A Change?

Over the summer I was listening to a radio show that had a segment on innumeracy in today's society.  As a subject that interests me greatly, I was excited to hear what the guest expert had to say.  Sadly the interview didn’t go too in depth because the host would frequently make jokes about how she couldn’t do her taxes or multiply 7 and 3 without a calculator.  At first this struck me as horrendous.  Have we really come to a point in society where it is FUNNY that we have a poor grasp on basic mathematical concepts?  (But I guess I shouldn't be surprised, its really easy to find other examples, take TV shows like Big Bang Theory for one where its comedy draws on exactly this)

 Let’s flip it around, would it really be that funny if I told people that I have no clue what year Canada confederated?  (its 1867, right?).  Or that I get confused as to which province Regina is the capital of?  I have a feeling we wouldn’t all slap our knees and laugh it away.   How can we expect our students to care about a subject that gets diminished in our society on a daily basis?  Well with the current view of math in our society, growing access to technologies (calculators and computers) and the cutting of curriculum expectations in high school math we aren’t giving students too much of a chance to embrace the subject.

But then I realized its not just math that gets shafted.  French has had this issue for a while (when do we ever use French in Ontario?) and with Wikipedia even history and other “fact based courses” are getting a bit less relevant to be taught in class.

So what do we do as teachers when the student-teacher relationship model of the “knowledge giver” and “knowledge receiver” can be rendered useless by current technologies and societal advancements?

Well I suggest a shift in how we view the expectations we must teach to our students.  Jimmy can Wikipedia what the Qaudratic formula is.  Thus I could care less whether or not he knows it by heart.  But what are the implications of this formula?  What does it tell us about mathematical functions?  Sally can google when and how World War I started.  But how does that affect current global relations and what can we learn from it?  Why should I waste my time as an educator doing something a computer can do in 30 seconds much more effectively than I ever could? 

The shift, in my opinion, has to come from teaching pure factual, “memorizable” knowledge to teaching students to analyze and critically look at the information given to them.   So looking back on the radio show that inspired this whole line of thought, I realize we just live in a different world than our parents and even a different world that we did 10, 15 years ago.  Although it might be sad this woman could not multiply 7 by 3 without a calculator, it’s just the way society has progressed.  But as educators, we must be changing just as quickly as society (and just as importantly technology) does.  That is the only way we can be relevant to our students, and that’s the key.