Search All of the Math Forum:
Views expressed in these public forums are not endorsed by
NCTM or The Math Forum.
|
|
|
Of Mathematics and Outdoor School
Posted:
Dec 5, 2010 5:12 PM
|
|
Having just spent many hours immersed in high school culture, as a speech and debate event judge, I feel in a position to reaffirm that we have a lot of the "right stuff" in our subcultures.
Gearing up to provide more outdoor mathematics experiences will necessitate creating vastly more jobs in army surplus stocking and ordering. This will coincide with the military having a lot of surplus given the surge into cyber-warfare instead (the real front lines, where the meme wars rage -- math wars a subtype).
The trainings might seem paramilitary owing to all the recycling that's going on, which doesn't preclude getting new stuff from North Face or like that. There will be a change in fashion, towards more boots and head gear (when riding electric ATVs).
I realize this sounds like boarding school for rich people, not American public education. Diplomats might send their kids to Oregon for some time in the outback, learning the ropes around horses, native American ways of life, based in some well-equipped high bandwidth academy, where expert guests from around the world either drop by in person, or show up on the big screen in the auditorium. They mingle with tomorrow's leaders and develop those supranational networks that last longer than a lifetime in many cases.
But who can afford the $100K tuition that likely costs? Not everyone lives inside the beltway, with both parents pulling down hefty CIA salaries and flying to embassies all the time for big bonuses, not to mention perks. Not everyone lives in Dubai or Abu Dhabi in some luxurious Middle East condo (I've been invited to Amman, but my passport has expired so I can't even go to Canada at the moment -- something to work on).
No, the schools I'm talking about, although they do provide boarding, are not pre-programmed to only serve the ruling elite in America's post-democracy oligarchy (take the Philippines as a model, or any Banana Republic). These are civics-intensive "frontier towns" that model democracy on a small scale (cue DemocracyLab), giving students a foretaste of what life might be like in some science research outpost in some Chinese high desert, gathering data on flora and fauna.
The practice of rotating positions and responsibilities, serving on committees and subcommittees, holding facilitated (clerked) business meetings, will have become familiar from prior schooling.
Dave U has been out in his "business mobile" scoping out ghost towns in the Southwest we might want to convert to this purpose. Cooperation at the state level, from New Mexico and Arizona, would be a first order of business. Care and maintenance of solar steam dishes, placement of sensors, taking readings, will be among the outdoor mathematics-related activities required.
Will an SAT-like entrance test be required to access these programs? Will some of the questions be about sphere packing, as well as backpacking?
Before large numbers of students start agitating for these opportunities, they'll need to see what they're missing on TV. That will require adults, many of them younger, but quite a few older, role modeling this American way of life and having it seem attractive.
At the moment, most full time adult encampments are either military or of the "tent city" variety, unless we count the religious and survivalist camps such as you might find among Quakers (ropes course, communal kitchen, camp fire pit, stage). None of these facilities are "camera ready" in the sense of showing off much futuristic gear. The engineering after EPCOT has been pretty feeble, piggy-backing on mostly military fantasies of "world domination" in some retro style reality (tanks are about as futuristic as armadillos). The DEW line domes still look ahead of their time, simply because of their geometry, which the public schools do not teach -- even if there's a geodesic play dome out in the school yard, as depicted here:
http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2010/12/countdown-to-zero-game.html
Addressing these deficiencies will require the efforts of the TV industry, which stands to gain from having more shows with Bucky Works (a genre of prop and/or artifact) in the programming. Hollywood is starved for positive futurist programming that's also realistic.
We will need more postmortems on why American History is not being taught in an intelligible manner. More use of documentaries in the public schools is already the trend, so these more self reflective analyses will likely find a receptive audience. "Connecting the dots" is the name of the game.
Where is the mathematics in all this? We've already discussed somewhere in this archive how public schools need not be co-ed. The genre of girl scout math some of us are pioneering is paving the way for some of these pilot academies, wilderness based, to be mostly staffed and run by females. From these templates, the co-ed and even male-only schools might arise. Think of what you already know of object oriented programming, with polymorphism and inheritance. Girl scout math (GSM) is all about self-organization, dynamical systems (biological systems) and modeling. When it comes to developing new fashions and better gear, you want a strong sense of aesthetics.
Will the startups actually be based in North America though? I mentioned the Philippines earlier, a hub for much of Southeast Asia and home to several abandoned military bases with lingering environmental issues. That means airstrips. Our multi-national cast of thousands might initially want to take advantage of these more tropical climes. Recruiting commercials aimed at a North American audience will then highlight this opportunity to engage in work / study overseas. The counterpart schools in Colorado, attractive to a mix of locals and foreign nationals, might come along later, when more of the kinks have been worked out in a more forgiving environment.
Kirby
Message was edited by: kirby urner
|
|
|
|