Wednesday July 7, 2010

We finished up our "final" product for the DNR and prepared for a meeting in Des Moines on Friday to hopefully get approval to take this out to the parks. As we were working with our document, we were noticing all the details that had to be adjusted, shifted, changed, etc. Looking at this from a teacher perspective, details are so important. From a student perspective, I can understand why sometimes students just say, "give me a C and call it good enough." When you spend several hours just looking for details to change to make something as good as you can make it, it can become frustrating. I think this is what makes our job as teachers important. We need to convince students to WANT to make their work the best possible thing it can be no matter how many times they need to re-do or revise it.

My colleague and I also took some time to go reflect on the list of 21st Century Skills and Mathematics Essential Concepts that we have been working with in our DNR externship and City of Carroll externship. The number one thing we keep running into is the use of technology for both. The idea of technology literacy is very important. For the DNR, we designed our document using an excel document, and for the City of Carroll all of our data is collected onto an excel document. For City of Carroll, the GPS equipment is basically a handheld computer. It has to connect to as many satellites as possible to get a good reading of the GPS position. Then the survey equipment is downloaded onto an actual computer. GIS skills are used to create a map of all the sidewalk corners and then use the excel document to see if they are ADA compliant.

The frustrating thing we both agreed on today was the lack of mathematical knowledge that we have to use in our externships, OR do we already have the natural ability to just use it? We understand taxes (DNR), and we understand slope (Carroll). We understand data collection and analysis and the importance of details. So, as I am "cleaning up details" to a DNR report or recording sidewalk slope data, I have to stop and think - is this what a student would do? Would they understand all these numbers? Then take that idea and create something new in the classroom. I will also go back to a previous post I made. I believe in the "real world" people just get so accustom to using math in their everyday jobs its just natural for them. Take them out of their job and ask them to do the same math, and it does not make sense to them. The same thing happens to students. They have a lot of math background coming into high school. It getting them to use that knowledge naturally and understand what they are doing is the same thing in a different context. Same concept -- Different context.