Would a teacher ever cheat?
Of course this question will raise a few hackles. However, teachers are human, and humans respond to incentives. We do things that reward us, and avoid things that punish us. I’m intending to write a few blog posts about how incentives affect education – for good or for bad.
So, would a teacher ever have an incentive to cheat?
In this post, I want to talk about this statement : it is good to reward good teachers.
Some might say that teachers teach as a passion, and a reward is demeaning. While it’s true that there exist good teachers who are so devoted to their craft that they would work for free, it is still good to reward good teachers.
When someone says “gifted child”, a picture springs to most people’s minds of a child who always does well in school, who finds all topics easy to understand – a dream student. It did for me. I attended a talk a while back that shattered this misconception.
Although I didn’t listen to Obama’s “state of the union” address, I happened upon the transcript and started flipping through it. There’s a lot of encouraging stuff about science and math education.
The classic way to teach fraction division is like this. To work out, say,
we ‘turn the second fraction upside-down’, to get
and then the division question becomes a multiplication question.
I’m always impressed by creative teaching ideas. Here’s one I encountered the other day, for chemistry.
I learned a new word the other day. “Extelligence”. If intelligence is the ability to use the knowledge inside our minds, then extelligence is the ability to use the knowledge that resides outside individual human minds. I’ll give some examples of extelligence below.
At lunch the other day, there were some magazines on the table. I picked one up, turned to a random page, and a particular phrase caught my eye – in essence, the writer was saying that they don’t believe we should give scientists a blank check, and a carte blanche to do whatever research takes their fancy. He seemed to imply that some scientists say that we should. I don’t know if any scientists actually do say that, however, it raises an important question. Who, ideally, should decide what scientists should work on, and how much money they should get?
Continue reading Science Education And Political Choices
Someone asked me recently if I had any tips on teaching “estimation with friendly numbers”. I had to admit that I don’t have a magical tip that would instantly help – I’ve struggled to get the same concept through to my own son, after all! However, while framing my reply, it occurred to me why estimation might be difficult for a child who is otherwise good at math.
I’ve been exchanging emails with a mother of an autistic child. Her name is Penny, and she has a blog of her own, about how she tries to teach her autistic daughter. The technique she is using seems to work – her daughter, now 11, is slowly catching up with other more “normal” kids, in terms of academic skills.
