talking in generalities
of course, and referring to preparation, not ability). We put them through
Accuplacer (here in the East, anyway). We discover that students who have
been using calculators for the last 5 or 7 years can¹t do fractions by paper
and pencil. We complain.
So why wouldn¹t our K-12 schools seek to improve on basic skills?
I still don¹t understand the stress on having all our high school, if not
community college, graduates have an acquired innate sense of what
mathematics is, whatever that means. I would be very happy with a reasonable
level of numeracy (as espoused, for example, in Paulo¹s book of the same
name a dozen years ago).
We went to the moon, conducted a ³war on poverty², and protested the Viet
Nam war on a system that stressed skill, not creativity. We haven¹t done any
of those things lately.
Phil
On 3/19/12 12:48 PM, "Guy Brandenburg" <gfbrandenburg@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Unfortunately, what I see at KIPP and the other charter schools I have visited
> in DC looks very much like that. There seems to be a real push to get
> compliance by the students. Creativity did not seem to be promoted at all. And
> i was looking at classes of teachers who were considered exemplary (and they
> were, in fact, exceedingly good at achieving compliance).
>
> Guy Brandenburg, Washington, DC
> http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/
> http://home.earthlink.net/~gfbranden/GFB_Home_Page.html
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> From: "Blustein, Bonnie" <BlusteB@wlac.edu>
> To: "Clyde Greeno @ MALEI" <greeno@malei.org>; mathedcc@mathforum.org;
> Richard Hake <rrhake@earthlink.net>
> Sent: Monday, March 19, 2012 10:32 AM
> Subject: RE: What's the Meaning of 'Direct Instruction'?
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> What's the Meaning of 'Direct Instruction'?
> So true!
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> The national hunger for Khan-type "direct instruction" manifests popular
> preference for being told how to gain favor by performing as directed, rather
> than for achieving functional personal intelligence. Our math-education
> traditions thoroughly train school students for such subservient stupidity ...
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