Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Wannado Wannabes

"It is time for a change. We do not have to accept that the school we have always had is what we have to have now. Times have changed. Now everyone goes to school and now we have computers and the internet. The possibilities are endless. The economics of school can be quite different than what they are now. We can let kids learn what they want to in the way that works best for them. We will have happier and better functioning society because of it."

When I think back to my high school days what I remember most was playing baseball and basketball on my high school teams. Those were my favorite subjects. They served me well. I continued to play those games until my early 50s when my knees couldn't take the pounding anymore. The other subject that served me well was math. Without that I wouldn't have had the career I had being a math teacher. But math was not something that I would go out of my way to do. I never was interested enough to explore the wonderful math books in the library. If it wasn't for my math crisis in my sophomore year in college when I almost quit majoring in math, I would have never discovered the books in 510-599 section of the library which got me to see that math could be interesting and even empowering. I'm sorry to this day that the traditional math curriculum that I followed didn't allow for excursions to those books that might have fostered a love for math that I really didn't have despite being a straight A student in math.

Roger is right. Schools should allow students to study things that interest them; to follow what I call a wannado curriculum. I'm sure we would have a lot of wannado wannabes in schools everywhere.

I'm writing about my path to the Wannado Curriculum in my forthcoming book titled "The Wannado Curriculum - A Math Teacher's journey to the Dynamic Math 2.0 Classroom"