Darren Kuropatwa did not post a new blog this week, so I went into his archives to June 30, 2009. This blog shared a two minute video clip titled "Ted, Ideas Worth Spreading", from TED.com, featuring Arthur Benjamin made in February of 2009. In this clip Arthur Benjamin, a math professor, states that at the top of the math pyramid of learning we find calculus. He asserts that instead, the top of the pyramid of mathematical learning should be statistics and probability. Benjamin affirms that the laws of nature are written and defined in calculus and that it is necessary for science and engineering. However, he believes that in our everyday lives we should and do use statistics involving the random understanding of data. He says that statistics could help our economic woes and can be fun. He notes that games and gambling are based on statistics and probabilities.
Benjamin advocates that math curriculum needs to change from "analog to digital" in the sense of moving from classical continuous forms of data to discreet and to the randomness of data that would be more significant in our everyday lives. The clip ended with him advocating that curriculum and math learning would be far more significant if students understood what two deviations from the "mean means," and he said he "means" it.
For me this post just serves to re-emphasize what all educators should understand--that what we teach should be current and relevant to the student. Students will learn and retain more information if it is meaningful and relevant to their everyday lives, rather than just learning standard, traditional material that uses rote learning, consisting of meaningless facts and equations.
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From the assignments I have in school, some of the most memorable have been from talks found on TED.com. Now, I agree with about 1% of what the speakers tend to say simply because of the liberal lean of the talks (at least of those I have seen), but the topics make one THINK and it sounds like this fellow is no different.
ReplyDeleteMath is one of those subjects that I would love to go back and study after I get my first El Ed degree. The topic is fascinating and I think statistics would be one area worth looking into. I took a my Stats class from Dr. Larry Foster here at UAA and I loved it! I think such knowledge would greatly benefit my career in teaching.
Virginia, you took the words right out of my mouth! It's just a shame that those who create the standards of learning can't seem to grasp the basic logic of if it's not relevant to a person's life, they won't retain it.
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