You can't be a change agent if you're an expert ...

change

Well, you can, but it's tough.

When you're on the early part of the learning curve others look at you and say:

"Hey, it's Darren. If he can do I can do it."

Once you hit a certain level of competence or expertise they same people look at you and say:

"Hey, it's Darren. He can do it, I can't."

Did you hear the change in tone in the first part of each of those statements?

Neophytes can be models of change for people new to learning something different. Experts have a different aura about them. That aura of expertise is intimidating for neophytes. The aura of "not quite an expert", the sense of newness associated with someone learning something they've just learned, is motivating for newbies.

We need less experts, more neophytes. Actually, a constant influx of neophytes to provide a continuous stream of models to engage new learners.

What are the implications of this for change agents? What about teachers; because aren't all teachers change agents for the stuff they teach?

Posted via email from dkuropatwa's posterous

New Math 10 Curriculum

manitoba
There's a new curriculum coming. Gave a little talk about it and the text book that supports it. Here it is. You can download it if you like. All the links I shared in the session can be found by clicking around on the slides below.

MHR Math10 Workshop
View more documents from dkuropatwa.

UPDATE

Joe, one of the folks who attended the session on Friday, has shared the Graphing Calculator Lease Form he uses in his school. You can see it here. Feel free to copy and edit or or just print it as is.

Thanks Joe!

Scribes Spreading

bloggers
Thanks to some blog love from Roland I put together a small, inadequate list of how the scribing blog love is spreading; check out these wonderful teachers:

Chris Harbeck's class blog hub (innovator par excellence!)

Ryan Maksymchuk's suite of class blogs (more scribing class blogs than you can shake a stick at!)

Derrick Willard's class blog

Jim Homan's Cathoilic Morality wiki

Mr. Marti's precalculus class blog

Reversearp's (an alias I believe) precalculus class blog

Mrs. Everard's AP Calculus class blog

Image by dkuropatwa via Flickr


Every new day brings more new math (and non-math) bloggers. This is a small and woefully incomplete list. If I've failed to include your blog, or another one you know of, where the teacher has implemented the practice of having daily student authoured scribes please share it here in the comments.

I've Got 5 Minutes

blogging
actually, it was 11 minutes and 45 seconds.

This is the slidecast from one of three talks I gave on Friday October 9, 2009. I was in Virden Manitoba participating in the NIBBLE Conference for the Fort La Bosse School Division.

More coming soon. Everything will be aggregated on the Senior Years Information and Communication Technology wiki I'm maintaining to share all the work I do in Manitoba with teachers across the province ... and you.

I've Got 5 Minutes
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Seeing Differently or 31 Days in October

flickr
It seems I've been talking about flickr a lot lately. Mostly in the course of discussing pedagogy and Brain Rule #10 in the context of my flickr assignment. One of the points I often bring up is the experiment I did with myself, inspired by folks who, like D'Arcy, are taking a photo a day. Every day. All year.

I just don't have that kind of stamina. I've twice in the past managed to sustain it for about a month; 31 Days. Every time the experience has changed the way I see the world around me. I notice things I've missed even though I walk past them every day; like that little tree ... I never noticed it until I started taking a picture a day for the 31 days of March, 2008.

This is what happened in October of last year when I did this again with a larger group of teachers from around the world:



Anyway, I'm starting this up again and you're invited along for the ride. I've already heard from a couple of Manitoba educators who are interested in doing this and some folks from MICDS in St. Louis might join in the fun too; they might even have a few students join us ... I really like that idea.

I'm going to tag all my photos 31DaysOct09. Feel free to use the same tag. Tagging all your photos allows you to create nifty little slideshows of them like the one I have above. Even if you use the same tag as me you can pull out just your photos if you want to create your own slideshow.

If you'd like to join, with or without your students, you can sign up for the flickr group I started. We're starting tomorrow, October 1st. If you start late, that's OK too. There are no rules. We're just going to have fun ... and maybe start seeing things differently together.

Photo Credit: Snow Came Back This Morning by flickr user dkuropatwa

The problem with math education ...

... is that there is too much emphasis on content and not enough on skills.

Math explains the world around us — makes it comprehensible — and when it's not comprehensible, when we don't understand something in the world around us, math guides our discovery ... it's all about knowing what to do when you don't know what to do.

Math is the science patterns; shouldn't we emphasize pattern recognition deliberately and explicitly in our teaching? Isn't that an important set of skills? Have I got this wrong?

Photo Credit: Sunny Side Up by flickr user code poet