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.
As a kid, I watched Sesame Street. One segment was on sharing. Bert has a cookie, and Ernie comes and asks him “will you share your cookie with me, Bert?”
[This is a back-issue of this website’s newsletter]
There’s a new game now on Dr Mike’s Math Games for Kids – Primary Colors. This is a logic puzzle where the goal is to change the color of every bead on the board to red, green or (dark) blue. As well as challenging kids to think logically, it will help teach about how colors are made up on the computer – as a mixture of red, gree and blue.
Continue reading Newsletter #45 Primary Colors and Valentine’s Day
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.
[This is a back-issue of this website’s newsletter]
Last week, I announced a new game you can play online at Dr Mike’s Math Games for Kids – Color Switcher. I got some nice emails with some excellent suggestions for improving the games, from a teacher who will use it in class. If you play Color Switcher now, you’ll see that the online version keeps track of how many moves you’ve taken in a game – that way, kids can compete against their friends.
Continue reading Newsletter #44 : Play Color Switcher Offline
My son wrote an essay on math the other day. I thought I’d reproduce it here. You can think of him, therefore, as my first ‘guest blogger’. I’ve edited it only very slightly.
