Before I read the writeup more carefully, I was very excited to see a school that looked this good. Unfortunately, it’s a former school that’s being converted into apartments.
But can you imagine?
Draw your own conclusions.
I’m reading the New York Times article “A Better Way to Teach Math,” and I can’t help thinking athousandtimesyes. Not only is this math tutor’s method giving the lie to the idea that there are “math people” and “not-math people” (which I myself once believed), but he’s also able to introduce game dynamics and intellectual micro-steps in a way that’s perfectly effective and not tedious.
As the children experienced repeated success, it seemed to Mighton that their brains actually began to work more efficiently. Sometimes adding one more drop of knowledge led to a leap in understanding. One day, a child would be struggling; the next day she would solve a problem that was harder than anything she’d previously handled. Mighton saw that if you provided painstaking guidance, children would make their own discoveries. That’s why he calls his approach “guided discovery.”
This is very consistent with Paul Lockhart’s A Mathematician’s Lament, which changed the way I think - both about mathematics and and about mathematics education. As Mighton points out, there’s no reason to veer between hand-off education that relies on self-discovery and a stifling “banking” model.
I’m keen to read The Myth of Ability, the book that the curriculum’s developer wrote.
My first year out of college I worked at the university I graduate from, so I was still more of less in the academic rhythm. The summer was quiet. Then, professors and students started to trickle back, leading to a frenzy of activity through the middle of the semester, followed by a winter lull and another peak of activity in the spring.
Since then, I’ve spent a couple of years working in the corporate world, and the academic rhythm that I grew accustomed to over seventeen (!) years has more or less faded away.
Observing the whole back-to-school phenomenon as a nonparticipant feels weird. It’s remarkably commercial; “school” is almost an afterthought.
One of the best things I’ve ever read about education, this essay literally brought a tear to my eye and made me want to become a teacher (again). Be sure to check out the entire book, with the more optimistic second half.
