Response to a reading on Battleground Schools article

My first stop was to realize that by the year 1910, activity mathematic teaching practice had started.  Montessori and Dewey wrote that teaching techniques involve programming the environment so that students would encounter teacher structured materials and situations that sparked experimentation, inquiry, and interpretation.  Rather than sitting and taking in what the teacher presented, students would be actively engaged in movement, talk, and activity around the materials provided, working individually and socially to build mental models of their mathematical experiences, supported and guided by occasionally teacher intervention.

 In Kenya, Mathematics teachers are yet to understand and implement proper teaching skills to alleviate this situation.  This involves getting everything works well and in balance.  It can only be done out of professional commitment if the teacher would find it rewarding regarding students’ response.  As Kenyan teachers rediscover mathematics classroom, they need to fight against ‘complacency’ and do a little bit better in a few different way.  Mathematics education aims to help young people understand mathematics needed to function efficiently in society by the end of secondary education.  Although the current secondary school mathematics curriculum in Kenya emphasizes the development of good attitudes and thinking, most teachers
Students do not understand the basic mathematics needed to function efficiently in the society.  Students appear to lose interest in the learning of mathematics as they progress through the school system.


The other stop is where teachers who excelled under the transmission model of presentation combined with lots of exercise and drills in applying algorithms, expect that anyone who is good at math should be able to succeed as they did under a similar system.  Likewise in Kenya, the present education system has caused very high competition in education.  Hence, it has resulted in most students’ becoming stressful due to the aspiration to get high academic qualifications.  Families and society have also experienced this kind of change.  And there has been a weakening of desire to learn.

Comments

  1. Susan Gerofsky16 October 2017 at 11:15

    Thanks for these interesting thoughts and comparisons with Kenyan math education !

    ReplyDelete

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