Ooh! Guess What!

I had the pleasure of reading the blog Ooh! Guess What! written by Dawn DuPriest, a 7th grade math teacher. She had some very insightful thoughts on our changing education system.

The first blog post of hers that I read was titled "What it’s like to live Common Core". Mrs. DuPriest started by stating some common assumptions about Common Core State Standard (CCSS). The purpose of CCSS is to help assure that every student in the same grade nationwide is on the same level. Mrs. DuPriest says it best, "The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are a set of learning objectives. They lay out what kids should know and be able to do at each grade level. That’s it. They’re goals." She goes on to say what she likes and dislikes about CCSS. For example a few of them include.

Likes
1.The consistency: She believes national standards were needed and that having every state(that is the not including the ones who have not adopted these standards)on the same level as far as education will help aid our education system in success.
2.Strategy: CCSS helps the students become better learners.

Dislikes
1. Technology: She finds that technology is not used enough in assignments.
2. Application: After the 8th grade CCSS has little to no practical application.

She then goes on to say "All that said, if we can get past the nonsense about fighting educational reform, if we can accept the premise that we really do have some re-thinking to do about how we approach mathematics in school, if we fully accept our role as developing critical thinkers, and if we can embrace the vast resource pool that’s just becoming available to use as Common Core comes online – we’ve got a good shot at making this thing work. There’s more to do in other areas, but this will start some terrific conversations."

The second blog post of hers that I read was titled "Hour of Code activities!" In this post Mrs. DuPriest talks about the use of coding as an outlet for teaching. The new innovations happening in coding and programing make it easier than ever. Her students use Khan Academy and Javascript for their coding projects. Mrs. DuPriest uses various projects to teach her students how to think mathematically. "Rich math tasks really take on a new dimension when they’re done in a programming context. The feedback is instant, the visuals are rich, the numbers are never easy to work with, yet mental math and estimation are crucial to understanding if your results are reasonable." There is no doubt that technology is soon, if not already,going to be a big part of teaching.